For most of Yazidi history, writing the qewls down was neither practised nor desired; the tradition's authority lived in its reciters, and a widespread though not universal Yazidi conviction held religious writing itself suspect, a stance entangled with the community's memory of persecution by literate neighbours. The twentieth century changed the calculation.
Yazidi intellectuals, first in Soviet Armenia and later in Iraq and the European diaspora, began recording and publishing hymns, and from the 1970s onward the scholarly documentation of the corpus advanced decisively through cooperation between academic specialists and learned Yazidis, including men of the qewwal and sheikhly classes willing to recite for the record, with substantial collections edited, translated and analysed from the 1990s onward. The published corpus now runs to many dozens of qewls, though custodians affirm that more remain unrecorded and that some knowledge is not for circulation. Two pressures drove the opening: the erosion of the reciter lineages by emigration and modern schooling, and after 2014 the genocide against the Yazidis of Sinjar, which killed carriers of tradition and scattered the community across continents, making documentation feel to many like rescue. Within the community the standing of print remains a live question, the written hymn being a record of scripture rather than scripture itself, whose proper form is still the trained voice with flute and drum before the assembled faithful.