Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir

The valley narrows before it opens. Oak and mulberry close over the path, the air drops a few degrees, and then the spires appear above the trees: fluted cones of pale stone, like something poured rather than built. Pilgrims stop at the doorway and take off their shoes. Under the sanctuary, in a cave reached by worn steps, a spring runs cold in the dark. The man buried beneath that roof came here nine hundred years ago as an Arab ascetic looking for somewhere quiet, and the religion he did not set out to found has been washing his bier in spring water ever since.

Adi ibn Musafir was born around 1075 in the Beqaa valley, into a family that traced itself to the Umayyads. He went to Baghdad, which is what a promising young man did, and studied there under Abu’l-Khayr Hammad al-Dabbas alongside Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, whose own order would outlast empires. Then he left. Some time in the early twelfth century he walked north and east until the roads gave out, and settled in the valley of Lalish, roughly sixty kilometres northeast of Mosul, in mountains that had never been convenient to govern. He was, by every account that has come down to us, an entirely orthodox Muslim.

What he found in those mountains mattered more than what he brought. Communities that venerated Yazid ibn Mu’awiya and the Umayyad house were already living in the area and already carried the name Yazidi. Local tribes held onto practices that look, to anyone who knows the material, like the residue of an older Iranian religion. Into this his teaching went, and the ascetic order that formed around him, the Adawiyya, put down roots among Kurdish hill people. Medieval Arabic writers called them the Akrad al-Adawiyya, the Adawiyya Kurds, which was accurate and would shortly stop being sufficient. He died in 1162.

The drift began almost at once. Two generations later the community around his shrine was strong enough to be a political problem, and the Atabeg of Mosul killed its leader, Hasan ibn Adi, in 1246. By then more orthodox Muslims had begun to object, loudly, to the extravagance of the veneration being offered to Sheikh Adi and to Yazid. The objection never really stopped. In 1414 a battle ended with his tomb razed to the ground. It was rebuilt, and it is still there, and the annual gathering still happens.

What the Yazidis made of him has no equivalent anywhere nearby. In their cosmology God created the world and then handed it into the keeping of a Heptad of Holy Beings, the haft sirr, the Seven Mysteries. Pre-eminent among them stands Tawûsî Melek, the Peacock Angel. Sheikh Adi is among the Seven as well, and the listings do not always agree on the boundary between them. One hymn puts it flatly: Sheikh Adi, Tawûsî Melek and Sultan Êzî are one, and are not to be regarded as separate. The mechanism that permits this is metempsychosis, which Yazidis describe with the image of changing a shirt. The Seven return periodically in human form, and the senior religious castes descend from the most recent of those returns, in Sheikh Adi and the men who came with him to Lalish. An Arab Sufi who never left the faith of his teachers was, in the accounting of his own followers, a divine being wearing a twelfth-century body.

Here is the part nobody tidies up. The name survived and the man did not. Yazidi tradition preserves him as Adî, sometimes as Hadî, and full knowledge of who he had actually been drained out of the community over the centuries. The sanctuary is exact about ritual and vague about biography, which is the opposite of how saints usually work.

A faqir sits in the shade at the edge of the courtyard in a black woollen kherqa, cut to recall the one Sheikh Adi wore. The cloth is sacred and so is the man inside it; nobody may lay a hand on him. Further up the slope, kochaks are cutting wood and hauling water for Sheikh Adi, a chore performed for a householder who has been dead since 1162 and is not treated as absent.

Then, once a year, the thing itself. On the Thursday of the autumn Feast of the Assembly, a bier kept inside his shrine and called both the Throne of Êzî and the Throne of Sheikh Adi is lifted onto the shoulders of senior men and carried out into the daylight, down to a spring called Ava Kaloke, and immersed in the water. Drums and flutes go with it. Then it is carried back and set in its place. On the Friday a length of coloured cloth, any colour but blue, is baptised in the White Spring and laid on his coffin.

His powers are the powers of the Seven: he holds a share of the world in trust, he is petitioned for help, he presides over the valley where earth and spring water are mixed into the small moulded balls that Yazidis carry through marriage and burial, and his shrine is the place where the Heptad are believed to reconvene each autumn. His limits are just as plain. He is not God, and the great hymn tradition praises God and Sheikh Adi together rather than collapsing one into the other. His tomb has been destroyed by men with weapons. His history was lost by the people who love him most. The two books long said to contain his religion’s secrets, printed to great excitement in 1911 and 1913, were written by outsiders chasing a manuscript market, even if the material inside them ran close to what the hymns had been saying all along.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir?

Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir was a Sufi ascetic of Umayyad descent, born in the Beqaa valley around 1075, who studied in Baghdad and then settled in the mountain valley of Lalish northeast of Mosul in the early twelfth century. He founded an order called the Adawiyya and died in 1162. His own teaching was orthodox Islam, but the community that formed around him absorbed older local beliefs and became the Yazidi religion.

Is Sheikh Adi a god in Yazidism?

Yazidis count Sheikh Adi among the haft sirr, the Seven Mysteries or Holy Beings to whom God entrusted the world, so he is a divine figure rather than only a saint. Some Yazidi listings go further and identify him directly with Tawûsî Melek, the Peacock Angel. One hymn states that Sheikh Adi, Tawûsî Melek and Sultan Êzî are one and should not be regarded as separate beings.

Where is Sheikh Adi buried?

Sheikh Adi is buried at Lalish, a mountain valley roughly sixty kilometres northeast of Mosul in Iraqi Kurdistan. His tomb is the holiest site in Yazidism and the focus of the annual autumn pilgrimage known as the Feast of the Assembly. The sacred Zamzam spring rises in a cave beneath his shrine, and its water is used in the rite that initiates Yazidis into the religion.

What happens at Sheikh Adi’s shrine during the Feast of the Assembly?

Over seven days pilgrims perform baptism in the springs at Lalish, a bull is sacrificed at the shrine of Sheikh Shams, and sacred dance and hymn-singing take place each evening in the courtyard of Sheikh Adi’s sanctuary. A bier kept in his shrine, called the Throne of Sheikh Adi, is carried out to a spring, immersed, and returned. Yazidis believe the Seven Holy Beings gather at Lalish during this festival.

Why did Sheikh Adi’s tomb get destroyed?

Muslim rulers increasingly regarded the Yazidis as a threat as the community grew and its veneration of Sheikh Adi and of Yazid ibn Mu’awiya deepened. The Atabeg of Mosul killed the community’s leader Hasan ibn Adi in 1246, and a significant battle in 1414 ended with Sheikh Adi’s tomb razed. The tomb was rebuilt and remains the centre of Yazidi pilgrimage today.

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