Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (20 page)

I tried to imagine what it would be like to see the collision of cosmic forces in one’s daily life. All people, I suppose, have a conceptual understanding of pure and impure. Few people are comfortable buying a house where someone has died a violent death, and not many of us would like to be on an airplane journey seated next to a corpse. Immorality has been discovered by scientists to elicit the same physical reactions as physical disgust; indeed, sin and immorality are often described in terms of uncleanness (“immaculate” literally means “unstained”). Zoroastrians believe that the impurity in the world has been put there by an active and malign supernatural power, so cleanliness has a moral force, and the uncleanness of a burial ground must be taken very seriously. The death of a good person represents a great victory for Angra Mainyu and his servants, and makes the place of the burial especially unclean. A dead body attracts the corpse demon, the
nasu
. Wandering about in a
dakhma
would not be the Zoroastrians’ idea of a holiday: to them it is one of the most supernaturally polluted places on earth.

I rode in a taxi from the
dakhma
back to the center of Yazd. “Zoroastrians are good people,” said the driver, Hassan. Hassan was a devout Muslim, wearing a purple shirt to mark the fact, he told me, that the day was the anniversary of an Islamic martyr. “Islam came to Iran through war,” he said, “from the Arabs. Before that we were all Zoroastrians.” Every year people like Hassan are reminded of their heritage when they celebrate Nowruz, the spring festival, when the day becomes longer than the night (in Zoroastrian thinking, this marks a victory by good over evil). The spring festival lasts two weeks in modern Iran, and Muslims celebrate it more exuberantly than the Zoroastrians’ own quiet and more religiously oriented ceremonies. Common to both groups is the custom of placing on a table seven fruits of creation, corresponding to seven virtues and the seven planets. For Zoroastrians the fruits can include wine, milk, water, sprouting cereals, the oleaster berry, and sweets; a mirror and coins can also be included, the former representing the future and the latter prosperity. Muslim Iranians tend to use wheat, apples, lotus fruits, garlic, a spice called
somak,
a pudding called
samanu,
and vinegar. A lesser festival called Charshanbeh-e-Suri, which occurs just before Nowruz, involves leaping over fire. It, too, is practiced by Muslims. The Iranian religious establishment has tried to discourage Nowruz, and in 2010 Ayatollah Khamenei tried to completely ban Charshanbeh-e-Suri on the basis that the celebrations “have no basis in Islam,” but Hassan and many other Iranians across the country, though many of them are deeply religious, ignored him. I could see why. The event is fun, deeply entrenched in society, and distinctively Iranian: it is not celebrated by any culture that has not been influenced by Iran.

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LAAL’S HUSBAND
, the army officer Shahriar, was sent after World War II to fight a Soviet-backed insurgency in northwestern Iran (the province where I first entered the country, near Zendan-e-Soleyman). During the fighting he was wounded and left for dead on the battlefield; when he was finally found to be alive and taken to a hospital, he had lost his sight. The shah decorated him and sent him to Britain for treatment. A war veterans’ charity adopted him, taught him Braille, and helped him find a job as a telephone operator. There were few Zoroastrians in Britain at this time: their daughter Shahin was brought up singing Christian hymns at school (“My father wanted us to fit in,” she told me) and could explain to her puzzled classmates what her religion was only by talking about the Three Wise Men of the Bible.

Though few and not well known, the Zoroastrians were already a prosperous and influential community. The Parsee Zoroastrians had been preferred by the British over all other groups in their Indian empire: “the most intelligent, as well as the most loyal of the races scattered over our Indian possessions,” as one nineteenth-century cricket commentator wrote, inspired by the visit to England of a Zoroastrian cricket club in 1887. The Zoroastrian cricketers (whose club had been formed in 1850 in Bombay) were not uncritical in their response. They complained about how dirty England was and how shocking it was to see such a gap between rich and poor: “men and women living in a chronic state of emaciation, till they can hardly be recognised as human.”

