Chapter 18. After the Conquest: Gabrs, Parsis, Iranis and the Afterlives of an Ancient Faith

The Arab conquest ended Zoroastrianism’s long run as the religion of Iranian empires, but the faith survived it. It survived as two communities. The Iranis held out in the oases of Yazd and Kerman while their numbers kept falling. The Parsis migrated to Gujarat and later grew prosperous under the British in Bombay. Politics runs through both stories: the poll-tax, the law on apostasy, nationalist use of the Faravahar and of Cyrus, and the suspicion of the Islamic Republic. Where the sources disagree, above all on the Parsi founding legend, both sides are given.

Conquest and subjection

Boyce’s outline is as follows. After taking Byzantine Syria in 636, the Arabs defeated the Sasanian army at Qadisiya in a battle lasting “several days” and seized Ctesiphon. “Two more hard-fought battles” opened the Iranian plateau to them, and Yazdegird III “met his death in Merv… in 652” [Boyce, Zoroastrians, #55117, ch.10 “The Arab conquest of Iran”]. Hoyland’s reading of the Bundahishn dates Yazdgird’s attempted comeback to 651 [Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, #55061, “Bundahishn”]. Boyce says the conquest was waged “in the spirit of Surah 9.29”, to subject unbelievers rather than convert them. Strictly, Zoroastrians were entitled only to the choice of death or Islam, but “because of sheer numbers” they “had to be treated as dhimmis (despite doubts that persisted down the centuries)”. Cities bought their terms. Ray paid 500,000 dirhams on condition that the Arabs would not “raze any of their fire temples”. A manual for civil servants quoted by Boyce describes how the jizya (poll-tax) was collected: “The dhimmi has to be made to feel that he is an inferior person… the emir gives him a blow on the neck… The public is admitted to see this show” [ibid., citing Baladhuri and Tritton].

Other sources give a more tolerant picture. Jackson reports a covenant “reported to have been granted to the Zoroastrians by the Fourth Caliph, ‘Ali… the tenor of which would show tolerance on the part of the Arabs”, though “their authenticity may not be wholly beyond question” [Jackson, Zoroastrian Studies, #55164]. A Parsi pamphlet reprints a ruling of 1910 by a mujtahid of Karbala, which makes it “obligatory on all Muslims” to guard Zoroastrian “lives, honour and possessions” [Vakil, Jashan Committee and the Parsi Community, #60426, “Parsis & Persia”]. Nineteenth-century Parsi authors take the darker view. Framjee writes of “the alternative of death or the Koran”, and claims that “a hundred thousand persons are said to have daily abjured the faith” [Framjee, The Parsees, #55076]. Menant opens his account by stating that “two hundred years after the Mahomedan conquest the condition of Persia had entirely changed” [Menant, Les Parsis, #60391, “The Zoroastrians in Persia”].

Inducements and barriers

Boyce presents conversion as a balance of pressures [Boyce, #55117, ch.10, “Inducements and barriers to conversion”]. On the side of conversion were freedom for slaves who converted, escape from the poll-tax, and death as the penalty for apostasy. A ninth-century case illustrates the last point: a man “who has put off the kusti… cannot tie the kusti again for fear of his life.” Familiar doctrine also eased the change. Heaven and Hell, the Last Judgement and the five daily prayers all derived “ultimately from Zoroastrianism”. Against conversion stood loyalty to the faith of the ancestors, a scripture in a foreign tongue, and a different God. Boyce contrasts the two forms of prayer: “the Zoroastrian standing erect in the presence of his beneficent Lord… the Muslim kneeling before the Omnipotent, his forehead in the dust.”

Iran stayed mostly Zoroastrian under the orthodox caliphs and the Umayyads. Several later developments wore that down. Arabic replaced Pahlavi in government. The Khwaday Namag was translated, which separated the national epic from the religion. The legend of the princess Shahrbanu, said to have married Husayn and whom Boyce calls a “wholly fictitious figure”, gave Iranian patriotism a Shi’ite form. Finally the ‘Abbasids, in Boyce’s words, “proved deadly foes of Zoroastrianism”. In her account Islam meanwhile grew “more Zoroastrianized”, and the Hidden Imam took over the role of the Saoshyant [Boyce, #55117, ch.10 “Islam takes root in Iran”].

