Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir

Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir was a 12th-century mystic, ascetic and theologian who is the central saint of the Yazidi religion, regarded as its reformer, renewer or founder. Born in the 1070s at Bait Far near Baalbek, in present-day Lebanon, he studied in Baghdad and settled in the Hakkari mountains before 1111, gathering followers at Lalish. Islamic literature and Western scholarship traditionally describe him as a Sufi mystic of Islamic background, a framing Yazidis reject; in Yazidi belief he is an earthly incarnation of God. The caste structure of Sheikhs, Pirs and Murids is conventionally traced to his reforms. He died in 1162, and his tomb at Lalish is the holiest site in Yazidism.