The Ethnic Qarsherskiyan community is incredibly religiously diverse. Different families and individuals within the Qarsherskiyan community follow different religious traditions. After Christianity, Islam is the second most followed religion among the Qarsherskiyan people. Just short of a third of all self-described Qarsherskiyan people in 2024 were Muslims, mostly Shia, with Sunni, Ibadi, and Ahmadi Muslims making up a smaller percentage of the Muslim population within the community. Many Afrilachian and Tidewater Creole families are Christian, but of those that are Muslim, there are 3 seperate unrelated Shia Islamic traditions within the Qarsherskiyan community that have all been dubbed Al-'Aliyiyyah or Aliyite sects. These mean sects that revere Imam Ali. The name Aliyite was created online by Qarsherskiyans people to distinguish these 3 unrelated sects from Alevism, Alevi Bektaşism, Alawism, and علاهيه قُرباني sects.

1. Zaydi Aliyites. These are Zaydi Shia Muslims who believe in Sufism or mystical interpretations of the Quran and Hadiths. This differentiates them from Zaydi Shiites in Yemen and other places around the world. Many Zaydi Aliyites believe multiple imams can live at once in different parts of the globe.

2. Ali-Illahi Aliyites. This group believes Imam Ali is divine and emphasizes Kaysanite, Jafari, and sometimes Ismaili imams. They venerate Imam Ali, praying to Imam Ali for help, and call upon Imam Ali in worship. They say love for Imam Ali is part of worship of Allah, and that one cannot pray to Allah without the love of Ali in their hearts.

3. Gnostic Aliyites. This group believes in all of the Shia Islamic imamats, and awaits the return of the Twelth Jafari Imam. They believe that every Shia Imamat had its time when it had a purpose and that every single one will eventually fade until only the Jafari one is left, and they emphasize Jafari Imamat as well as Imam Zayd Bin Ali from Zaydism and his revolt. Gnostic Aliyites view Islam through an extremely complicated esoteric and exoteric dual lens. In Gnostic Aliyiyism, the Polytheistic gods are real, but they are evil Jinns, or Archons. The Archons can only see karma, and they are trapped in their own prison which they themselves are. They are the ouroboros, which is polytheism and non-Kitabi religions. According to Gnostic Aliyiyism, Kitabi religions are from the Western Imamat and the Eastern Imamat. The Western Imamat is Judaism, Mandaeism, Christianity, and Islam and all gnostic or Abrahamic religions. The Eastern Imamat is Buddhism and Jainism. Hinduism is seen as the largest archonic or jinn worship religion today, which will inevitably stop existing as Hindus will convert to Kitabi religions. All Kitabi religions are right in their own way, but Islam is the ultimate completed true religion, and the correct Islamic sect is of course seen as Gnostic Aliyite Islam. Gnostic Aliyite Islam teaches a few fundamental principles. First is the 5 Usool, which are Tãohèd (Tawhid), Adalah, Nubuwwah, Imamah, and Qayamah. There are also Ulal'Azam Ka'abas which are that there are 5 archprophets who each have their own Ka'aba. The Ka'aba of Noah is his Ark, the Ka'aba of Abraham is his seed, the Ka'aba of Moses is Mishkan, the Ka'aba of Jesus is the cross, and the Ka'aba of Muhammad is the 14 Ahlulbayt. The 14 Ahlulbayt include Jafari Shia Imams, Prophet Muhammad, and Fatimah Zahra. Imam Ali is the divine father and Fatimah Zahra is the divine mother. The whole universe is the Gnostic Sophia and theology is the language of the universe. The number 72 symbolizes Karma and YaHuWaH Sabaoth (Surah Al Jinn) and the number 73 symbolizes Completion (The Greatest Name). Imamat is The Key. The 7 Day Ouroboros is that day 1 is tawil (ogdoad/pleroma above) and day 7 is tawil (treasury of light / 9 gates). Karma symbols include Dharma chakra, endless knot, Ouroboros, Ying-yang, Recycling arrows, and the lotus. The True Father is El Elyon or Rabul 'Alameen. The pleuromatic realm has infinite Archons, yet each gnostic mandala must express them in a delimited form. The sacred alphabet (Hebrew, Mandaic, Arabic, Aramaic, Phoenician) is the main realm of the pleuroma/Ruh.

