July 8, 2020

Michael Sims Published in Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World

Ph.D. Candidate Michael Sims has published an article entitled Claiming the Ezidis (Yezidis): Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Assyrian, Kurdish and Arab sources on Ezidi religious and ethnic identity in the Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World. Focusing on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article explores the ways in which various religious and historical aspects of Ezidism were employed by both non-Ezidi and Ezidi authors to make claims of communal solidarity, national identity or religious categorization. Drawing upon a variety of Kurdish, Syriac, Arabic and Ottoman-language sources, it contextualizes these claims within contemporary historical developments and explores relationships between Ezidis and Assyrian/Syriac Christian communities, state authority, and Kurdish and Arab nationalism.

The special issue of Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World is edited by Alda Benjamen and focuses on northern Iraq.  It includes a number of top scholars in the field.