CHAPTER SEVEN FROM POWER TO POWERLESSNESS: ZOROASTRIANISM IN IRANIAN HISTORY

The present chapter discusses a relevant, but generally neglected case of a religious minority in what is generally referred to as the ‘Middle East’, namely the case of Zoroastrianism. This is one of the oldest religious tradi-tions of the world, with roots in the second millennium BCE and primordial ties to Iranian history and the country of Iran, where Zoroastrians until well after the Arabic-Islamic conquest in the mid-seventh century CE constituted the majority religious group.1 While focusing on more recent developments,2 the present chapter will put the minority question in a more long-term perspective. It starts with some reflections on terminology, before giving the argument a historical twist and looking at the historical origin of the majority/minority confijiguration, which is shown to have pre-Islamic antecedents. The conclusion will briefly wind up the argument by pointing to some dimensions of the core issue of this volume: power and powerlessness. Speaking of Religious Minorities The notion of ‘religious minorities ’ rests on a double distinction: Speaking of religious minorities only makes sense when religion can be distinguished 1 I wish to thank my colleague Jenny Rose for reading and correcting an earlier version of this essay. Thanks also to the editors of this volume for their careful editorial work and to Maurits van den Boogert for suggestions and comments. 2 For general historical surveys of Zoroastrianism in modern Iran see Writer 1994; Stausberg 2002b: 152–262 (in German); Mehr 2002; Choksy 2006. Local ethnographic stud-ies include Fischer 1973, who did fijieldwork among the religious minorities of Yazd during the late 1960s; Boyce 1977, who paints a somewhat romantic picture of religious life in a remote village based on fijieldwork in the early 1960s; Kestenberg Amighi 1990, on assimila-tion and ethnic persistence based on fijieldwork in Teheran in the early to mid-1970s. For a more recent sketch of Yazd, see Green, 2000. See also Sanasarian 2000, for a synoptic survey of the religious minorities. Sarah Stewart (SOAS) is currently engaged in a comprehensive study of contemporary Zoroastrianism, including oral history