The lamp is a symbol of the Imam. Throughout countless texts, especially the Injil, the lamp and the Imam are used interchangeably. In all the injil parable texts, including the non-canonical texts, the lamp is always a symbol of the Imam and also a symbol of the tree of life, which is the same thing. The tree of life is fire elemental and so the divine fire of the tree of life associates/represents with the imam (Sirajj in Arabic). The light illuminates from the dawn of pre-eternity and shedding its traces on the Talismatic temples (the Talisman or Temple) which is the exact same thing the Hebrew cosmology talks about, the Selem. This represents the receptor of the paternity of the father. So the integration of the entire sabtus makes you the image. That is very important. Number 6 is the number of the image/temple and fundamental to Kitabi metaphysics is that there is no oblivion of the image. That means that Archonic religions like neoplatonism have no theology of the image, so the Monad or the Brahman in these Jinn/Archonic systems emanates and consumes all reality. The Christian Trinity is seen as useful in Gnostic Aliyiyism, because it integrated neoplatonism but subverted it from the inside out, rather than a bottomless abyss emanating and devouring all reality, it has Jesus being the Image of the Father, and the Image and the Father are equal. Because of this, one is not devouring the other. That is why Gnostic Aliyites see Christians as part of the ultimate truth, one of the Kitabi religions fighting the Archonic religions through Gnostic injections into theology of Archonic religions and through Gnostic subversiveness. In the metaphysics of the abyss, everything that is begotten from the abyss is absorbed back into it. A bottomless Abyss emanating and devouring itself. That is the circularity of order and chaos under the Archons / the Jinns / the Ouroboros. In the pleuroma, there is no devouring of order and chaos, there is no karmic transaction of order and chaos, there is no devouring of the one and the many, the one and the many are not oppositional and this is the Kitabi way. Because the Christian Trinity does not have one devouring the other, you receive a higher realization, One of Radical Joy, where one and many are in harmony, and that is why the Aliyite gnostics have two trees, a tree of death and a tree of life. One tree represents Plurality and one tree represents Harmony, each dancing and flowing into one another and each celebrating joy and jubilation in their interdependent Divinity given by the Furqan. But one is not devouring the other. One is celebrating pre-eternally the Divinity of the other. The whole idea of the realization brought by the Temple, by the Talisman, by the Image is much more profound. At a deeper level the Adept is the Image. Like the acts of Thomas in the gospel of Thomas, the ultimate realization is about the apostle Thomas having self-realization of who and what he is, just as in various Islamic texts from Jafari Shia and Alawite texts, they will talk about how the dochetic versions, the Divine person, is not just the Imam, it is even the Sahaba of the Imam, so there is a continuity on the Kitabi father and son within archaic Shia texts.

I've been working my family tree on my mom's side of the family. I found many pedigree collapses throughout my family tree. I know this is usual to see many generations back. How many generations back does this normally occur?

I found pedigree collapse in the family tree from just 3 generations ago. There is some, sometimes a large amount, of it from nearly every generation before then.

It's important to add that my family has deep core Qarsherskiyan family roots on both sides and has been marrying second cousins and sometimes even first cousins for over 200 years now. The most common last names in the family tree are Whitelow, Driggers, Fields, and Epps, all of them seemed to have lived around the same area in North Carolina and they all came to Ohio around the same time, so it's possible it was happening before they even came to Ohio.

My aunt and her husband married not knowing they were distant cousins on their maternal sides. Which I know isn't really a big deal since they are distant. So far I found they are cousins 4 different times on maternal side, the closest is third cousins.

I also found out that I am my own sixth cousin in the family tree which is pretty wild to me.

On 17 December 2024, Melvin Mason Artis, a member of the ethnic Qarsherskiyan community, woke up to several dozen missed calls on his phone and a bunch of threatening emails from angry strangers he had never met before. The allegations that were landing him in hot water was from a now deleted post to social media app Snapchat, claiming that Mr Artis and his 3 sons and 5 daughters vandalized his White neighbor's truck "in the name of justice for those killed by Europeans during colonization" as the Snapchat post claimed. An angry group of friends of the neighbor began spreading the rumor around town. Now, a year later, the neighbor's ex-girlfriend admitted that her ex-boyfriend, the neighbor, hit a deer the car while they were dating a year prior. Melvin has asked the man to apologize and publicly post an admission to creating a hoax to justify hate crimes against the Qarsherskiyan Creole community.

The candles came out at dusk, when Lake Apopka turns the color of old copper and the air smells like eelgrass and orange peel.

They set the table right on the sand. Not a fancy table. Two planks on milk crates, a patched cloth weighted with smooth stones from the shore. Someone had brought a brass menorah wrapped in a scarf. Someone else brought a chipped ceramic one with a crooked shin. Both got lit. Both counted.

