Iran: the empire that was Zoroastrian for a thousand years

Zoroastrianism was the state religion of Iran for more than a thousand years, under the Achaemenids, the Parthians and the Sassanids. It is one of the oldest revealed religions on earth and it shaped the eschatology of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in turn. Today there are roughly twenty thousand Zoroastrians left in Iran.

That is not a decline. That is a religion removed from the country that produced it, and the mechanism is documented by the people who did it.

The conquest, 633 to 651

The Sassanid Empire in 633 was the eastern superpower, four centuries old, exhausted by a generation of war with Byzantium but intact. It took eighteen years.

Qadisiyyah, 636: the Sassanid field army broken near the Euphrates.
Ctesiphon, 637: the capital taken, with the imperial treasury.
Nahavand, 642: called by Arab chroniclers the Victory of Victories, because after it there was no Persian army left to defeat.
651: Yazdegerd III, the last Sassanid king, killed in flight near Merv.

The state did not survive in reduced form the way Byzantium did. It ended.

What happened to the religion

Zoroastrians were eventually granted the status of protected non-Muslims, alongside Jews and Christians, which meant the jizya and the legal disabilities that came with it. Fire temples were converted or fell out of use. The Persian aristocracy converted early, because the alternative was exclusion from a state they had run for centuries, and the population followed over generations under the same fiscal and social pressure that operated in Egypt.

Two things left with the religion.

The priesthood and the books. The Avesta survives in fragments; a large part of the Zoroastrian literary corpus is known only from later summaries of texts that no longer exist.

The community itself. From the eighth century onward Zoroastrians migrated to Gujarat in India, where their descendants are the Parsis. There are more Zoroastrians in India today than in Iran, which is the demographic signature of an exodus rather than a persuasion.

What survived, and what it cost

Iran is the great counter-example to the idea that conquest erases everything, and the counter-example is worth stating honestly because it is real: Iranians did not become Arabs. The Persian language survived, unlike Coptic, Aramaic and Berber. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, completed around 1010, deliberately retold the pre-Islamic Persian past in Persian with minimal Arabic vocabulary, and it is the reason a modern Iranian can still name Cyrus and Darius.

So the language held and the religion did not. Iranians kept their identity and lost their faith, which is precisely what the pressure was aimed at, because the jizya was levied on belief and not on speech.

The remnant today

Zoroastrians are one of three recognised religious minorities under the Islamic Republic, with a single reserved seat in the Majlis. Recognition is not equality: conversion from Islam is a capital offence, inheritance and testimony law disadvantages non-Muslims, and the Baha’i faith, which originated in Iran in the nineteenth century and is the country’s largest religious minority, is not recognised at all. Baha’is are barred from university, their cemeteries have been bulldozed, and their leadership has been imprisoned in successive waves since 1979.

The country that gave the world the idea of a cosmic struggle between light and darkness now permits about twenty thousand people to practise it.

Why this page exists on a Jewish site

Because Iranian Jewry is the same story on a shorter timeline. Jews had lived in Persia since the Babylonian exile, some 2,700 years, and the Book of Esther is set at that court. There were around 100,000 Jews in Iran in 1948. There are fewer than 10,000 now.

And because the state that did this is the one currently funding the movements that say the Jewish presence in the Middle East is a colonial intrusion. The Jewish community in Iran predates Islam by more than a millennium. So did the Zoroastrians. Only one of those facts is allowed to be mentioned in the argument.