Zoroastrians: Iran’s forgotten minority
Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: 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. Zoroastrianism is believed to have been founded in ancient Iran 3,500 years ago. 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. Iran’s 2011 census found that there were only around 25,000...
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