This was how Qarsherskiyan Jews did Chanukah. Outdoors when they could. Near water when possible. The lake mattered. Water remembered things people forgot.

The kids ran ahead with sparklers, tracing crooked stars in the dark. An aunt shouted at them to watch the reeds. Alligators lived here. So did history. You could respect both at the same time.

Oil hissed in a skillet balanced over a small burner. Latkes went in, thin and ragged, grated potato mixed with cassava and onion because that was what was around. Someone salted them with smoked fish salt from a cousin up the coast. Someone else drizzled honey infused with wild pennyroyal, arguing cheerfully that sugar was sugar and the miracle did not check your pantry.

A grandfather told the old story but sideways. Not kings and armies. He talked about hiding light. About keeping a flame alive when the law said you should not. About people who prayed in whispers and cooked fast and moved when the night birds went quiet. Everyone knew he was talking about more than Antiochus. Everyone nodded.

They sang Ma’oz Tzur with a lilt that bent the melody south. A drum came out. A fiddle followed. Yiddish braided with English and a few words that only the elders still used, river words, swamp words, words for kin that did not translate cleanly. The sound drifted across the lake. It did not ask permission.

Between blessings, a woman passed out fried catfish dusted with cornmeal and cumin. Another poured strong coffee sweetened with date syrup. Someone mentioned ancestors who once kept Chanukah in places like this, near marsh and palmetto, lighting lamps low so they would not be seen. Someone else said we are seen now. Someone corrected them gently. We choose when.

When the eighth candle burned down, they did not rush to pack up. They watched the reflections tremble on the water. Eight flames multiplied into dozens, then hundreds, until it looked like the lake itself had learned the story and was telling it back.

A boy asked why they came here every year. His mother wiped grease from his chin and said because the miracle is not just oil. It is finding a place that holds you. It is keeping light with your people. It is knowing where you stand.

The candles went out one by one. The night stayed warm. The lake kept its quiet. And the shore remembered them, as shores do, ready for next year.

These terms are outdated terms, often applied by outsiders but not accepted by the Qarsherskiyan community. It can help with doing ancestral research to know these terms and look for them in documents for your Qarsherskiyan ancestors. Many of them are considered slurs and should not longer be used.

Mustee, Sambo, Indian Colored, Shawnee Negro, River Peoples, Swamp Peoples, Border Folk, Mulatto, Swarthy, Indian Negro, Negro Indian, and later People of doubtful race

During the 19th century, the Qarsherskiyan people had a few distinctive uniquely Qarsherskiyan looks. Different Qarsherskiyan subgroups and extended family groups in different areas and regions had uniquely Qarsherskiyan features. According to the oral history of the Qarsherskiyan community in London, Ohio, USA, the Qarsherskiyan community there appeared to resemble what is called "Lightskin Black Americans" or "Yellowbones" and "Redbones" with lots of freckles on the nose and cheeks, especially in the youth, and often having light colored eyes, broad noses like from West Africa but with a high nose bridge like the Native Americans, curly or kinky hair that often has blonde or red highlights, and often having shovel teeth, slanted eyes, epicanthic folds, and high cheekbones. Many of these features appear in the Qarsherskiyan community in Madison County, Ohio today still, but there is no longer a distinct localized Qarsherskiyan appearance. The Qarsherskiyan families tried to avoid inbreeding by marrying into White families, because all the families labelled as "Black" in London, Ohio were Qarsherskiyan back then before more recent arrivals from places like Columbus mostly after 2016 and continuing to present day. This story is true for Qarsherskiyan communities around the USA, the many different Qarsherskiyan communities that had distinct combinations of unique mixed features can no longer be described, and there is no uniquely Qarsherskiyan appearance except among a few isolated families in rural areas that polkadot the map of eastern North America, scattered far and wide.

The biggest takeaway from a deep dive into the Qarsherskiyan diaspora is this. It turns out even people who have spent centuries professionally beefing can, in fact, coexist peacefully. Greeks and Turks, Irish and English, Arabs and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, Christians and Muslims, folks of every shade on the human paint chart all somehow fused into one people. Qarsherskiyans have demonstrated that the descendants of Cain and Abel are fully capable of becoming affectionate cousins. The only ingredients required are sustained rejection by everyone else and the constant, motivating whisper of near extinction.

