I am in Singapore as a guest of the Middle East Institute to work on a book about Salafism and its networks of dissemination from the Middle East to the most distant corners of Southeast Asia, but in my spare time I have also been looking at some other intriguing connections between the two regions where I carried out most of my field research. I spent my first weekends in Singapore this year tracking down brass peacock lamps and attempting to interrogate people as to what they meant to them.

Sri Thendayuthapani Temple, Singapore, 23 June 2018

The reason for my interest in these lamps is a painting on a wall in Northern Iraq that I photographed several years ago. The painting intrigued me, not only for what it appeared to represent but even more because it seemed so strangely out of place in the locality where I saw it. The wall was that of of a building next to the sanctuary of Sheikh Adi in Lalish, which is the spiritual centre of the Yezidi religion. I took the picture when I briefly visited Lalish in 2012 during a tour of Iraqi Kurdistan with a group of students from Mardin in Turkey (which once had a large Yezidi population too).

The painting struck me as odd and yet familiar. It shows a young Indian-looking woman holding a large object with the image of a peacock or rooster or similar bird on top. The object appears to be an oil lamp, and while her eyes remain fixed on the bird the woman appears to be lighting a wick that emerges from the tray just beneath it.

The oil lamp with the bird was obviously a reference to the most sacred object in the Yezidi religion, the sanjaq (standard), which represents the Peacock Angel (Tâwûsê Melek or Melek Tawus), the most venerated spiritual being. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the first serious European accounts of the Yezidi religion were written, there were said to be seven sanjaq, each of them associated with a specific zone of settlement of Yezidi communities.

The sanjaq, believed to have been created by Tâwûsê Melek himself, were kept carefully hidden from outsiders for most of the time, which has led to increasing curiosity and efforts by antique hunters to buy or if necessary steal one. Both Austen Henry Layard and George Percy Badger, to whom we owe the first substantial accounts of the Yezidis, published sketch drawings of a sanjaq they had briefly seen. (In the case of Badger, it was actually his wife who was allowed a look at it.) At the time of my visit, these were the only representations of sanjaq that I had ever seen, but it was not hard to see the close similarity of the oil lamp in the painting to those drawings of the sanjaq.

The drawings by Layard (left) and Mrs Badger (right),
representing two obviously different sanjaq.

Lalish is located in the district of Sheikhan to the North of Mosul, and it is currently part of the autonomous Kurdistan Region, which allows easy access. Until recently, however, the districts of Sheikhan and Sinjar, where the main centres of Yezidi population in Iraq are concentrated, were practically off-limits to foreign visitors. This changed after the American invasion of 2003 that overthrew Saddam Hussein. Since then, many foreigners including relief workers, journalists, scholars and missionaries of various kinds have visited the region, and Yezidis have been able to travel abroad. (Many in fact have sought asylum in Europe, but some appear to have travelled east to Pakistan or India.)

One of the foreign researchers, the Hungarian scholar of religion, Eszter Spät, was allowed – probably as the first outsider ever – to follow the periodical Parade of the sanjaq of Sinjar to the village communities of that region and to document the entire Progress of the Peacock on video (see her film “Following the Peacock”, which is available on YouTube).

The sanjaq of Sinjar. Screenshot from Eszter Spät’s film “Following the Peacock”
Reproduced with permission.

On another occasion, she was allowed to witness a ceremony in Lalish, the Great Autumn Assembly,  where the sanjaq of Sheikhan – the one seen by Mrs Badger and considered to be the most sacred of them all – was presented to the devotees to be kissed.

The peacock lamp in the wall painting shows some similarity to the Sheikhan sanjaq in the photograph by Spät. But what is the Indian lady doing in that picture, and why would anyone paint an Indian lady with a Yezidi sanjaq? The intensity of her look is similar to that of the man in Spät’s photograph, but unlike that man, she is lighting a wick, and the shallow bowl beneath the peacock appears to be filled with oil. Fire is sacred to the Yezidis, but there is no record of the Yezidi sanjaq ever being used as lamps.

The sanjaq of Sheikhan displayed In Lalish during the Great Autumn Assembly (top).
Courtesy Eszter Spät.

It seemed obvious to me that the mural was not painted by a Yezidi but by an outsider making a statement about the connection of Yezidism with an Indian religion. No one I met in Lalish in could tell me more about it, however. The locals paid no noticeable attention to it, and I met no religious or worldly authorities who might have told me who the artist was and what his or her intentions were. Several of the scholars of Yezidism whom I later queried about this intriguing mural had also seen the painting, which must have been there for several years already, but none could offer an explanation.

To be continued in part two.