Methodology & Sources

Every profile synthesises three kinds of sources: academic scholarship (the standard monographs and reference works for each community — see the bibliography below), quality journalism and NGO reporting for recent events, and the communities' own publications, institutions and self-descriptions, which are given particular weight for questions of identity and belief.

No text on this site is generated from a single source, and none is copied from one. Each page lists its image credits in the footer; factual claims that rest on one contested source are either flagged in the text or left out.

There are almost no reliable censuses to lean on. Few states in the region count ethnicity or faith at all — Lebanon has not held a census since 1932, precisely because the answer is politically explosive — and communities themselves often publish figures that argue their case. Estimates for the same community routinely differ by a factor of two or more.

The atlas therefore uses mid-ranges of credible published estimates (Minority Rights Group, academic surveys, UN and government reporting), rounds them openly with the ≈ sign, and shows diaspora populations as a single separate bar. Every chart carries a note naming its basis. Treat all figures as orders of magnitude, not measurements — and see The Region in Numbers for the figures side by side.

Distribution maps show soft-edged zones — halos — around the places where a community is concentrated, drawn after published ethnographic atlases (among them Columbia University's Gulf/2000 collection) and adjusted against recent reporting on displacement. They are deliberately indicative: settlement is mixed almost everywhere, and a hard line would claim a precision that does not exist.

The base map is generated from Natural Earth data and draws coastlines, not political borders. That is a choice, not an omission: these communities are older than every border that crosses their world, and the atlas does not adjudicate any of them.

One map — the Yazidis — pilots a more precise treatment: settlement fields redrawn after Michael Izady's Gulf/2000 ethnographic cartography (Columbia University), used with his permission, and adjusted against post-2014 displacement reporting. The remaining maps will move to this standard progressively.

Contested questions stay contested. The atlas takes no position on sovereignty, borders or the region's conflicts. Political events appear where they shaped a community's fate — told as history, not argument.

Communities name themselves. Self-designations lead (Amazigh, not Berber; Êzidî alongside Yazidi), with widely known exonyms mentioned once and marked as such — “also known as Nusayris.” Where a community disagrees internally about its own identity — whether Yazidis are Kurds, whether Alevism is Islam — the disagreement itself is reported, never adjudicated.

Dignity in imagery. No graphic violence is shown. Persecution is told without euphemism, but every community's page leads with what it has built and preserved, not only with what it has suffered.

Photography comes from Wikimedia Commons (public domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA), Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay, together with original photographs © Ruben Vermeer (2016–2024) taken across the region. Every page lists its own credits in the footer; machine-readable credit files ship with the site. Crops of CC BY-SA images remain under the same license.

This atlas is written about twenty communities, and it wants to be accountable to them. If you belong to one of these communities — or study one — and you find an error of fact, a mislabelled photograph, or a framing you would contest, write to info@middleeastminorities.org. Corrections are acknowledged, fixed, and logged on this page with dates.

Corrections log: none yet — the atlas launched in July 2026. The first corrections will appear here.

Twenty communities is a beginning, not a boundary. The region holds many more peoples than any one atlas, and several are already on the longlist for future profiles: the Nubians of Egypt's south, the Dom (the Middle East's Roma), the Afro-Iraqis of Basra, the Rum — Greek Orthodox communities of Istanbul and Antakya — the Chechens and Dagestanis of the Levant, and the Baluch of Iran's southeast.

If a community you belong to or care about should be here — one of those, or one we haven't named — suggest it. Tell us what the atlas should know, and where to start listening.

The standing references behind the atlas. Individual profiles draw on further specialised scholarship; community-specific reading is linked at the foot of each profile.

Reference works & data

• Minority Rights Group International — World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples
• Encyclopædia Iranica — Columbia University
• Michael Izady — the Gulf/2000 ethnographic, religious & linguistic map collection, Columbia University
• Ethnologue: Languages of the World — SIL International
• UNESCO — Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
• U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom — annual reports
• Pew Research Center — studies of global religious composition

Books

• Gerard Russell, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East (2014)
• William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1997)
• Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (2019)
• Philip G. Kreyenbroek, Yezidism — Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition (1995)
• Birgül Açıkyıldız, The Yezidis: The History of a Community, Culture and Religion (2010)
• Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People (2002)
• Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1979)
• David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim–Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (2006)
• Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (2015)
• Kais M. Firro, A History of the Druzes (1992)
• Yaron Friedman, The Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs: An Introduction to the Religion, History and Identity of the Leading Minority in Syria (2010)
• Markus Dressler, Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam (2013)
• David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (3rd rev. ed., 2021)
• Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide (2013)
• Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands (2010)
• Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans: A Profile (2016)
• Otto F. A. Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity (1999)
• Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (2011)
• Farhad Daftary, The Ismāʿīlīs: Their History and Doctrines (2nd ed., 2007)