Britain was a good place to do business, though, and a number of India’s top trading families were Parsee; some of these began to put down roots in Britain. In fact, the first Indian to enter the British parliament was a Parsee called Dadabhai Naoroji. In the 1880s he had helped to found the Indian National Congress, which would eventually be post-independence India’s ruling party. Mahatma Gandhi had called him an “inspiration”; Naoroji had had the future founder of Pakistan, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, as his assistant. Then, since India had no parliament of its own, Naoroji stood for the British one. He was selected as the Liberal candidate for a northern suburb of London called Finsbury Park in the 1892 general election. The odds did not favor him: the Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury famously said he doubted that a “black man” could be elected to the British Parliament. One newspaper attacked Naoroji’s religion, denouncing him as a fire worshiper.

So when Naoroji won by a slender majority, a delegation of his supporters made the journey all the way from India to see him sworn in. This was only a few years after Parliament had agreed to admit non-Christians at all. On the day that he was due to take his oath of office, therefore, Naoroji took his place as a lone Indian in a long line of top-hatted Victorian gentry, queuing up in the Chamber of the House of Commons. He was carrying a small copy of the Zoroastrian Avesta in his pocket, intending to take the oath on it instead of the Bible. A few days later he found himself speaking in a debate shortly after Gladstone and Balfour, warning Britain that injustice toward the people of India would end its rule there. He sat in Parliament for three years but never felt quite at home there, speaking of the “peculiar position” in which he found himself. There were in all three Zoroastrian MPs elected before India achieved its independence (none since—though one member of the British House of Lords is a Parsee). But the community never grew to any huge size. In 1980 it numbered two thousand people.

In their last twenty-five years Laal and Shahriar made no more visits back to Yazd or Tehran, out of fear of the new Islamic regime. Instead they became mentors for a new wave of Iranian Zoroastrians arriving in Britain. Between 1980 and 2001 the Zoroastrians of Britain doubled in number, from two thousand to nearly four thousand—including both Parsees and Iranians. In 2004, the Zoroastrians themselves estimated their numbers in the United States at ten thousand and in Canada at five thousand. Numbers in Iran itself have declined, though official statistics do not show this, because however badly the Zoroastrians are treated, the Baha’i fare worse, and so many Baha’is have begun to register themselves officially as Zoroastrians.

Professor John Hinnells of Liverpool Hope University interviewed and polled hundreds of Zoroastrians across the world in the late 1990s for a massive study of this diaspora. He found that many felt caught between cultures. One Zoroastrian woman in Britain told him: “My mind says I should behave like a Zoroastrian, but my body says Western.” Another, in America, complained that “nowhere in the world are the social pressures to conform as great as in the United States.” Yet in fact nearly three-quarters of Zoroastrians in the United States and United Kingdom said they prayed daily, and almost half those in Britain said that living there had not had an effect on their beliefs. Hinnells also recorded fierce opposition from senior clergy to the idea that those who have married outside of the religion should be allowed to take part in any of its rituals or receive a Zoroastrian burial. A marriage between a Zoroastrian woman and a non-Zoroastrian man, said the high priest in Bombay, “hurts and distresses Ahura Mazda,” because women who marry outside cannot observe the rules of purity laid down by the religion. Those born to such marriages are also not counted, by traditionalists, as Zoroastrians.

Laal and Shahriar’s daughter Shahin follows a more liberal interpretation of Zoroastrianism. She is a spokesperson for the World Zoroastrian Organisation, which celebrates Zoroastrian heritage and tries to keep the culture and religion alive. She also organizes events for Iranian Zoroastrians in Britain such as the yearly water festival Tirghan, when Zoroastrian children are encouraged to throw buckets of water over each other—just as their ancestors in Yazd once playfully threw water from the rooftops over passers-by. Because the water (one of the four sacred elements) is a blessing, those who are hit by it cannot complain. Such events are a way of keeping up traditions in a society where the Zoroastrians face the new challenge of secularism. “We find life in the West comfortable because people here have embraced humanistic values,” Shahin told me when we met at an artists’ club in a fashionable suburb of London. “We get assimilated into that because they’re in tune with what we’ve been taught.” But this is a tricky balancing act, as Shahin acknowledged: “Our children might hold on to the cultural baggage of our faith. But they might not.” She was looking for a way to adapt her faith to modern times—welcoming scientific progress as, in Zoroastrian terms, the slow triumph of good thought over evil. She has even worked out a progressive approach to death that marries her interpretation of Zoroastrian principles with contemporary mores. “Exposure to vultures is about being useful in death to living creatures. Personally, I’ve gone for recycling,” she told me cheerfully; “I have offered my body to a research institute.”

