first; next come the French; then the Russians; and finally the Italians. The German scholars seem to be interested mainly in certain words and festive events. And, in the discussion of these, they go so far in their unbounded speculation that one cannot tell whether the people they deal with are the Yezidis in question, Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Greeks, Romans or Jews. The German writers do not seem to be interested so much in the problem of the origin of this people as a sect, unless they regard the question as settled on the ground of the Yezidis' own statement that they are the descendants of Yezid bn Mu'awiya.
To tell the truth, the rise of the interest in the inquiry about the founder of this sect on a scientific basis, is due, without question, to the scholarship of the West. And any solution of the problem (and it does not matter who does the work), in the last analysis, must be accredited to the influences emanating from these scholars and these scholars only. Nevertheless modern orientalists have been far from approaching the solution of the question. This may be due in part to the extreme interest which they have taken in the matter, an interest which led them to accept the phenomena without critical examination. But the inductive study of their respective writings tends to show that this is due to their method of procedure rather than to anything else. They have employed the philosophical and not the historical method.[1] I do not mean to deny the value of such a course of investigation in questions pertaining to
- ↑ 23