Zoroastrians recorded their own reaction in apocalyptic texts. Hoyland shows that the Bahman yasht was reworked so that “a myriad kinds of demons with dishevelled hair, of the race of Wrath” overrun Iran. In his reading, a text that “probably began as a lamentation over the predations of the Macedonian conquerors… became in the final redaction directed against the invading Arabs”. Bundahishn XXXIII declares: “From the beginning of creation till this day no evil more grievous than this has come… there shall come an end of their accursed rule” [Hoyland, #55061, ch.8 “Persian Texts”]. Shaked’s essays trace which Sasanian ideas, such as esotericism, the menog–getig doctrine and Ahreman, carried through the transition to Islam [Shaked, From Zoroastrian Iran to Islam, #60406].

Retreat to Yazd and Kerman

In the ninth century the priests still produced the Dadestan i dinig, the Denkard and the Shkand-gumanig Vizar. Boyce calls it “the last century… when the Zoroastrians still had the means and energy to engage in creative work on any scale” [Boyce, #55117, ch.10]. The harassment never stopped. In 861 the caliph Mutawakkil felled the cypress said to have been planted by Zoroaster. “Gabr-baiting” was “a popular sport… indulged in by Caliphs and high officials”, and a law gave a family’s entire property to any member who converted. The Mongol invasions probably destroyed “every copy of the Sasanian Avesta”. The survivors regrouped around Yazd and Kerman, where their sacred fires were hidden in “small mud-brick houses indistinguishable from ordinary village homes” [ibid., ch.10–11].

According to Fozi, “Gabr is the Persian form of the Arabic Kāfar or infidel… the addition of the humiliating suffix -ak” in Gabrak and Gabraki “increased the disdain of the term”. The Zoroastrian Dari of Yazd is “unintelligible to Muslim Yazdis”, and Boyce describes it as “a linguistic barrier… raised in self-protection” [Fozi, Reclaiming the Faravahar, #54976, ch.1]. Framjee compares the treatment of the “Gabres” to that of “the low caste Mahar in India” [Framjee, #55076]. Menant quotes an 1843 letter in which the Zoroastrians of Kerman lament “the destruction of most of their sacred books, and… the massacre of the faithful” [Menant, #60391].

The Parsis and the Qissa-i Sanjan

Boyce follows Hodivala on the migration. Emigrants from Sanjan in Khorasan spent nineteen years on Div and landed in Gujarat in 936. The traditional date of 716 comes from a misread numeral [Boyce, #55117, ch.11]. The main source is the Qissa-i Sanjan, which Boyce describes as “a narrative poem composed largely from oral traditions by a Parsi priest, Bahman, in 1600”. Hodivala (1920) translates the poem and builds his chronology on it, with “a Hindu chief named Jadi Rana” as host [Hodivala, Studies in Parsi History, #60407]. Karaka sets the Qissa’s date of 775 beside “the generally accepted date” defended by a dastur of Broach in 1826 [Karaka, History of the Parsis, #55022, ch.1].

B. N. Bhathena rejected the tradition outright in a paper to the 1943 All India Oriental Conference. He called the poem propaganda “made by the priestly class”, and claimed that “authentic proofs… prove the falsity of the Kisse-Sanjan from the beginning to the end”. On his account, independent Zoroastrian settlements had long existed in Gujarat and Sindh, so the story of Jadi Rana’s court “falls to the ground”. He also argued that Neryosang never consecrated the Sanjan fire [Bhathena, Kisse-Sanjan: A Palpable Falsehood, #54990].

Mughals, British, missionaries, occultism

Under Akbar the Parsis began “their rise to prosperity”, while the Irani community sank further under the Safavids. By 1875 the Bombay Parsi Panchayat administered 44,000,000 rupees and served as a communal “Social Security system” [Boyce, #55117, ch.11–13]. John Wilson’s missionary campaign, launched after 1829, won “few converts” but discredited the priests. Two of the priests who answered him took refuge in the Desatir, which Boyce calls “a literary forgery”, and so “the gates were opened to occultism” [ibid., ch.13]. Haug’s thesis that only the Gathas were Zoroaster’s own words delighted the reformists, and Dhalla later blended orthodoxy with Western scholarship. Moulton, writing on “The Parsis and Christian Propaganda”, called Theosophy a system “nursed in fraud” [Moulton, The Treasure of the Magi, #55091, ch.5]. Olcott, in contrast, told the Parsis that their faith rests on “the living rock of occult science” [Olcott, The Spirit of Zoroastrianism, #55087], and Bilimoria’s anthology repeats his line that “Occult Science is the vindicator of Zoroastrianism” [Bilimoria, Zoroastrianism in the Light of Theosophy, #55115]. Ilm-i Khshnoom grew from Behramshah Shroff’s claimed initiation by “Masters” on Mount Demavand. Boyce characterises it as “a thorough-going adaptation of theosophy” combined with strict purity laws [Boyce, #55117, ch.13].

