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Du’a Khalil Aswad meets the Peacock Angel: A Love Story

It was Steinbeck’s Mother Joad in The Grapes of Wrath who said, Sometimes lovin’ someone don’t turn out like you thought it would. Just last spring, Du'a Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old Yezidi Kurdish girl of Northern Iraq, fell in love with a Muslim boy. Yezidi Kurds are strict about this. Marrying outside their sect is an offense under their religious edicts. But it was spring in Mosul, and she was a teenager and the boy seemed nice. Really nice, as only forbidden fruit can be. And anyway, soon after the elopement, Du’a’s family members came calling. They explained that she was forgiven, and welcomed her back home for a visit.

The video, now on the internet, consists of 6 clips.

Clip 1. The jeers of the crowd reminds one of a cockfight once viewed in an open air market in SE Asia. The flurry of red is Du’a’s blouse as she is shoved and dragged before the crowd. A flash of white legs, one bare foot. Cries of terror as Du’a’s thin black skirt is ripped away and used as an impromptu hood. She is naked from the waist down except for a black bikini panty, the minimal thong favored by more than a few girls her age—the sight of it all the more pitiful for its strategically placed “V” of black fabric.

Stripping someone removes not only their garment, but whatever remnants of dignity they may have retained. Hooding them increases their vulnerability and terror, and it also makes them faceless, less human. These facts are now scribed into the American psyche as remnants of recent experience with our own prisoners.

Clip 2. The sharp smack of stones striking human flesh. Du'a cries out again for mercy. But there was to be no mercy that day in the town square, for they were involved in God’s work. Du’a’s long hair as she lies supine is a corona around her head, glossy black against the dull gray paving stones. Her legs flail, her screams are piercing and plaintive. In their howling onslaught, the crowd is now a pack of wild dogs that have brought some small creature to ground and are tearing it to bits.

Yezidis are not Muslims. They share many of the traditions and mythology of all three of the Abrahamic traditions as well as Zoroasterism. Seven archangels, the Heptad, figure prominently in their worship. The chief of this band is Malek Ta’us, the “Peacock Angel.” The Peacock Angel created the world from an egg, or perhaps a pearl. The written record is scanty, in part due to repeated destructive onslaughts by Christians and Muslims through the millennia, those who wished to convert the Yezidis by force.

If some of the mythology of Yezidism, is inconsistent, uncertain and improbable, still it also carries its own unique charm. What besides Mother Goose could be as endearing as a Peacock Angel to watch over and care for one while God is otherwise occupied?

Clip 3: Du’a’s movements are less purposeful as she attempts to avoid the unseen missiles, to fend them off with bruised and bloodied hands and forearms. The armed police present are enthusiastic spectators.

Clip 4. Du’a is supine, still moving slightly. Her bare white legs are spread. Bruises and cuts are visible on her hips. The exposed lower part of her face is covered with blood. The hood which covers her upper face is now saturated.

For a moment I am transported back to a decades ago medical school neuroanatomy class; the professor intones, “Deep within the brains of us all, there is an ancient and primitive brain that is quite analogous to the brains of our distant cousins, the crocodiles.” Within this crocodile brain is the limbic system. In its collections of nuclei and connecting tracts, intertwined in close proximity, are the areas responsible for both aggression and rage as well as sexual desire, arousal, and function. This unfortunate proximity speaks poorly for Intelligent Design, incidentally. In any number of species, sex has such violent overtones that the female may be injured or killed. This includes mammals from tarsiers to elephant seals and, occasionally, humans. What percentage of the men in attendance at Du’a's stoning, one wonders, are sexually aroused at the site of a young woman being methodically killed as she writhes and moans half naked before them?

Clip 5. Two men pick Du’a’s flaccid body up by her arms and drag her to a more propitious position in the street. Someone picks up a stone the size of her head, holds it high and crashes it with all his might into her face.

Clip 6. It is over. Du’a Khalil Aswad is now safe in the arms of the Peacock Angel. The crowd renders vigorous vocal affirmation. Her blood soaked corpse looks smaller in death.

Soon the Iraqi security forces, our surrogate army, actually, will come. They block off the area. But they are not there to apprehend anyone. In some things there and here, it is not the perpetrators that must be sequestered, but the images of the event that must be concealed.

Bloggers, blissfully innocent of the fact that Yezidis are no way Muslim, often responded with an indignant moral one-upsmanship: “Those damned Muslims should be shot.” Yet truly, this writer finds it difficult to find a great deal of moral superiority in any of the Abrahamic belief systems, all three of which have a great deal of blood on their hands: Consider Rachel Corrie, the young woman who died beneath the treads of an Israeli Defense Force bulldozer. The lynchings of Blacks in the Southland of my youth were typically committed by Christians. And then there is the matter of how many young women have been atomized in Mosul and elsewhere the Middle East by our own 2,000 pound bombs raining down on not quite the right spot.

Though it is not currently fashionable to stone women for sexual transgressions here, there are those in our midst who fervently wish to. To take a few of many possible prominent examples such as American Advocate president and Christian Dominionist Gary DeMar, and Christian Radio host Bob Enyard. Congressional candidate Randall Terry, former head of Operation Rescue, extends this view of "Biblical law" to include the approval of "Biblical slavery" and capital punishment for rebellious teenagers. One supposes Du’a would fall into this latter category.

Writer and professor Carolyn Marvin maintains that “Religion organizes killing energy. More precisely, it organizes men who wish to kill so they will kill the right people.” We though, as writers, as literate people of good will and good fortune, are each uniquely positioned to contribute in some small way to advancing standards of decency and to moral progress, not just of the Yezidi Kurds who slew Du’a Khalil Aswad but to that of humanity in general.

With appreciation to first publisher, the Harvard Square Commentary.

The Chickasaw Plum - Volume V - Number 3 - March 2008

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