The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands (Collected Studies in Three Volumes), volume 2, IHC series, Patricia Crone, edited by Hanna Siurua, Leiden: Brill, 2016. (original) (raw)
The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands (Collected Studies in Three Volumes), volume 2, IHC series, Patricia Crone, edited by Hanna Siurua, Leiden: Brill, 2016, ISBN 9789004319264, 368 pp. This work is the second volume in a three-volume collection of the late Professor Patricia Crone's collected studies. They have been organized according to the subject matter and the volume under review covers religious trends in Iran, starting with Mazdak's revolt in the late fifth century to a few centuries after the arrival of Islam. The volume is a collection of articles, book chapters and two encyclopedia articles published over the span of a quarter-century (from 1991 to 2016).
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(2021) "Zoroastrian Law and the Spread of Islam in Iranian Society" (BSOAS)
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2021
This article explores three important Zoroastrian legal texts from the ʿAbbasid period, consisting of questions and answers to high-ranking priests. The texts contain a wellspring of information about the social history of Zoroastrianism under Islamic rule, especially the formative encounter between Zoroastrians and Muslims. These include matters such as conversion, apostasy, sexual relations with outsiders, inheritance, commerce , and the economic status of priests. The article argues that the elite clergy responsible for writing these texts used law to refashion the Zoroastrian community from the rulers of Iran, as they had been in Late Antiquity, into one of a variety of dhimmī groups living under Islamic rule. It also argues that, far from being brittle or inflexible, the priests responded to the challenges of the day with creativity and pragmatism. On both counts, there are strong parallels between the experiences of Zoroastrians and those of Christians and Jews, who also turned to law as an instrument for rethinking their place in the new Islamic cosmos. Finally, the article makes a methodological point, namely to show the importance of integrating Pahlavi sources into wider histories of Iran and the Middle East during the early Islamic period.
Iranian Studies (forthcoming)
The present paper argues that the designation of heterodoxy for the socio-religious movements of late antique Iran such as Mazdakism is a misnomer. The article suggests that the designation of Mazdakism and similar movements as heterodoxies is in fact the product of an early Islamic need to create a Zoroastrian orthodoxy which did not exist under the Sasanian rule. Pressured by the Abrahamic religions surrounding them, the followers of Weh Dēn in this period felt the need to demarcate and clarify their beliefs, and to make their own beliefs comprehensible to their neighbours and rulers. What was then left out of this attempt was labelled a deviation, and heterodoxy, whose fundamental disagreement with Zoroastrian orthodoxy was then reflected back in time.
Nāme-ye Irān-e Bāstān, 2005
The movement led by Mazdak in Sasanian Iran in the first half of the sixth century has always been a popular topic of study for Iranists. Few aspects of the pre-Islamic Iranian culture and history have drawn more attention that Mazdakism. The orthodox Zoroastrian criticism of this heretical movement was often interpreted in the spirit of the Marxist ideology of class struggle resulting in a largely sympathetic interpretation of Mazdakism. However, almost all the information that we possess about the movement, its ideology and theology was recorded by contemporary Byzantine and much later Islamic authors. This information is fragmentary, self-contradictory, and, as François de Blois has recently shown, 1 "for the cosmology of Mazdak and his contemporary followers we are left with nothing". Patricia Crone published, over a decade ago, an illuminating article, in which she indicated 1. F. de Blois, "A New Look at Mazdak", A Lecture at the 4 e Conférence Européenne d'Études Iraniennes, Paris, 1999. Cf. A. Tafazzoli, "Observations sur le soi-disant Mazdak-
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