Shahs, ayatollahs, diaspora

When Manekji Limji Hataria arrived from Bombay in 1854, he counted 6,658 Zoroastrians in Yazd and 450 in Kerman. In 1882 he secured the abolition of the jizya [Boyce, #55117, ch.13]. Boyce links the Zoroastrian month names of Reza Shah’s calendar to his accord with the Zoroastrian deputy Kay Khosrow Shahrokh. She also notes that the Parsis had earlier adopted the winged disc of Persepolis “as the Zoroastrian symbol” [ibid., ch.14]. Fozi argues that the Pahlavi project made the community “a secular pre-Islamic national resource”, alongside “a nascent movement to purge Arabic words”. He reports that Khomeini “was worried about the revival of pre-Islamic values”. After 1979 Zoroastrians came to present their religion “as culture”, and one community leader told Fozi that “most of the Zoroastrian villages of Yazd are uninhabited now” [Fozi, #54976, ch.1, ch.4]. Since the revolution, Zoroastrians have moved to Tehran “for greater religious freedom” [Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, #55116, chronology], or abroad. The latter point comes from a library file catalogued as Amanat’s Iran Facing Others (#60437), which is in fact a printout of the Wikipedia article “Zoroastrian Dari language”. Boyce’s figures for 1976 give a world total of 129,000, of whom 82,000 lived in India and 25,000 in Iran. She lists marriage outside the community, a falling birthrate and a shortage of priests as the main threats [Boyce, #55117, ch.14, “International dispersion”].

Survivals, and Keshe’s bridge

Zaehner (1965) studied the Luri epic Irradiant. Its “Lionish God” claims omniscience but “always has to ask what is going on”, and he is slain “with his own sword”. Zaehner calls him “the lineal descendant of the Zoroastrian Ahriman” [Zaehner, Zoroastrian Survivals in Iranian Folklore, #55094]. Boyce traces the line from the Khwaday Namag of 957 to Firdausi’s Shahname [Boyce, #55117, ch.10]. Sundermann follows the Avestan Kauui Usan to the Shahname’s foolish Kay Kaus and his “abortive ascension to heaven on a throne” [Sundermann, Zoroastrian Motifs in Non-Zoroastrian Traditions, #55067].

Mehran Keshe has his own line on these matters. In KSW 608 (2025) he says that the Jews “literally rewrote the whole history of Islam, moved it to Mecca, away from Palestine. They paid the Muslim leaders to move” [Keshe, KSW 608, #378320]. In KSW 176 (2017), titled “Blueprint for Peace in the Islamic World”, he tells Sunni and Shi’a that “who followed doesn’t count, what is written and the message of the prophet counts” [Keshe, KSW 176, #377819]. In KSW 648 he says: “The Ethos of Zoroaster was with me, and it stays with me” [Keshe, KSW 648, #378360]. These claims lead into Part 3.

Key points

• Boyce dates Yazdegird III’s death to 652, and Hoyland’s Bundahishn reading gives 651 for his attempted comeback. Zoroastrians were reluctantly treated as dhimmis and humbled through the jizya.
• Boyce balances the pressures towards conversion (tax, the apostasy law, familiar doctrine) against the barriers to it (ancestral loyalty, theology). She puts the decisive phase under the ‘Abbasids.
• Pahlavi apocalypses were reworked into laments over Arab rule (Hoyland).
• “Gabr” comes from kafir. The survivors kept their own Dari and their hidden fires in Yazd and Kerman.
• Hodivala and Karaka treat the Qissa-i Sanjan as history. Bhathena calls it “a palpable falsehood”.
• Missionaries, Haug, Theosophy and Ilm-i Khshnoom divided Parsi belief.
• The Pahlavi shahs made Zoroastrianism a national symbol, while the Islamic Republic distrusted pre-Islamic revival. Both developments drove migration.
• Keshe ascribes the move of Islam’s centre to Mecca to Jewish leaders and claims the “Ethos of Zoroaster” for himself.