Purity and Polemics: Zoroastrian Women’s Bodies as Sites of Difference and Contestation in Early Islamic Iran

Abstract

Zoroastrian menstrual purity laws served as one of the most salient markers of socio-religious distinction during the tumultuous early centuries of Islamic rule in the Iranian world. This article surveys Islamic polemicsparticularly by the Muʿtazilah-directed against these Zoroastrian strictures on bodily purity and reads them intertextually, as it were, in conjunction with Pahlavi apologetic texts that defend the sanctity of these millennia-old practices. It is argued that the Zoroastrian scholar-priests were responding directly to the charges levelled against them by their Muslim counterparts, clearly suggesting that both theology and jurisprudence were produced through inter-confessional debate and dialogue, much as we find in the betterstudied cases of Christian-Islamic interactions.