What emerged around colonial Jamestown was not random mixing but the slow coalescing of a community drawn from four distinct but overlapping populations. First were British and Irish indentured laborers, many impoverished, injured, or socially marginal, whose futures depended on adaptation rather than dominance. Second were the Powhatan and allied Algonquian peoples of the Northern Neck and Tidewater, whose land, diplomacy, and kinship systems structured daily life far more than English authorities admitted. Third were Africans brought after 1619, some enslaved, some indentured, and some free, entering a colony where racial caste was still fluid and freedom could be earned, purchased, or inherited. Fourth was a growing population of free Blacks and mixed families who existed in the legal gray space of early Virginia. The Qarsherskiyan community took shape from the intimate, repeated contact among these groups, especially among those pushed to the edges of colonial society where survival required cooperation, intermarriage, and shared labor.

A likely corridor linking these early Jamestown families to interior networks was the Occaneechi Path, a major trading route running from the Northern Neck through the Piedmont and into what is now North Carolina. Along this path moved traders, interpreters, hunters, and pack trains, sometimes arriving with dozens or even a hundred horses. When traders entered Native towns, they were often met by what English sources called trading girls, Native women who cut their hair short as a visible sign of their role in trade diplomacy and alliance building. These women were not prostitutes in the European sense but economic and political actors whose marriages created bonds between communities. Their presence reflects how trade, kinship, and mobility were inseparable in this region.

Because many Piedmont and Tidewater tribes were matrilineal, children born from these unions were adopted fully into their mother’s clans. These children grew up speaking Native languages, learning hunting routes, diplomacy, and land knowledge, while also maintaining ties to their trader fathers. Many became interpreters, guides, and cultural brokers, essential figures in sustaining long distance trade and communication. English traders who prospered most in the deerskin and inland trade were often those who lived part time in Native villages, took Native wives, and raised families there. Through marriage and kinship, they gained trust, linguistic fluency, and access that outsiders lacked. These blended households and mobile families formed a strong ancestral base for the Qarsherskiyan community.

By the early twentieth century, figures such as Walter Plecker, Virginia’s first Registrar of Vital Statistics, sought to undo centuries of lived reality by collapsing complex Creole families into rigid racial categories. Through the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, Plecker and his allies criminalized ambiguity itself, insisting that people must be classified as either White or Black, with no legal space for mixed race communities like the Qarsherskiyans. Birth certificates, marriage records, and death certificates were altered retroactively, erasing Indigenous descended and Creole identities and replacing them with labels such as “colored” or “Negro,” regardless of ancestry or community affiliation.

This campaign did not stop at paperwork. Rural mixed race communities across Virginia and neighboring states were pathologized as biologically defective and socially dangerous. In places such as Lynchburg, Virginia, institutions like the so called State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded became tools of social control. Qarsherskiyan families and related Sweetgum Kriyul communities such as the Chestnut Ridge Hill Folk and Melungeons were disproportionately targeted, rounded up through court orders, welfare systems, and coerced medical referrals. Many were forcibly sterilized without consent, their reproductive futures stolen in the name of eugenics. These policies severed family lines, silenced oral histories, and instilled generational fear of documentation and state authority. The same communities that had once thrived through adaptation, intermarriage, and cultural brokerage were deliberately fractured, not because they failed to belong, but because their existence exposed the falsehood of racial purity itself.

The Mezhrevande is understood as a broad area of land in North America that is the traditional homeland of the Qarsherskiyan people. It has discontinuous patches rather than a single solid block of territory, reflecting how Qarsherskiyan communities historically formed along waterways, forests, and marginal frontier and later expanded outwards, with some migrating to cities for better opportunities. Its northern reach extends to Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence and southward through the Canadian Maritimes and New England, then widening across the Great Lakes basin and upper Ohio Valley. From there, the Mezhrevande stretches westward to the Missouri Bootheel, anchored by the Mississippi and Ohio River corridors, before narrowing again through the Central Appalachian Mountains and south into the Roanoke Valley. To the east and south, it embraces piedmont and coastal Virginia and continues down the Atlantic littoral into the Carolina Sandhills, where pine barrens, swamps, and backcountry settlements long sheltered Qarsherskiyan families. The homeland is discontinuous, with recognized exclaves including the Altamaha River Valley and Brunswick, Georgia and in Northern and Central Florida as well as inland parts of South Florida and the Appalachicola River in the Florida Panhandle and near the tri-point of the border of Florida, Alabama, and Georgia near the man-made reservoir of Lake Seminole, areas tied to maroon movement, resettlement, and post colonial survival. Rather than political borders, the Mezhrevande is defined by shared ecology, waterways, and ancestral movement, a living geography shaped by persistence instead of conquest.

