The worlds oldest religion

They are scared of lettuce. They abhor pumpkins. They practise maybe the oldest religion in the world. And now, after at least 6,000 years, they are finally being exterminated  in Iraq.

So who are these Yazidi?

The Yazidi are a Kurdish ethno-religious community, representing an ancient religion that is linked to Zoroastrianism. They live primarily in the Nineveh Province of northern Iraq. Additional communities in Armenia, Georgia and Syria have been in decline since the 1990s, their members having emigrated to Europe, especially to Germany. The Yazidi believe in God as creator of the world, which he placed under the care of seven holy beings or angels, the chief of whom is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel.

Yazidism is much older than Islam, and much older than Christianity. It is also deeply peculiar. The Yazidi honour sacred trees. Women must not cut their hair. Marriage is forbidden in April. They avoid wearing dark blue because it is "too holy".

They are divided strictly into castes, who cannot marry each other. The upper castes are polygamous. Anyone of the faith who marries a non-Yazidi risks ostracism, or worse. Yazidism is syncretistic: it combines elements of many faiths. Like Hindus, they believe in reincarnation. Like ancient Mithraists, they sacrifice bulls. They practise baptism, like Christians. When they pray, they face the sun – like Zoroastrians. There are also strong links with Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.

Then there is the devil worship: arguably, the Yazidi worship what Christians or Muslims might call “Satan”, though the Yazidi call him “Melek Taus”, and he appears in the form of a peacock angel.

Why might Melek Taus be “the devil”? For a start, the Yazidi believe the peacock angel led a rebellion in heaven: clearly echoing the story of Lucifer, cast into Hell by the Christian God. Also, the very word "Melek" is cognate with "Moloch", the name of a Biblical demon – who demanded human sacrifice.

The avian imagery of Melek Taus likewise indicates a demonic aspect. The Yazidi come from the ancient lands of Sumeria and Assyria, in modern-day Turkey, Iraq and Kurdistan. Sumerian gods were often cruel, and equipped with beaks and wings. Birdlike. Three thousand years ago the Assyrians worshipped flying demons, spirits of the desert wind. One was the scaly-winged demon in The Exorcist: Pazuzu.

The Yazidi reverence for birds – and snakes – also appears to be extremely old. Excavations at ancient Catalhoyuk, in Turkey, show that the people there revered bird-gods as long ago as 7000BC. Even older is Gobekli Tepe, a megalithic site near Sanliurfa, in Kurdish Turkey (Sanliurfa was once a stronghold of Yazidism). The extraordinary temple of Gobekli Tepe boasts carvings of winged birdmen, and images of buzzards and serpents.

Taking all this evidence into account, a fair guess is that Yazidism is a vastly ancient form of bird-worship, that could date back 6,000 years o r more. If this is right, it means that Yazidism is therefore the Ur-religion, the mother ship of Middle Eastern faiths, and it is us who have incorporated Yazidi myths and beliefs into our religions, of Christianity and Islam and Judaism.

The 40,000 Iraqis stranded on a mountain and facing possible genocide at the hands of surrounding Islamic State fighters are the last surviving community in their ancestral homeland of the Yazidis, long misunderstood by the outside world as "Devil-worshippers".

One of the most persecuted minorities in the Middle East, the Yazidis in fact find even the mention of the word "Satan" profoundly offensive, and have kept their ancient religion alive despite centuries of oppression.

The Yazidis mark themselves out as different. They never wear the colour blue. They are not allowed to eat lettuce. Many of the men wear their hair in long plaits that make them resemble nothing so much as Asterix and Obelix.

They believe one of their holy books, the Black Book, was stolen by the British in colonial times and is being kept somewhere in London.

But in their home town of Sinjar, from where they have now fled to the mountains above, they were welcoming in a way that belied their fearsome reputation as Satanists.

For ordinary Iraqis, they are bogeymen to frighten children with. But for religious extremists through the centuries, they have been Devil-worshippers to be slaughtered.

The misidentification came about because the Yazidis worship a fallen angel, the Malek Tawwus, or Peacock Angel. But, unlike Lucifer, the Yazidis' fallen angel was forgiven by God and restored to heaven.

Their religion is not just an offshoot of Christianity or Islam. They do not believe in heaven or hell, but in reincarnation, which they describe as the soul "changing its clothes".

They have kept their religion alive through the Talkers, men who are taught the entire text of their missing holy book by memory as children, and who in turn pass it on to their own sons.

The Yazidis once lived in a wide area, across Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Georgia and Armenia. But they have been driven from their homelands, and most have fled to Australia, Canada and Germany. Against all the odds, Iraq is the one place in the Middle East where a sizeable community remains.

They have been persecuted both for their religious beliefs, and for their ethnicity. In Turkey, they faced double discrimination as both non-Muslims and Kurds, and were forced to carry identity cards that listed their religion as "XXX". In Georgia and Armenia, they fell foul of nationalist movements after the fall of the Soviets.

The Yazidis speak Kurdish – they claim theirs is the ancient Kurdish religion – but they have a troubled history with their Kurdish neighbours too.

Their traditions make them highly visible as a separate community. The Yazidis do not practise arranged marriage, like other communities in the region. They have a formal system of elopement, where a man must "kidnap" his bride. If the woman is willing, the parents have to accept the match.

There are darker sides to the Yazidis. They have a tradition of killing any of their members who leave the religion, and 2007 it was reported that Du'a Khalil Aswad, a Yazidi woman, was stoned to death for converting to Islam and marrying a Muslim man.

The Yazidis say they have survived 72 genocides. Now there are fears the last community of them in the Middle East is facing another. And now, in the dusty cities of northern Iraq, Yazidism is finally dying. Moloch has returned to devour the gentle and peaceful Yazidi people, in the form of hateful, virulent, sadistic Islamism. Put it another way, the devil has revealed a sense of irony, even as the rest of us sit back, and passively watch the most ancient culture in the world being erased from human history.