Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 1.djvu/187

Rh pollute the lives and conduct of Mohammedans; though it is said that great lewdness secretly prevails within the limits of their own community. This is a natural result of polygamy, which is allowed among them to the extent of three wives, to the facility of obtaining divorce, and particularly to the frequency of incestuous marriages. Instead of being deemed a crime, it is generally thought desirable and praiseworthy, for a man to marry his sister-in-law, and for a woman to marry her brother-in-law.

During the government of the different hereditary pashas of these districts, and when anarchy frequently prevailed throughout the country, the Yezeedees occasionally got the upper hand, and the people of Mosul still remember the time when Christians and even Mohammedans did not dare to enter the mountain-pass in which Sheikh Adi is situated, for fear of being robbed or murdered. The Yezeedees of Sinjâr were the terror of all caravans and merchants travelling through the desert, few of whom escaped without being attacked and plundered. In 1833 the Coordish pasha of Rawandooz, instigated thereto by religious fanaticism and a thirst for booty, fell upon those inhabiting the plains, burned their villages, carried many of them away captive, and on the mound of Koyoonjuk massacred several thousands in cold blood who had fled thither, hoping that the people of Mosul would offer them a refuge within the city walls. About six years later Mohammed Pasha led an army against the Yezeedees of Sinjâr, and after several defeats finally succeeded in crushing their power, and in reducing them to abject submission by the most cruel and barbarous measures. And as late as 1844, when Jebel Toor was under the government of Bedr Khan Beg, the Yezeedees of that district were subjected to the most wanton oppression by that tyrannical Coord, in order to force them to embrace Islamism. Many underwent imprisonment, stripes, and other indignities, and a few suffered death, rather than renounce their creed; but seven entire villages became the professed followers of the False Prophet.

The Tanzeemât Khairiyyeh, or Beneficial Ordinance, lately issued by the Sultan, has wrought a great change in the local administration of the Turkish provinces, and the Yezeedees are now free from many of those exactions and hardships under which they formerly laboured. An imperial edict has also been