This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir was a Sufi mystic, born near Baalbek in present day Lebanon around 1075, who left the wider Sufi world of his own training and settled at Lalish, in the Kurdish highlands of what is now northern Iraq. There he built a hermitage that drew a following, teaching and living at a site that had no organized religious community of its own before his arrival.
Around that hermitage, and around the veneration that grew after his death, Yazidism took the organised religious form it holds today. The community that gathered at Lalish under his teaching became the nucleus of a distinct tradition, rather than remaining one Sufi circle among many in the region.
Sheikh Adi died at Lalish around 1162, and his tomb there remains Yazidism's holiest site and the destination of its central pilgrimage. A Sufi mystic's choice of where to settle and build, in other words, became the geographic and devotional center of the religion that grew from his community, a connection between founder and holy place unusually direct even among religious traditions that trace themselves to a single figure.
That path, from Baalbek near the Mediterranean coast to a hermitage deep in the Kurdish highlands of northern Iraq, covers a considerable distance for a single man's own lifetime, roughly ninety years from his birth around 1075 to his death around 1162, and it was the second half of that life, spent at Lalish rather than in his region of birth, that the tradition remembers as decisive.