A little over three decades ago, during the reign of the last Pahlavi monarch Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, non-Muslim religious minorities in Iran experienced life within a relatively tolerant society. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran’s native Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, Mandaeans, and Baha’is have experienced increasing discrimination, isolation, and intimidation. Those non-Muslim religious minorities provide Iranian society with confessional pluralism and cultural diversity, thereby serving also as a moderating population sliver against Shi‘ite fundamentalism. But now the non-Muslim communities collectively have diminished to less than 2 percent of Iran’s 75,2 million residents. Yet, these minorities have attracted very limited domestic and international attention or concern because their situation is poorly understood. This article, based on extensive fieldwork in Iran during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, examines the situations of those Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews, Mandaeans, and Baha’is. While Sunnis also are a religious minority in Iran and do experience prejudices too, intra-Muslim tension with its origins in seventh century religious disputes and its geopolitical reverberations to the present day go beyond the scope of this article.
Grappling with unstable, unruly, and reprobate Middle Eastern nations, and by extension North African ones such as Libya, has constantly been and will continue to be a major challenge for U.S. administrations. Attempts by Iran and Saudi Arabia to expand their regional influences by interfering in the internal affairs and ethno-sectarian tensions of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Yemen have worsened instability in those Arab countries. Now Riyadh and Tehran have been drawn into the region's bloody civil wars-directly with Iranian forces in Syria and Iraq and with Saudi troops in Bahrain and Yemen to bolster client regimes, or through surrogates such as Sunni rebels in Syria and Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza. The Saudi population is increasingly restive toward the squandering of life and money by new King Salman to prop-up the Sunni government in Sanaa. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei's deployment of Islamic Revolutionary Guards into Syria faces mounting criticism by moderate Iranians for similar reasons.
scripture has ritual uses aimed at giving religion meaning in daily life. in zoroastrianism, the niya¯yišns, ‘invocations of praise’, and the yašts, ‘devotional poems’ have played fundamental roles in connecting doctrine and theology to praxis and conviction whereby faith and rites have been transmitted and augmented across many generations. this article discusses some of the contents and traditions of each niya¯yišn and yašt plus the functions those religious texts have fulfilled and continue to serve for zoroastrians from ancient through modern times.
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