MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 76 of 100

Correct — option (4). This is a negative question and the paper marks it: the word incorrect in the English stem and अयोग्य in the Marathi stem are both printed in bold italic, so the reversal is signalled rather than hidden. Fix the task first — you are looking for the ONE statement that is false — and then read the four options as claims to be tested. Option (4) says that the Yazidi religion has taken some elements from Christianity and that they are therefore targeted by Islamic terrorist groups. The first half of that sentence is unobjectionable as far as it goes: Yazidism developed through a long historical process out of a pre-Islamic Kurdish and Iranian religious substratum together with the teaching of Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, and scholars identify influences from ancient Iranian belief and from Sufism, with elements drawn over the centuries from the other faiths of the region as well. What makes the statement false is the causal claim in the second half — the word so. That is not why the Yazidis have been persecuted. The Islamic State did not attack them because their religion resembles Christianity; on the contrary, Christians in the areas the Islamic State overran were treated as People of the Book and offered the status of protected subjects on payment of a tax, an option the Islamic State refused the Yazidis altogether, holding that they were neither People of the Book nor eligible for that protection. The reason given for the persecution lies elsewhere, in the central figure of Yazidi worship. Yazidis are monotheists who venerate Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, whom they understand as a benevolent being; the Islamic State and some other Muslims in the region identify that figure with Lucifer or Shaitan, and it is on that identification that the slur of devil worship, and the campaign of killing and enslavement that followed from it, were built. So the statement inverts the actual grievance: the Yazidis were attacked for what was said to be an element of devil worship, not for an element of Christianity. The scale of what followed is a matter of record — the Islamic State attacked Sinjar on 3 and 4 August 2014, some two hundred thousand civilians fled and about fifty thousand Yazidis were stranded on the mountain, and by early October that year one scholarly estimate put the number of Yazidi men killed at around five thousand, with thousands of women and children enslaved. Since the false statement is option (4), that is the answer to be marked.

• (1)It is one of Iraq's oldest minorities. — This statement is true, so it cannot be the answer to a question asking for the incorrect one. The Yazidis are among the oldest religious minorities of Iraq, their faith having grown out of a religious substratum older than Islam in the region and having taken its present shape through a process running back to the medieval period. Antiquity is in fact one of the standard descriptions applied to the community in reporting and in scholarship, and it is part of why the destruction of 2014 was treated internationally as the destruction of a heritage as well as of a population. A candidate might hesitate over the word oldest, on the ground that it is a comparative claim about a country with many ancient communities, but the statement does not say the oldest; it says one of the oldest, which is a weaker and clearly supportable claim. Reading quantifiers carefully is worth doing in every question of this kind, because the difference between one of the oldest and the oldest, or between many and all, is very often where a true statement is turned into a false one.
• (2)They are concentrated in northern Iraq around Mount Sinjar. — This statement is true as well. The great majority of Yazidis in the Middle East live in Iraq, concentrated in the northern governorates of Nineveh and Duhok, and their heartland is the district around the Sinjar Mountains in the north-west of the country, close to the Syrian border. Sinjar is also the place-name attached to the worst episode in their modern history: when the Islamic State attacked on 3 and 4 August 2014, tens of thousands of Yazidis fled up the mountain and were trapped there without water, and the siege became the immediate occasion for international air operations against the group. The other place a candidate should attach to the community is Lalish, north-east of Mosul, the site of the tomb of Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir and the holiest place in the religion, to which Yazidis make pilgrimage. Geography is the part of a question about an unfamiliar community that is easiest to verify and hardest to fake, so a statement locating a people correctly is rarely the falsifier in a question of this shape.
• (3)This ancient religion is rumoured to have been founded in 11th century by Umayyad Shaikh. — This statement is not the one the question is looking for, and the word rumoured in it is doing a good deal of work. The tradition it refers to is real. Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir was born in the 1070s at Bait Far, near Baalbek in what is now Lebanon, and left in about his thirtieth year for the Hakkari mountains of northern Iraq, settling at Lalish, where his tomb remains the holiest site of the religion; he is described as the reformer, the renewer or the founder of Yazidism, having drawn scattered communities together and given the faith the religious and social structure it still has, and in Yazidi belief he holds a central theological place. On his descent the sources genuinely disagree, which is why a statement about it can only be reported rather than asserted: Arab sources written centuries after his death connect him with the Umayyad house, and the Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council notes that those sources place him in its Marwanid branch, while Kurdish and Orientalist scholars argue for a Kurdish origin among families of the Hakkari mountains. A statement that reports a contested tradition as a tradition is not the same as a statement that asserts a falsehood, and the plainly false statement in this set is option (4).

