伊斯兰国准备屠杀的雅兹迪究竟是什么?

It's tragic that the world pays attention to largely forgotten communities only in their moments of greatest peril. This week, we've watched as tens of thousands of Yazidis — a mostly Kurdish-speaking people who practice a unique, syncretic faith — fled the advance through northern Iraq of the Islamic State's Sunni jihadists, who have set about abducting and killing hundreds of members of this religious minority. As The Washington Post's Loveday Morris reports, as many as 40,000 remain stranded on "the craggy peaks of Mount Sinjar," dying of hunger and thirst and devoid of much support from a faltering Iraqi government. (Days after the Yazidis' plight became known, the Obama administration authorized air strikes in northern Iraq against the Islamist rebels.)

当雅兹迪到了生死存亡的时候，世界才开始关注这片被遗忘的社会，是多么悲哀的事情，在这个星期，我们看到了数万雅兹迪人头里伊斯兰国逊尼派圣战者占领的伊拉克北方，雅兹迪其中大部分都说库尔德语，他们有世界独一无二宗教融合的信仰。而伊斯兰国他们已杀死劫持了数百雅兹迪成员，华盛顿邮报Loveday Morris报道，依然有超过4万人被困在辛加尔陡峭的峭壁中，面临着饥饿和干渴，而与此同时来自于伊拉克政府的支援却步履瞒珊（而得知消息之后，奥巴马政府都已下达命令对伊斯兰国进行空中打击）

Ever since seizing Mosul, Iraq's main urban center in the north, the forces of the Islamic State have embarked on a gruesome mission to transform their domain into an idealized Caliphate — on the way, they've forced the conversion of religious minorities, destroyed the shrines of rival sects and butchered those they consider apostates. Yesterday, a distraught Yazidi member of parliament in Baghdad made an impassioned appeal on behalf of her people: "An entire religion is being exterminated from the face of the Earth," she said.

自从控制住，伊拉克北方主要城市之后，伊斯兰国的部队开始执行一项可怕的任务，将其领土净化为理想主义中的哈里发帝国。在此过程中，他们强迫转化少数派宗教团体，摧毁敌对派别的圣地，将他们眼中的变节者残杀，昨天在巴格达议会，一名悲痛欲绝的雅兹迪议员代表其人民慷慨激扬的呼吁“雅兹迪整个宗教都将从地球上被灭绝”。

The Yazidis, globally, number about 700,000 people, but the vast majority of the community — about half a million to 600,000 — live concentrated in Iraq's north. The city of Sinjar was their heartland. Now, it's in the possession of extremists who seem bent on ethnic cleansing.

雅兹迪全球总数越有70万人，其中最大的社区约有50万到60万人，主要生活在伊拉克北方，辛加尔城是他们的中心城市，而如今却被极端恐怖分子占领，他们几乎已下决心民族大清洗。

The Yazidi faith is a fascinating mix of ancient religions. Its reputed founder was an 11th-century Umayyad sheik whose lineage connected him to the first great Islamic political dynasty. His tomb in the Iraqi city of Lalish is a site of Yazidi pilgrimage, mirroring the Sufi practices of millions of Muslims elsewhere; now, there are reports of the town being turned into a refugee camp for the displaced.

雅兹迪的信仰混合诸多古代宗教，其创建者被认为是11世纪的Umayyad sheik ，他的血统和第一代伊斯兰王朝有联系，他的墓地位于伊拉克的Lalish，是雅兹迪的朝圣地，在宗教活动上，他们借鉴了穆斯林苏菲派的做法。目前有报道说Lalish已经成为无家可归者的难民营。

Despite its connections to Islam, the faith remains distinctly apart. It was one of the non-Abrahamic creeds left in the Middle East, drawing on various pre-Islamic and Persian traditions. Yazidis believe in a form of reincarnation and adhere to a strict caste system. Yazidism borrows from Zoroastrianism, which held sway in what's now Iran and its environs before the advent of Islam, and even the mysteries of Mithraism, a quasi-monotheistic religion that was popular for centuries in the Roman Empire, particularly among soldiers. Not unlike the rituals of India's Parsis — latter-day Zoroastrians — Yazidis light candles in religious ceremonies as a sign of the triumph of light over darkness.

