Sema
Today, I had a conversation with a German student who has chosen to write her graduation thesis about the Ezidis and the meaning of belonging within their community. During our conversation, she asked me a question whose echo remained with me long after the interview had ended:
How have the Ezidis, across successive generations, managed to preserve a sense of belonging among their children?
My first answer—and the simplest way I could express what I felt—was:
Love.
Love for family, love for faith, love for identity, and love for that deep feeling that there is something to which we belong, something that lives within us.
From that answer, I found myself thinking about our reality today: How does this sense of belonging continue, especially among young people living in open societies, surrounded by many choices and different ways of life, while at the same time belonging to a community with its own traditions and boundaries, including marriage within the Ezidi community?
If there were no genuine love for this belonging, what would make a person remain close to it when there is a real possibility of walking away?
Those who live in Europe understand well what I mean.
Our sons and daughters study, work, and meet people from different cultures, religions, and backgrounds. They have before them many relationships, opportunities, and ways of life. No one can close off the world around them.
And yet, many of them choose to keep this sense of belonging as part of their lives.
And here, I believe, lies the power of love.
If a person’s connection to their community were based only on fear, duty, or boundaries, those things alone could not preserve a sense of belonging from one generation to the next. Anyone who wishes to distance themselves today has the ability to do so.
But many do not.
Because behind their decision to stay lies something deeper than boundaries and prohibitions: a person loves what they belong to.
Identity is not passed from one generation to another through words and instructions alone. It is passed on through what a person experiences from childhood: in the embrace of family, in holidays and rituals, in stories and memories, in familiar faces, and in that feeling of being among people who understand them without requiring them to constantly explain who they are.
Here, we cannot overlook the role that parents and elders have played across generations. They did not merely pass on religion and traditions to their children; they also passed on memory—the stories of what they themselves lived through, what those before them endured, and how, despite suffering, persecution, and displacement, they managed to preserve their faith, identity, and community.
When children grow up knowing these stories, their sense of belonging becomes connected to a deeper understanding of what they have inherited. They do not simply see what makes their community different from the societies around them; they also come to understand what previous generations sacrificed so that this heritage could remain alive and eventually reach them.
This awareness can create a certain determination—not one born of fear, but of love, responsibility, and appreciation for those who came before. For some, preserving their sense of belonging becomes more than simply following what they inherited. It becomes a conscious choice not to allow what previous generations preserved under far harsher circumstances to disappear easily.
This is where the role of parents and elders becomes even more profound: not merely to tell younger generations who they are, but to help them understand why what they belong to has remained alive until today.
For this reason, I do not see belonging as something connected only to a place.
In the Ezidi faith, a person’s connection to God is not dependent on a particular location, nor is it confined within walls. Shrines and sacred places hold profound spiritual and religious significance, but faith, in its essence, lives in the heart, and a person carries it wherever they go.
What lives within a person does not need an external place in order to remain alive.
Belonging is similar. It does not exist only in the land, homeland, or house in which we were born. It lives in memory, faith, family, and a person’s sense of self. A person may move thousands of kilometers away from the homeland of their ancestors and still carry something within them that distance cannot take away.
In this sense, home, to me, becomes more than a place. It is the inner home where family, memory, faith, identity, and belonging reside—a home that a person can carry wherever they go.
But thinking about this inner home led me to an even deeper question:
Does a person need to belong to something at all, or is it enough simply to be oneself?
The more I thought about it, the less I saw any contradiction between the two.
True belonging should not dissolve a person into their surroundings, nor should it demand that they abandon themselves in order to remain part of the community to which they belong. Perhaps the most beautiful thing belonging can offer is roots that do not restrict us, memory that does not imprison us, and an identity that does not prevent us from being ourselves.
A person does not have to choose between being themselves and belonging. Perhaps the deepest form of belonging is finding, within one’s roots, something that helps a person become themselves rather than something that demands they lose who they are.
This is precisely what makes me look at our younger generation differently.
Instead of always looking at our young people through the lens of fear and anxiety over what we might lose, we should also recognize what they are preserving—and acknowledge and appreciate it.
We should appreciate our young people, women and men, who live in a world full of choices and yet, of their own free will, many choose to preserve their faith, identity, and sense of belonging, allowing this heritage to remain a living part of their lives.
This is not something we should take for granted.
When a person has an entire world of choices before them and still chooses to carry something inherited from their parents and grandparents, that choice itself deserves to be seen and appreciated.
Alongside our concerns for the younger generation, we also need to trust them—to see what they carry within them and to let them know that their choice to maintain this sense of belonging is valued.
And from here, the question itself begins to change.
Instead of always asking:
How do we preserve our children and their sense of belonging?
Perhaps we should also ask ourselves:
What have we given them that makes them love this belonging?
Because belonging built on fear always needs someone to guard it. But belonging filled with love is something a person carries wherever they go.
And this, in my view, is the difference between an identity we try to impose on our children and an identity that becomes part of who they are.
This does not mean that someone who chooses a different path loves their family or identity any less, nor does it mean that belonging has only one form in which everyone must be the same. People, experiences, and circumstances are different. Our responsibility is not merely to draw boundaries, but to give our children a sense of belonging in which they find love, dignity, and meaning—something worth carrying with them even when no one is watching.
That is why I realized today that the continuity of this belonging, through everything the Ezidis have endured, cannot be explained by boundaries and prohibitions alone.
There is something simpler than that—and perhaps something deeper:
People loved what they belonged to.
And that love, passed quietly from parents to children and from one generation to the next, may be one of the greatest secrets behind why this sense of belonging has remained alive until today.
True belonging does not mean preventing our children from seeing the world.
Nor does it mean tying them to a place so they cannot leave.
It means creating within them a home beautiful enough
that they carry their faith, their memory, and their love wherever they go;
so that even after they have seen the whole world,
the road back home remains alive within them.