We exchanged stories about Yazd, which she has not visited since the Islamic Revolution. She was involved in a charity there, but it was largely engaged in providing care for the elderly; hardly anyone else was left. “Very few homes in Yazd have Zoroastrians in them now,” she said. “Yazd is pretty much abandoned. We try to keep
gahambar
s [prayer services] in them for what is left of the community. And when the mud roofs fall in they pay for repairs.” Younger Muslim Iranians, such as my Yazdi taxi driver Hassan, are less prejudiced than earlier generations were—but the Islamic government has introduced newly discriminatory laws. Zoroastrians who convert to Islam in Iran today, for example, can take their parents’ inheritance at the expense of their unconverted brothers and sisters.

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THE STORY OF ZOROASTRIANISM TODAY
, though, is not just about decline and growing secularism. This ancient faith has in recent years accepted its first converts in fourteen centuries. Carlos is a convert whom I met at a concert of Indian and Iranian music put on by talented young Zoroastrians in London. I had encountered Zoroastrians who had converted to Christianity and who attributed their decision to what they saw as the ritualism of their native religion. What had made Carlos, originally an unreligious Spanish Catholic, go in the other direction? Glancing briefly at his wife, Carlos explained: “We wanted to fight evil. In our religion we help God and he helps us. We’re not his servants. This world isn’t a test, where we get told at the end if we have passed or not.” He had read about Zoroastrianism as a small boy and been attracted to it, but he had not realized any Zoroastrians still existed. After watching a BBC documentary about the fire temple at Yazd, he searched on the Internet for a community that might initiate him as a Zoroastrian, and discovered one in Scandinavia. There he put on the
kushti
, alongside a group of panicky converts from Afghanistan who wanted to return to their ancestral religion but were understandably nervous about the consequences for them when they returned home.

I noticed, though, that Carlos and his wife stood alone for much of the evening, while others at the gathering had known each other since childhood. I saw the same when I met two Zoroastrians who had adopted the religion from a nominally Muslim background (both said that their families were not religious): they were not excluded, but neither did people go out of their way to make them feel welcome. Some Parsees in particular admit that they are a clannish group, defining their identity not always by belief but also by race, and only some more liberal Zoroastrians countenance the admission of converts.

Though the Zoroastrians are few, they have internal divisions. Liberals and conservatives disagree about how to tackle intermarriage (traditionalists want to exclude altogether the children of mixed marriages, whereas liberals want to include them) and whether to admit non-Zoroastrians to the most sacred parts of the fire-temples, where the ever-living flames are kept. There are also disagreements about how to interpret the Avesta. For the most part, Zoroastrians today are much less likely to emphasize the independent power of evil than, for example, their Sasanian forebears would have done. There are also cultural distinctions between Iranians and Parsees: Iranians speak Farsi and prefer Iranian dishes, while Parsees speak Gujarati and prefer Indian food.

Nonetheless, at the London fire temple that is the religion’s chief social and religious focal point in Britain, an effort has been made to accommodate all varieties of Zoroastrians. In the entrance hall of the temple, which once was a movie theater, an Iranian tapestry depicts imperial Persian soldiers from the era of Darius; in what used to be the principal screening room and is now the main prayer hall, a picture of Dadabhai Naoroji celebrates the most famous Parsee to have lived in Britain. A picture of Zarathustra, on the prayer hall’s left wall, faces a picture of the Queen on the opposite wall. The stage, where the screen once was, is still faced by a few rows of comfortable seats left over from the building’s days as a theater. A piano on the stage shows that the temple is used for secular entertainment as well as prayer services. Above the stage in gold letters affixed to the wall, the Zoroastrian motto is displayed: “Good thought, good word, good deed.”