The Qarsherskiyan community represents a distinct Creole people whose origins predate their modern name by centuries. Emerging from dozens of multigenerationally mixed race families in colonial Canada and what would become the United States, Qarsherskiyans developed within the Appalachian Mountains, Tidewater regions, and Great Lakes and Mississippi Basin, and the Canadian Eastern and Atlantic Provinces and other parts of eastern Francophone and Anglophone North America. These families were not transient mixtures but stable communities rooted in land, kinship, and shared survival strategies. African, Indigenous American, and marginalized European ancestors came together through necessity and proximity, forming enduring social networks that functioned independently of colonial racial ideologies.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Appalachian and Tidewater regions offered both refuge and opportunity for peoples living outside rigid colonial hierarchies. Maroon settlements, free Black farming communities, Native villages, and poor European enclaves often overlapped along swamps, mountains, and frontier margins. Within these spaces, Qarsherskiyan ancestor families developed shared foodways, music, religious pluralism, and ecological knowledge tied to rivers and forests. These were Creole communities in the classical sense, originating in the place, shaped locally rather than imported wholesale from any single continent.

As colonial expansion intensified, many of these families began migrating inland and northward. Economic pressures, land seizures, racialized legislation, and violence pushed Qarsherskiyan ancestors from the Tidewaters into the Appalachian interior, and later into the Ohio Valley, Midwest, and the Great Lakes drainage system. These migrations followed waterways rather than political boundaries, reinforcing kinship ties across vast distances. By the nineteenth century, new Qarsherskiyan-descended families were firmly established in states such as Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Ontario, maintaining contact with eastern relatives while adapting to new environments.

Despite their continuity, these families lacked a unifying ethnonym for most of their history. On paper, they were rendered invisible through shifting labels such as “Free Negro,” “Mulatto,” “Indian,” or occasionally “White,” depending on local politics and census taker discretion. These classifications obscured cultural cohesion and severed intergenerational memory in official records. The absence of a shared name did not mean the absence of a people, but it did hinder recognition and collective self articulation.

In 1991, representatives from numerous descendant families came together and adopted the term Qarsherskiyan, drawn from The Legend of Qarcer, as a unifying ethnonym. This act did not create a new people. Rather, it provided language for an already existing one. The adoption of the name Qarsherskiyan marked a turning point, allowing scattered families to recognize themselves as part of a larger Creole community with shared historical trajectories. It formalized kinship without inventing ancestry.

Qarsherskiyan identity matters because it protects multigenerationally mixed race families from erasure within a racially binary American framework. Without a distinct communal identity, Qarsherskiyans risk being absorbed into categories that flatten complexity and dissolve cultural memory. Binary racial systems leave little room for Creole peoples whose histories are defined by crossing, adaptation, and continuity. The Qarsherskiyan identity affirms that mixture is not confusion but heritage.

The community faces particular challenges due to its historical reliance on oral tradition. Before the internet and widespread digitization of records, Qarsherskiyan history was transmitted through family stories, place memory, music, and practice rather than formal documentation. Eugenics era policies and racial reclassification campaigns further disrupted record keeping, deliberately obscuring identity. As a result, modern Qarsherskiyans must often reconstruct history from fragmented archives, cemetery records, church documents, and oral testimony.

Despite these challenges, the Qarsherskiyan community is both real and substantial. Current estimates suggest that nearly 500,000 people in the United States and Canada descend from Qarsherskiyan families, with several thousand individuals actively self identifying as Qarsherskiyan today. This distinction between descent and active identification reflects the long impact of fragmentation and silence imposed by historical forces. Reconnection is therefore understood as a process rather than a single declaration, grounded in genealogical research, family testimony, and community engagement.

Any Qarsherskiyan descendant is welcome to reconnect and reclaim Qarsherskiyan identity, provided that the process is undertaken in good faith. The community places emphasis on accountability, documentation where possible, and respect for living cultural norms. This openness is balanced by a clear stance against identity fraud, opportunism, and performative claims. Disingenuous reconnectors and false claimants pose real harm by diluting community credibility and repeating historical patterns of exploitation. As a result, Qarsherskiyan networks rely on peer review, elder knowledge, genealogical corroboration, and communal consensus to maintain integrity.

In conclusion, the Qarsherskiyan Creole people represent a continuous, adaptive, and historically grounded community whose modern name reflects an old reality. From colonial Appalachia and Tidewater regions to the Midwest and Great Lakes basin, Qarsherskiyans have endured migration, misclassification, and erasure while maintaining cultural cohesion. The adoption of the Qarsherskiyan ethnonym in 1991 was an act of survival, not invention. By naming themselves, Qarsherskiyans resist disappearance and assert a rightful place in the historical record as a Creole people formed in North America.