The Yazidis are a religious community, mostly Kurdish-speaking, whose heartland lies in northern Iraq — the governorates of Nineveh and Duhok, and above all the district around the Sinjar Mountains — with smaller populations in Syria, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia and a large diaspora in Germany. Their religion is monotheistic and centres on a God who created the world and entrusted it to seven holy beings, the chief of whom is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel. It developed through a long process combining a pre-Islamic Kurdish and Iranian religious substratum with the teaching of Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, a mystic born in the 1070s near Baalbek who settled at Lalish in the Hakkari mountains and died in 1162, and whose successors reorganised the faith during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; his tomb at Lalish is the holiest Yazidi site and the destination of their principal pilgrimage. Scholars identify influences from ancient Iranian religion and from Sufism, and the sources disagree about Sheikh Adi's own ancestry, Arab accounts written long after his death connecting him with the Umayyad house while Kurdish and Orientalist scholarship argues for Kurdish origins. The community has been persecuted repeatedly, and the identification of Melek Taus with the devil by outsiders has been the recurring pretext. The worst episode in modern times began on 3 and 4 August 2014, when the Islamic State attacked Sinjar: about two hundred thousand civilians fled, some fifty thousand Yazidis were stranded on the mountain, massacres were carried out across the villages, and thousands of women and girls were enslaved. The Islamic State's stated justification was that the Yazidis were neither People of the Book nor eligible for the status of protected subjects — a position it did not take towards the region's Christians — and the campaign has since been recognised as a genocide.

Questions about a religious or ethnic community that has been in the international news are a recurring feature of the current affairs section, and the shape used here is the commonest: four descriptive statements about the community, three of them accurate and one containing a false claim, with the stem asking which is incorrect. The false statement in such a question is almost never a plain error of geography or history, because that would be too easy to catch; it is usually a correct fact joined to a wrong explanation. Option (4) here is exactly that — a defensible observation about the syncretic character of the religion, joined by the word so to a causal claim that inverts the actual reason for the persecution. Learning to read for the joint between a fact and its explanation is one of the most transferable skills in this section of the paper, because the same construction appears in questions about schemes, about institutions and about historical events. The second thing to take from this question is a matter of proportion in preparation. A candidate cannot study every community that appears in the news, but for those that do appear, four facts cover almost everything an examiner will ask: where they live, what is distinctive about their belief or identity, why they were in the news, and what the international response was. Written out, that is four lines a community, and the Yazidis have been in the news often enough to earn theirs.

• The Yazidis are one of Iraq's oldest religious minorities, concentrated in the northern governorates of Nineveh and Duhok and above all around the Sinjar Mountains, with a diaspora in Europe and communities in Syria, Turkey, Armenia and Georgia.
• Yazidism is monotheistic and venerates Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, understood by Yazidis as a benevolent being; the Islamic State and some others in the region identify that figure with Lucifer or Shaitan, which is the basis of the false charge of devil worship.
• The Islamic State targeted the Yazidis because it refused to recognise them as People of the Book or as eligible for the status of protected subjects — a status it did extend to Christians — and not because their religion contains elements drawn from Christianity.
• Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, born in the 1070s near Baalbek and died in 1162, settled at Lalish and is regarded as the reformer, renewer or founder of the faith; his tomb at Lalish is its holiest site, and the sources disagree about whether he was of Umayyad or Kurdish descent.
• The Islamic State attacked Sinjar on 3 and 4 August 2014; about two hundred thousand civilians fled and some fifty thousand Yazidis were stranded on the mountain, thousands were killed, and thousands of women and girls were enslaved in what has since been recognised as a genocide.

• Missing that the falsifier in a statement is the causal claim rather than the factual one; option (4) joins a defensible observation to an explanation that inverts the real reason for the persecution
• Reading a negative stem as though it were positive and marking the first accurate statement offered
• Treating a reported tradition as an asserted fact; a statement using a word like rumoured claims only that the tradition exists, which is a much weaker and more defensible claim
• Overlooking quantifiers — one of the oldest is a far weaker claim than the oldest, and questions of this shape often turn on exactly that difference

Communities and conflicts in the news are asked in MPSC papers in three shapes: where a named people live; why they were in the news; and, most often, a statement list of the kind used here in which one description is subtly wrong. Because the pool of possible subjects is large but the depth expected is shallow, the efficient preparation is a four-line note for each community that reaches the front pages — location, distinguishing belief or identity, the event that put them in the news, and the international response — rather than any attempt at real study. What raises a candidate's accuracy beyond that is a reading habit rather than more content: in a list of descriptive statements, look for the sentence that explains rather than describes, because the explanation is where an examiner can plant an error that survives a quick reading. Words such as so, because, therefore and as a result are the markers to slow down at, and in this question the single word so is the difference between a true statement and the keyed answer.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which figure central to Yazidi belief is misidentified by their persecutors as the devil ?

  • (a)Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir
  • (b)Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel
  • (c)The shrine at Lalish
  • (d)The Sinjar Mountain

  Answer(b) Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel. Yazidis are monotheists who understand Melek Taus as the chief of seven holy beings to whom God entrusted the world, and as a benevolent figure; the Islamic State and some other Muslims in the region identify him with Lucifer or Shaitan, and it is on that identification that the charge of devil worship rests. Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir is the twelfth-century figure regarded as the reformer or founder of the faith, and Lalish, the site of his tomb, is its holiest place.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The attack on Sinjar in August 2014, which displaced about two hundred thousand people and stranded tens of thousands of Yazidis on a mountain, was carried out by which group ?

  • (a)Al-Shabaab
  • (b)Boko Haram
  • (c)The Islamic State
  • (d)The Taliban

  Answer(c) The Islamic State. It attacked Sinjar on 3 and 4 August 2014, massacres followed across the surrounding villages, and thousands of women and girls were enslaved; the group refused to treat Yazidis as People of the Book or as eligible for the status of protected subjects. Al-Shabaab operates in Somalia and the surrounding region, Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria and its neighbours, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.