Communalism and the state in Iraq: the Yazidi Kurds, c.1869–1940

The Yazidis are a Kurdish heterodox group settled in the province of Mosul. They represent an interesting case study for the development of communalism in the heterogeneous social fabric of northern Iraq. This article analyses cultural difference, intergroup relations and processes of nation building as they affected and articulated various manifestations of Yazidi identity under the political modernization of the late Ottoman and mandatory periods.' The Iraqi Yazidis constituted the second largest non-Muslim group living in the Mosul province. They were settled in the two main enclaves of Jabal Sinjar and Shaikhan: the former is a mountainous area located in the middle of the northern Jazira south-west of the city of Mosul, the latter is a transitional zone between the Mosul plain and the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. As a community the Yazidi Kurds functioned within several often overlapping frames of reference: they were a tribe, a religious community, and an economic group whose members were mainly agriculturalists and cattle breeders. They also shared language and racial affiliation; all the Iraqi Yazidis were Kurds and spoke Kurdish as their first language. Thus individuals operated within a variety of contexts which served different types of action: the family, the clan, the tribal group, the religious polity and the wider ethnic community.2 This article concentrates on Yazidi tribal, religious and ethnic identities as sources of communal mobilization which provided a continuous interaction between the members of the group and the surrounding environment. The development of socio-economic and political solidarities that crossed communal boundaries was an important dimension of a continuous process of exchange and strategic negotiation which occurred between the Iraqi Yazidis and the cultural, socio-economic and political spheres within which they operated. In particular, the complex patterns of socio-economic and political identification which developed among the community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were closely related to the impact of state power. After the appointment of Midhat Pasha to the