Boyce Persian Stronghold Zoroastrianism

A PERSIAN
_STRONGHOLD OF
ZOROASTRIANISM
based on the Ratanbai
Katrak lectures, 1975
MARY BOYCE
OXFORD
.AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1977
~\
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6oP

OXFORD LONDON GLASGOW NEW YORK
TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON CAPE TOWN
1
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IBADAN NAillOBI DAil ES SALAAM LUSAKA ADDIS ABABA

KUALA LUMPUR SINOAPOllE JAKARTA HONG KONO TOKYO
DELW BOMBAY CALCUTI'A MADRAS lillACBI
Dedicated to
Agha Rustam Noshiravan Belivani
Oxford University Press 1977
and his wife
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of Oxford University Press
Khanom Tahmina Mundagar Abadian
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Boyce, Mary
A Persian Stronghold of Zoroastrianism
- (Ratanbai Katrak Lectures; 1975)
1. Religious life (Zoroastrianism)
I. Title II. Series
295' .4'0955
BL1525
ISBN
0-19-826531-X
Printed in Great Britain

at the University Press, Oxford
by Vivian Ridler
Printer to the University
THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES
THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES
Zoroastrians. They also diverted themselves by climbing into the

local tower of silence and desecrating it, and they might even break
into the fire-temple and seek to pollute or extinguish the sacred
flame. Those with criminal leanings found too that a religious
minority provided tempting opportunities for theft, pilfering from
the open fields, and sometimes rape and arson. Those Zoroastrians
who resisted all these pressures often preferred therefore in the end
to sell out and move to some other place where their co-religionists
were still relatively numerous, and they could live at peace; and so
another village was lost to the old faith. Several of the leading
families in Sharifabad had forebears who were driven away by
intense Moslem pressure from Abshahi, once a very devout and
orthodox village on the southern outskirts of Y azd; and a shorter
migration had been made by the family of the centenarian 'Hajji'
Khodabakhsh, who had himself been born in the 1850s and was
still alert and vigorous in 1964. His family, who were very pious,
had left their home in Ahmedabad (just to the north of Turkabad)
when he was a small boy, and had come to settle in Sharifabad
to escape persecution and the threats to their orthodox way of life.
Other Zoroastrians held out there for a few decades longer, but by
the end of the century Ahmedabad was wholly Moslem, as Abshahi
became in 1961. 19 It was noticeable that the villages which were left
to the Zoroastrians were in the main those with poor supplies of
water, where farming conditions were hard.
Under the Pahlavi dynasty, which took power in 1925, the rule
of law was fully extended to Zoroastrians, and the violence in
Moslem pressures had almost disappeared by the 1960s; but other
factors were then hastening the erosion of the Yazdi community,
notably the attractions of Tehran, with its wide opportunities and
relative freedom from religious strife and prejudice. The local
Moslem population was swelling steadily in numbers (thanks largely
to better medical care), and as Zoroastrians left for the capital
there were always Moslem families eager to move into their old
homes, and this meant a steady infiltration of the dominant faith

into Zoroastrian strongholds. At the end of the nineteenth century
there were still a number of villages in the Yazdi plain which were
wholly or almost wholly Zoroastrian, and there were Zoroastrians
too in villages over the mountains to the north, around Biyabanak.
The last left there early this century, 20 and by the mid 1960s, of the
thirty-one villages in the Y azdi plain which still had Zoroastrians
in them, not one was entirely Zoroastrian. In addition to the losses
caused by migration or conversion to Islam, there were others due
to the fact that (much to the sorrow and perplexity of the community) relatively large numbers of Zoroastrians embraced Baha'ism,
and many suffered accordingly in the terrible Baha'i massacres
which took place in Yazd early this century. No Sharifabadis succumbed to the proselytizing of the new faith, but even among them
the growth of the Moslem population was rapid after the Second
World War. At the beginning of the century there were only two or
three Moslem families in the village, but by 1964 there were reckoned
to be about a thousand Moslems to only some seven hundred
Zoroastrians. 21 Two Husayniyas had been built, 22 and the call of
the mu'azzin sounded loudly over the Zoroastrian quarter, which
itself was being steadily penetrated by Moslems as Zoroastrian
families sold up and left for Tehran.
Naturally even in the Yazdi region, famed for its religious fervour,
there were Moslems who were not particularly zealous, or burning
to vex the unbeliever; and in some of the suburban villages the
two communities lived tolerantly together. In the past too there had
19
A little fire-altar of solid stone was rescued from Ahmedabad by a group of
young Sharifabadis (under the leadership of Noshiravan, Agha Rustam's father),
~ho rolled it laboriously across the desert to the safety of their own village, where
it now stands in the fire-temple. The last Zoroastrian family left Abshahi in
1961, after the rape and subsequent suicide of one of their daughters. Hajji
Khodabaksh's own mother was of an Abshahi family. After her death his father
married again, this time an Ahmedabadi bride, and through this marriage
Khodabakhsh had a half-brother, Bahram Surkhabi (known as Bahram Skundari
or 'Beetroot Bahram') who was some fifty years younger than himself.
20 The last Zoroastrians in Biyabanak, four brothers and a sister, tenantfarmers, left there in about 1900 to save the sister from the attentions of a local
Moslem. They sought the protection of their Zoroastrian arbiib (landowner)
in Yazd; and he sent one of them, Isfandiyar, to act as his agent in developing the
then tiny hamlet of Hasanabad-e Maybod (see further below). He was still living
there, in his eighties, in 1964.
21
In 1976 the figures were 455 Zoroastrians and 510 Moslems, the drop in
the population representing movement to the cities (information from Agha
Rustam).
22 Such places of worship are found in most Moslem villages of the Yazdi
region. The older one in Sharifabad was built at the end of the nineteenth
century on ground between the village and the neighbouring town of Ardekan
which was the original area of Moslem settlement. The second one was built in th~
1950s in the more recent settlement on the south side of the village, known to
the Zoroastrians as the Shahr-e Lukhtha 'Town of the Naked', because of the
numbers of impoverished Moslems who had crowded there. Zoroastrians had
always to pass through one or other of these Moslem quarters to reach the highway to Yazd, or Ardekan with its shops and secondary schools.

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A PERSIAN

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6oP

IBADAN NAillOBI DAil ES SALAAM LUSAKA ADDIS ABABA

Oxford University Press 1977

and his wife

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

Khanom Tahmina Mundagar Abadian

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Printed in Great Britain

THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES

THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES

Zoroastrians. They also diverted themselves by climbing into the

homes, and this meant a steady infiltration of the dominant faith

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