“Marriage, Property and Conversion among the Zoroastrians: From Late Sasanian to Islamic Iran,” Journal of Persianate Studies, vol. 6, 2013, pp. 91-100. (original) (raw)
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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.
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One of the confusing and at the same time unique and most intriguing aspects of Zoroastrian society in the pre-Islamic period in Iran is the complete lack of a regulation forbidding marriages between close relations, especially members of the nuclear family, mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister. As is by now well known, there is plenty of evidence on incestuous alliances in various sources, including not only foreign texts written in Greek, Latin, Armenian, Syriac and Arabic, but also extensive Iranian material in a great number of Pahlavi texts, in which incest is placed in a religious context and praised as one of the most meritorious and virtuous deeds a true Zoroastrian could accomplish. 1 In fact, the description of incestuous bonds, its merits and advantages, is so precise in Pahlavi literature that it is impossible to ignore the evidence pointing to a society that not only allowed incest, but even encouraged it in all three forms as the best possible alliance between the sexes. 2 Despite this overwhelming mass of information in favour of incest, the matter has been discussed controversially since the 19 th century in a great number of contributions because of three main reasons. First of all, incestuous relationships are not accepted or allowed by Zoroastrians today, neither by the parsis of India, nor those adherents of the faith still living in Iran. The most ardent arguments against incestuous marriages in pre-Islamic Iran have been brought forward in the past by parsis, who, understandably, did not want their faith to be associated with a practice that must have seemed abhorrent and completely alien to them. 3 The second main reason for controversy is based on the long-lasting 1
ProQuest LLC (2018).
Historically, the rise of Islam led to the establishment of certain women’s rights during Mohammad’s lifetime, however, those rulings soon declined following his death. Eventually, during the first half of the second century AH or the early Abbasid period (132-656 AH) when the Muslim societies were expanding to become the largest empire of the time, most of the Islamic laws or figh were developed. The image of the Muslim woman became increasingly similar to that of the civilized cultures of the ancient world and resembled less the early Muslim community of Medina. Modern scholarship confirms the unique contribution of Iranian culture and creeds to the numerous aspects of newborn Islamic civilization. I attempt to answer the question that if so, what parts of the Islamic point of view and jurisprudence on women might imitate Sasanian/Zoroastrian tradition? The unique situation of Mesopotamia as the heartland of the Islamic Empire intensified the impact of Iranian culture over the entire empire. My investigation in this thesis confirms the cultural continuity of the Zoroastrian/Sasanian matrimonial customs through Muslim jurisprudence in its early stages. Despite the differences between Zoroastrianism and Islamic understanding regarding the meaning and purpose of marriage and wifehood, many Zoroastrian traditions were adopted by Islamic Family Law, except for the clearly affirmed or prohibited cases in the Quran.
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This article collects and analyses passages about male and female domestic slaves in the Persian Rivāyats. The Rivāyats consist of correspondence between Iranian and Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis) from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries CE. In these letters, Parsis sought the opinions of Iranian Zoroastrians on various doctrinal and ritual issues. The passages in question cover a range of subjects, including the issue of converting household slaves to Zoroastrianism, their participation in domestic religious ceremonies, the exposure of their dead bodies in the towers of silence, and marrying female slaves. These references to slaves challenge the conventional narrative that pre-modern Zoroastrians were oppressed, marginalized, and poor communities. This narrative has overshadowed these pieces of evidence and has caused them not to be studied seriously. This paper seeks to go beyond this traditional reconstruction by examining these texts based on their context. The passages reflect the actual socio-religious issues of Zoroastrians, especially Parsis, and demonstrate their participation in the slave-owning milieu of late medieval and early modern Gujarat and Iran rather than mere anachronistic elements or rhetorical tools reflecting a scholastic treatment of a defunct legal question.
The Co-formation of the Manichaean and Zoroastrian Religions in Third-Century Iran
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The assumption that an already established Zoroastrian religion served as the source for terms, concepts, and themes, which Mani and Manichaeans appropriated and altered, is due for reassessment. Building on the work of P. O. Skjaervø, this study argues that (1) Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism arose together, side by side, in the third century (2) against the background of older Iranian religious cultural traditions, (3) each fitting those antecedent cultural artifacts into different systems of interpretation and application.