Magi, Persians, Unbelievers – The Depiction of Zoroastrians in Early Muslim Sources

Zoroastrianism in various forms was the main religion during the time of the Persian Empires until 651 CE, though religious minorities such as Christians, Jews, Manicheans and Buddhists existed in various regions. The Arabo-Muslim expansions led to significant change in Iran: in the aftermath following the conquests, Iran was gradually islamicized.

The project explores this situation of change – the decline of the Sasanians with the invasion by Muslim Arabs until the end of the Islamization around the 10th century – and critically examines contact between Muslims and Zoroastrians in Iran. Main focus is on the display of this contact in the textual sources and the interpretation in terms of the history of religions. The way of depicting the religious other reveals the interdependency of identity construction and identity attribution, constellations of power, mechanisms of boundary making and appropriation as well as the attribution of agency. These interrelated topics are examined by evaluating original sources in Arabic, Persian and – to a lesser extent – Middle Persian to reach further understanding in matters of cultural encounters and identity construction.

Theories and research into religious and cultural encounters are considered to establish categorizations and terminology for this research project. Only little research has been carried out on Zoroastrians under Muslim rule and contact between Zoroastrians and Muslims, mainly due to missing Zoroastrian sources for the first two centuries after the conquest. Iranian history is mostly divided into a pre- and post-conquest era. However, the gradual Islamization with concurrent persistence of Zoroastrian ideas, resulting in rebellions and uprisings, is not reflected by this periodization. The research project contributes to this lack of research on two levels: it examines the history of religion in Iran in the first centuries after the conquest and furthermore analyzes the field of religious contact with the subsequent construction and attribution of religious identities. Instead of writing a history of events, the treatment of another religious tradition, that became a minority religion after being protected and propagated by the rulers, is analyzed by critically examining and interpreting the sources.

Prof. Christian Sahner,
Prof. Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina,
Prof. Edmund Herzig
Oriental Institute, University of Oxford