The Religious Textual Heritage of the Yarsan (Ahl-e Haqq)

Philip G. Kreyenbroek held the chair of Iranian Studies at the University of Gottingen and is one of the foremost specialists in the religions of the Kurdish speaking world, having written the standard academic study of Yazidism as well as this 2022 article on the Yarsan. It appeared in Oral Tradition, the peer reviewed journal hosted by the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, a specialist venue for exactly the kind of question this article answers: how a religious literature transmitted partly by memory and partly by manuscript actually holds together. The article draws on his own fieldwork and on the wider academic literature on the Yarsan to describe the kalams, their layers and their transmission through Sayyed lineages, rather than restating secondary summaries, which is why the atlas treats it as primary evidence for how Yarsani textual transmission works rather than only for the facts it reports.