Sheikh Fakhr al-Din

The frame drum starts before the words do. In Ba’shiqa, a village of flat roofs and olive groves east of Mosul, the qewwals tune a daf and a reed flute and begin a hymn that nobody committed to paper for the better part of eight hundred years, and the name inside it belongs to a man who is also an angel and also the moon.

Sheikh Fakhr al-Din is one of the Seven. In Yazidi belief God made the world and then put it into the hands of a Heptad of Holy Beings, known as the Heft Sirr, the Seven Mysteries, with Tawûsî Melek the Peacock Angel pre-eminent among them. Four of those Seven are brothers: Şemsedîn, Fexredîn, Sicadîn and Nasirdîn, whom oral tradition names as the sons of a prince called Êzdîna Mîr, the man Sheikh Adi met when he settled in the valley of Lalish in the early twelfth century. Each brother became the eponym of a lineage of shaikhs, so that the Yazidi caste system and the Yazidi heavens describe the same four names. The division between the eldest two is the cleanest thing in the whole system. Şêx Şems is the sun, the divine light, fire, the doorway where oaths are sworn and the bull is killed at the autumn Feast of the Assembly. Fexredîn is the moon.

What makes that sentence work rather than collapse is a doctrine at the centre of the religion. Yazidis hold that the Seven are reincarnated in human form, a manifestation called a xas, and that ordinary souls transmigrate too, a process they describe as changing the shirt. So there is no contradiction to resolve between the twelfth-century poet who lived near Mosul and the being who governs the night side of the sky. They are the same, in the way a garment and the body inside it are the same for as long as it is being worn. The name itself is a borrowed honorific, Arabic for pride of the faith, the sort of title a scholar of that century and that region would carry, and the Yazidi tradition took it and attached a moon to it.

His work was the word. The core texts of the religion are the qewls, hymns in Kurmanji that are dense with allusions to people and events the hymn never bothers to explain, which is why each one travels with a çîrok, a story that supplies the missing context. A great many of them are attributed to Fexredîn. Yazidi religious teachers put the figure at eleven thousand qewls, beyts and qesîdes, of which roughly two hundred survive. Most of it is gone. The losses are laid at the door of centuries of massacre and of the community’s own long taboo on learning to read and write, which kept the entire corpus inside the heads of the qewwals of Ba’shiqa and Behzanê and made every generation a possible point of failure.

The recitation still happens the way it always has. A qewwal draws the daf up against his chest, strikes it twice to set the pace, and the hymn comes out in the flat, insistent delivery that lets a long text be held and passed on. Afterwards someone explains what it meant. A sermon of that kind, narrative broken up with couplets from the hymn, is how most Yazidis have ever encountered the material, because the hymns themselves belong to men of religion.

The printed sources are messier than the sung ones, and the mess is worth naming. Two manuscripts surfaced in 1911 and 1913 under the titles Mishefa Reş and Kitêba Cilwe, offered to European collectors as the Yazidi scriptures. Scholars now take those particular manuscripts to be productions of non-Yazidis writing for a market in ancient books, though the beliefs inside them line up with what the oral tradition says. In the Black Book’s creation week God makes a Holy Being on each of seven days, and on Saturday he makes Yādīn, also called Nūrāʾīl, whom the text identifies with Fakhr al-Din, and it is Yādīn who then makes human beings, animals, birds and beasts. That is a substantial role, and it sits in a document with a compromised pedigree. The lists of the Seven do not always agree either; sometimes Sheikh Adi himself is counted as the Peacock Angel, sometimes Şêx Obekir is added. A religion that spent eight centuries under threat and transmitted itself by mouth does not produce tidy tables.

Nobody describes his appearance. There is no account of his height, his beard, the colour of his khirqa. The tradition seems uninterested in the question, having already supplied the answer in the sky, and a full moon over the Shaikhan hills is a more specific image than most myths manage anyway.

His family carried the work outward in strange directions. Three sons are named, Bedir, Aqub and the eldest, Mend, who became a ruler in the Kilis emirate and is venerated today as the lord of snakes, his descendants credited with handling vipers unharmed and curing snakebite. His daughter Xatûna Fexra guards pregnancy and childbirth; Yazidi women fast once a year for her, and a temple in her name stands in the village of Mağara in Şırnak province in southeastern Turkey. A woman in her ninth month, keeping that fast, is observing a line of descent that runs straight back to the moon.

His powers are the powers of a delegate. The Seven received the world jointly and the Peacock Angel leads them, so Fexredîn commands nothing on his own; what he holds is a share, the night half of a divided sky and the authority that runs through recited speech. The limits follow from the same arrangement. He has no thunderbolt and no weapon. His hold on the world depends entirely on whether anyone can still sing his hymns, which is a weakness no god with a temple and a written scripture ever has to worry about, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries tested it hard: the qewwal families’ training school closed, the widest knowledge of the qewls passed to men outside the hereditary reciter class, and the 2014 attacks on Sinjar destroyed shrines and scattered the communities that maintained them.

Two hundred hymns, then, out of eleven thousand. They are still sung, and the office that presides over the holiest rites in the religion is still filled from his line.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sheikh Fakhr al-Din in Yazidism?

Sheikh Fakhr al-Din, known in Kurmanji as Şêx Fexredîn, is one of the Seven Holy Beings of Yazidism, the Heft Sirr or Seven Mysteries, to whom God entrusted the affairs of the world. Yazidi tradition also knows him as a twelfth-century poet and scholar who lived near Lalish, since the religion holds that the Seven take human form. He is the personification of the moon.

Is Sheikh Fakhr al-Din related to Sheikh Shams?

Yes. They are brothers, two of the four sons of Êzdîna Mîr, along with Sicadîn and Nasirdîn. Şêx Şems is the divinity of the sun and of fire, while Fexredîn holds the moon, and each of the four brothers is the ancestor of one of the Şemsanî shaikh lineages.

What did Sheikh Fakhr al-Din write?

He is credited with composing a large share of the qewls, the sacred hymns in Kurmanji that hold Yazidi religious knowledge. Yazidi religious teachers say he produced eleven thousand qewls, beyts and qesîdes, of which about two hundred remain, the rest lost through centuries of persecution and through a tradition of oral rather than written transmission.

Who were Sheikh Fakhr al-Din’s children?

He had three sons, Bedir, Aqub and Mend, and one daughter, Xatûna Fexra. Sheikh Mend is venerated as the lord of snakes, and his descendants are believed to handle snakes safely and to cure snakebite. Xatûna Fexra is the guardian of pregnancy and childbirth, and Yazidi women fast once a year in her honour.

Why does the Yazidi Baba Sheikh come from his lineage?

The Baba Sheikh, the leading religious figure of the Yazidis, is drawn from the Şemsanî branch of the shaikh caste, and Yazidi accounts place the office specifically in the lineage descended from Fexredîn. Many of the ceremonies at Lalish cannot be performed without him, so the sacred year of the religion runs through Fakhr al-Din’s family line.

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Melek Taus, Angels, Israfil, Azrael, Gabriel, Michael, Amesha Spenta, Ahura Mazda, Mithra, Sin, Máni, Selene, Chandra, Tsukuyomi