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In India, they are known as Parsis, and Mahatma Gandhi once famously acclaimed their services by saying, “In numbers Parsis are beneath contempt, but in contribution, beyond compare.” Those who have settled in India and currently make up a tiny minority of 61,000 people in the world’s second-most-populous country contribute close to 6% of the nation’s economic turnover. Zoroastrians are reputed to be hard-working and entrepreneurial people. The 17th-century French writer Voltaire and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche cited Zoroastrianism as their guiding light, and even such contemporary cinematic productions as Star Wars and Game of Thrones were influenced by its canons. Even the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which was in effect a clampdown on anything un-Islamic, did not manage to obliterate these offcuts of Zoroastrianism.īut the inspirations of Zoroastrianism are not confined to the borders of Iran and are more broad-ranging than one might assume. The Persian New Year celebration of Nowruz, the Yalda Night celebration of the winter solstice and the ancient fiesta of Chaharshanbe Suri (Wednesday Feast) have remained mainstays of Iranian society after the last Zoroastrian dynasty, the Sassanians, was toppled in AD 651. They are exemplarily peaceful and some of their most revered cultural relics are embedded into the lifestyles of Iranian people, including pious Muslims. What is well known about Zoroastrians is that they subscribe to their prophet Zoroaster’s percepts of “good thoughts, good words and good deeds,” representing the linchpin of their ideology. We cannot get any budget for building a new fire temple when mosques are being built one after another.”

I have no platform on radio or television to go and speak about Zoroastrianism. Kourosh Niknam, a Zoroastrian priest and former member of parliament, once lamented his community’s draining resources: “We don’t have the right to make programs about our religion. Other than one lawmaker representing them in the 290-member parliament, a handful of functioning fire temples and some schools and kindergartens for their children, Iran’s Zoroastrian community does not enjoy the luxury of the resources at the disposal of the Muslim majority to proselytize, assert their identity, network and promote their faith. Iran’s 2011 census found that there were only around 25,000 Zoroastrians living in the country, and in a nation of 84 million people, the figure is simply infinitesimal. It was the dominant religion of the Persian Empire until the Muslim conquest of Persia starting in AD 633 capsized the cultural and religious configuration of the nation and ushered in new values based on Islamic law in a society that initially perceived the arrival of Islam as unwelcome. Zoroastrianism is believed to have been founded in ancient Iran 3,500 years ago. It is disheartening, but the adherents of the world’s first monotheistic religion appear to have been consigned to oblivion in their ancestral homeland, and as their numbers shrink, it is not only a religion that is disappearing, but the building blocks of a civilization.

Farsi good thoughts good words good deeds tattoo