Tawsi Melek, Religion and Innovation

Abstract

Sheikh Adi Ibn Musafir, who was born 1079 in Lebanon and spent most of his life in Syria, did something no one has since attempted: He invented a new God, Whom He called Tawsi Melek, “The Angel of the Highest Order” (from the Kurdish) and a new religion to go with Him.

Sheikh Adi, a Sufi, and His colleagues, a ragtag fraternity of Buddhists, Christians, Hindus and Jews wrote a detailed explanation of This Angelic Being and His Pillars of Faith called the Kitab al Jilwa, “The Book We Wrote.”

The people Sheikh Adi taught about Tawsi Melek, called themselves Yazidi, the descendants of Angels, or “The Defenders of the Place”. Who attacked them? Other Christians, Muslims, and Jews without restraint. Weary of war, dogma, displacement, and the shear ridiculousness of it all, Sheikh Adi led a revolution through Tawsi Melek.

What did Tawsi Melek say about His religious contemporaries and reasons for their Crusades?

“All the books of those who are without decency are altered by them; and they have declined from them, although they were written by their prophets and the apostles. That there are interpolations is seen in the fact that each sect endeavors to prove that the others are wrong and to destroy their books.”

Sheikh Adi and the Yazidi wanted none of it. Not their company, their books, their Bloodthirsty God, their restrictive and nonsensical rituals, their appetites for war.  In the Kitab al Jilwa, Tawsi Melek fosters a GDI attitude towards the incredulous and irreverent aspects of other faiths without compromising the centrality of a loving and protective deity. The idea was wildly popular. 

The Kitab Al Jilwa, a short text, and its counterpart, the Book of the White, were instrumental in the induction of  over 20 000 000 Yazidi from India, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Eastern Europe. There are less than one million Yazidi left in the world today.

Because of their clout, the Yazidi were hunted nearly to extinction by the Ottomans, other Muslims, and their numbers were culled further by the DAESH. It didn’t help that rumors confused Tawsi Melek’s identity with a fallen angel, and that  Hadith states that any abandonment of orthodox Islam is punishable by death Calabrese & Sexton et. al (2008.).

What is the truth of Tawsi Melek and why did His Appearance in the Spiritual Canon cause humanity to go mad? Are human beings allowed to make new gods and enter into new arrangements with the divine or not? Who is empowered by God to police these things and should their authority be recognized?

What of Yazidism itself? Can humanity grow from re-exposure to the beliefs, scriptures, and Archangel contained in the Book They Wrote?