伊斯蘭國準備屠殺的雅茲迪究竟是什麼?

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.)

當雅茲迪到了生死存亡的時候，世界纔開始關注這片被遺忘的社會，是多麼悲哀的事情，在這個星期，我們看到了數萬雅茲迪人頭裏伊斯蘭國遜尼派聖戰者佔領的伊拉克北方，雅茲迪其中大部分都說庫爾德語，他們有世界獨一無二宗教融合的信仰。而伊斯蘭國他們已殺死劫持了數百雅茲迪成員，華盛頓郵報Loveday Morris報道，依然有超過4萬人被困在辛加爾陡峭的峭壁中，面臨着飢餓和乾渴，而與此同時來自於伊拉克政府的支援卻步履瞞珊（而得知消息之後，奧巴馬政府都已下達命令對伊斯蘭國進行空中打擊）

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.

自從控制住，伊拉克北方主要城市之後，伊斯蘭國的部隊開始執行一項可怕的任務，將其領土淨化爲理想主義中的哈里發帝國。在此過程中，他們強迫轉化少數派宗教團體，摧毀敵對派別的聖地，將他們眼中的變節者殘殺，昨天在巴格達議會，一名悲痛欲絕的雅茲迪議員代表其人民慷慨激揚的呼籲“雅茲迪整個宗教都將從地球上被滅絕”。

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.

雅茲迪全球總數越有70萬人，其中最大的社區約有50萬到60萬人，主要生活在伊拉克北方，辛加爾城是他們的中心城市，而如今卻被極端恐怖分子佔領，他們幾乎已下決心民族大清洗。

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.

雅茲迪的信仰混合諸多古代宗教，其創建者被認爲是11世紀的Umayyad sheik ，他的血統和第一代伊斯蘭王朝有聯繫，他的墓地位於伊拉克的Lalish，是雅茲迪的朝聖地，在宗教活動上，他們借鑑了穆斯林蘇菲派的做法。目前有報道說Lalish已經成爲無家可歸者的難民營。

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.

儘管雅茲迪和伊斯蘭有關係，但是其信仰卻截然不同，雅茲迪是中東非亞伯拉罕諸教的一種，結合吸收了伊斯蘭前時代和波斯的傳統，雅茲迪相信轉世再生，繼承了嚴格的階級制度，雅茲迪脫胎於瑣羅亞斯德教（中國史稱祆教、火祆教、拜火教 ），瑣羅亞斯德教在伊斯蘭到來之前流傳於伊朗及其周圍，雅茲迪甚至借鑑了拜日教，拜日教是一種一神論宗教在古代羅馬帝國流傳數百年，在羅馬士兵中非常流行。和印度瑣羅亞斯德教的後裔帕爾西人的宗教儀式不同，雅茲迪在宗教儀式上點燃蠟燭，代表光明戰勝黑暗。

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."

雅茲迪相信一個神，這個神被七個天使所呈現，根據雅茲迪的傳說，其中一個天使名叫Malak Tawous，在拒絕服從亞當之後被派往大地，以孔雀的形象呈現於世人，雅茲迪認爲這個天使非善非惡，但是穆斯林認知這個天使爲“shaytan”，也就是撒旦，伊斯蘭國決定屠殺雅茲迪，就是基於他們長期認爲雅茲迪是崇拜魔鬼的人。

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."

時代雜誌駐巴格達的前任部門主任Bobby Ghosh，曾經說到，他的遜尼和什葉派同僚說到雅茲迪是崇拜魔鬼的人時，都一笑而過“當成笑話，甚至是一種戲謔。”但是伊斯蘭國卻太認真的對待這種並不爲真的撒旦主義者。

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，伊斯蘭國同樣瞄準了伊拉克國內其他宗教少數派，雅茲迪受到宗教迫害由來已久，從早期的封建帝國到之後出現的阿拉伯諸國，伊拉克國會的雅茲迪人說到自己人民的歷史時描述爲“72次大屠殺”，從蒙古帝國的鐵蹄到狂熱奧特曼帝國的淨化，在不同歷史時代對雅茲迪屠殺的甚至還包括20世紀初亞美尼亞人，那次屠殺至今被認爲是一次種族滅絕行爲。

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年美國主導入侵伊拉克，推翻薩達姆侯賽因的世俗獨裁政權後，雅茲迪在伊拉克北方的殘存變得風雨飄零。在2007年，伊拉克西北部的雅茲迪村莊發生連環爆炸造成約800人死亡，這是美國入侵之後伊拉克發生的最嚴重的恐怖襲擊。巴格拉政府分化宗教矛盾的政策佔據主導，部隊軍心不穩，北方伊拉克原有的很多基督徒逃亡流散在歐洲的社區，而雅茲迪依然在他們歷史上的故鄉，這裏有他們的山和神龕，還有他們的生活，儘管有可能成爲歷史。