Earlier this year, the New York Times Book Review published a review of Nadia Murad’s The Last Girl, a memoir of her experiences as a civilian victim of Daesh’s war of conquest in northern Iraq. Her Yazidi village was attacked, all the men and older women slaughtered and the younger women taken as sexual slaves. Her story is complex with exploration of America’s destruction of Iraq’s secularist national government which rendered the region vulnerable to militarized religious extremists as well as the Kurds exploitation of her and her story when she’d escaped captivity and made her way to Kuristan. It also examines the Yazidi’s religion, which Crowley, it’s reported, felt was the ancient antecedent to Thelema. Here’s an excerpt from the review:
“The Last Girl is also a primer on the ancient Yazidi faith that sustains Murad throughout her ordeal: its creation myths, visions of the afterlife and idiosyncratic customs. (Many Yazidis avoid eating lettuce, and consider blue a color too holy for humans to wear.) Yazidis pray to Tawusi Melek, an archangel who, at the creation, took the form of a peacock, and painted a desolate earth with the colors of his feathers. Over the centuries, misunderstandings surrounding the mysterious religion have fueled genocide — 73 times, Murad writes, a figure eerily exact. According to a pernicious myth, Tawusi Melek refused to bow before Adam and was condemned to hell, echoing Satan’s behavior in the Quran. Branding them ‘devil worshipers,’ ISIS legitimized the massacre and enslavement of Yazidis, singling them out among Iraq’s many minorities for particularly inhumane treatment.”
Read the entire review here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/books/review/nadia-murad-last-girl.html.
