PHOTOS: Shingal, an ancient town worth fighting to preserve
Ezidi tribes divide their history into two major epochs: before Sheikh Adi, and after Sheikh Adi. Their prophet was born in the Levant and lived in the 11th and 12th centuries, and oral tradition says he organized and “rectified” the Ezidi community in both social and religious ways. Ezidis widely understand that Sheikh Adi was the driving force behind modern Ezidism that is practiced today.
Ezidi oral tradition takes the maximalist stance that Shingal has always been Ezidi for thousands of years, and that, in fact, everywhere from the Mediterranean all the way to India was once Ezidi territory.
A more critical, minimalist approach to Ezidi history looks to the time before Sheikh Adi as an era when there were still Near Eastern, Persian, Hindu, Greek, and Roman traditions spread widely across the continent. This does not assume that communities practicing these traditions all referred to themselves as Ezidis.
This is a broad look at a robust non-Abrahamic universe that traded, communicated, migrated, intermarried, and often quickly syncretized together along caravan routes. This universe is the likely milieu from which proto-Ezdis (communities that later followed Sheikh Adi) likely were drawn.
That eclectic non-Abrahamic landscape must have persisted in some way well into the times of Christian and subsequent Islamic dominance. Sheikh Adi arrived almost six centuries after the Islamic conquest defeated the Zoroastrian Persians controlling Mesopotamia. By that time, Islam was by far the dominant religious force in the region.
Surviving communities of non-Abrahamic religions seem like the most plausible candidates to accept Sheikh Adi’s evangelizing in the region. They may have only survived in isolated pockets with highly local traditions, which would reinforce the “organizational” changes that Sheikh Adi catalyzed and which is deeply emphasized by Ezidi folklore about him.
Ezidi shrines on Shingal mountain associated with medieval times may be backdated, but it is more than likely that when the Romans came to Shingal in the second century, they encountered groups whose kaleidoscopic traditions would survive the next 1,000 years until their organization by Sheikh Adi. There is no reason to consider maximalist (folkloric) and minimalist (scholarly) perspectives on Ezidis as being mutually exclusive, especially as Ezidi history remains weakly documented and theorized in academia.