ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - An association of Islamic scholars in Rojhelat, the Kurdish region of western Iran, on Wednesday joined growing calls condemning remarks made by a cleric in Baneh targeting the Yazidi community.
The Association of Religious Scholars in Baneh condemned “the insulting, divisive, and provocative remarks made by an individual during Friday sermon speeches in a village in Baneh regarding the Yazidi Kurds of the Kurdistan Region.”
“Undoubtedly, the pulpit and sermon are intended as platforms to call for piety, ethics, unity, brotherhood, and reconciliation among people,” the association said, adding that hate speech “is incompatible with the ethical and religious duties of the pulpit.”
Ramin Salehzadeh, a mullah in Baneh, said during a Friday sermon that Yazidis are “atheists” and “fornicators” and that “if we have the slightest opportunity, we will not let you live one second on this earth.”
A video featuring part of his sermon went viral on social media, drawing widespread condemnation from religious figures in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq.
Rudaw English attempted to contact Salehzadeh through social media, but he did not respond.
He later deleted the video from his social media accounts and posted another video of himself saying that he had targeted certain Yazidis whom he claimed had disrespected Islam, rather than the entire community. He also claimed that his original comments had been clipped out of context by the administrator of his social media accounts.
“Yazidi Kurds are an integral part of Kurdistan's history and society,” the Baneh Muslim scholars association said. “Differences in religious or sectarian beliefs never grant permission for insults, disrespect, hate speech, or attacks on the national and human identity of any group.”
Sheikh Hassan Amini, a Sunni cleric and Islamic judge based in Sna (Sanandaj), told Rudaw on Tuesday that Salehzadeh’s remarks “solely” represented his own views and not even the view of Islam.
“In Islam, war is not waged against beliefs, but rather against injustice and corruption,” he said.
Meanwhile, Murad Ismail, a Yazidi lawmaker in the Iraqi parliament, sent an official letter requesting that the Iraqi foreign ministry take diplomatic and legal measures against the cleric and seek to hold him accountable through Iran.
Soud Misto, head of Yazidi affairs office at the Kurdistan Regional Government’s endowment ministry, said there was “an external hand behind this aiming to disrupt coexistence and social peace in the Kurdistan Region.”
He told Rudaw that they had requested the enactment of a specific law to combat hate speech, particularly on social media, “because the body of the Yazidi community is wounded and can no longer bear all this hate-filled rhetoric.”
The Yazidis are an ancient, Kurdish-speaking ethnoreligious minority indigenous to northern Mesopotamia, primarily concentrated in Iraq’s Nineveh province and the Kurdistan Region’s Duhok province. Shingal (Sinjar) in Nineveh is considered their heartland.
While some Islamic scholars have historically viewed Yazidis as non-believers, others have said they abandoned obligatory Islamic duties in favor of local traditions and mystical doctrines not grounded in scripture.