尽管雅兹迪和伊斯兰有关系，但是其信仰却截然不同，雅兹迪是中东非亚伯拉罕诸教的一种，结合吸收了伊斯兰前时代和波斯的传统，雅兹迪相信转世再生，继承了严格的阶级制度，雅兹迪脱胎于琐罗亚斯德教（中国史称祆教、火祆教、拜火教 ），琐罗亚斯德教在伊斯兰到来之前流传于伊朗及其周围，雅兹迪甚至借鉴了拜日教，拜日教是一种一神论宗教在古代罗马帝国流传数百年，在罗马士兵中非常流行。和印度琐罗亚斯德教的后裔帕尔西人的宗教仪式不同，雅兹迪在宗教仪式上点燃蜡烛，代表光明战胜黑暗。

Yazidis believe in one God who is represented by seven angels. According to Yazidi lore, one of the angels, Malak Tawous, was sent to Earth after refusing to bow to Adam, explains the Economist. Represented in peacock form, he is considered neither wholly good nor evil by Yazidis, but Muslim outsiders know him as "shaytan," or Satan. The Islamic State has justified its slaughter of Yazidis on the basis of the long-standing slur that they are "devil-worshipers."

雅兹迪相信一个神，这个神被七个天使所呈现，根据雅兹迪的传说，其中一个天使名叫Malak Tawous，在拒绝服从亚当之后被派往大地，以孔雀的形象呈现于世人，雅兹迪认为这个天使非善非恶，但是穆斯林认知这个天使为“shaytan”，也就是撒旦，伊斯兰国决定屠杀雅兹迪，就是基于他们长期认为雅兹迪是崇拜魔鬼的人。

Bobby Ghosh, former Time magazine Baghdad bureau chief, writes that his Sunni and Shiite colleagues referred to Yazidis as devil-worshipers "as a joke, even a term of endearment." But the Islamic State "is taking the false claim of satanism far too seriously."

时代杂志驻巴格达的前任部门主任Bobby Ghosh，曾经说到，他的逊尼和什叶派同僚说到雅兹迪是崇拜魔鬼的人时，都一笑而过“当成笑话，甚至是一种戏谑。”但是伊斯兰国却太认真的对待这种并不为真的撒旦主义者。

Well before the current outrages — which have targeted other religious minorities in Iraq as well — the sect suffered a long history of persecution, caught amid the overlapping ambitions of empires and later the emergence of fractious Arab states. The Yazidi member in the Iraqi parliament referenced "72 massacres" in her people's history, ranging from the rampages of conquering Mongols to the zealous purges of the Ottomans, who at various moments targeted the Yazidis, including during the early 20th-century massacres of Armenians that many now consider a genocide

在此之前，伊斯兰国同样瞄准了伊拉克国内其他宗教少数派，雅兹迪受到宗教迫害由来已久，从早期的封建帝国到之后出现的阿拉伯诸国，伊拉克国会的雅兹迪人说到自己人民的历史时描述为“72次大屠杀”，从蒙古帝国的铁蹄到狂热奥特曼帝国的净化，在不同历史时代对雅兹迪屠杀的甚至还包括20世纪初亚美尼亚人，那次屠杀至今被认为是一次种族灭绝行为。

The Yazidis' fragile existence in northern Iraq grew more delicate after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of the country and the ousting of Saddam Hussein's nominally secular dictatorial regime. In 2007, coordinated bomb blasts in a Yazidi village in northwestern Iraq killed about 800 people — it was at the time the worst single terror attack since the American invasion. After Baghdad's deeply polarized sectarian politics took hold and militants gained sway, much of northern Iraq's ancient Christian population has steadily fled to diasporic communities in Europe. The Yazidis largely remained in their historical homeland, by their mountains and shrines. That life, though, also may now be a thing of the past.

2003年美国主导入侵伊拉克，推翻萨达姆侯赛因的世俗独裁政权后，雅兹迪在伊拉克北方的残存变得风雨飘零。在2007年，伊拉克西北部的雅兹迪村庄发生连环爆炸造成约800人死亡，这是美国入侵之后伊拉克发生的最严重的恐怖袭击。巴格拉政府分化宗教矛盾的政策占据主导，部队军心不稳，北方伊拉克原有的很多基督徒逃亡流散在欧洲的社区，而雅兹迪依然在他们历史上的故乡，这里有他们的山和神龛，还有他们的生活，尽管有可能成为历史。