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Zoroastrianism, a religion which arose among Iranian peoples some 3,000 years ago, was the religion of the majority of Iranians prior to the Arab conquests of the mid-7th century. Since that time, a steady process of conversion to Islam has left a small Zoroastrian minority of 20,000 or less in Iran today. While community leaders are making efforts to keep the religion alive, factors such as emigration, intermarriage, and low birth rates now put the very survival of this ancient faith into question, not just throughout the global diaspora but within the land of its birth.
Zoroastrianism is one of the world's oldest living faiths. Tracing back most likely to sometime in the 2nd millennium BCE,1 it became the national religion of many Iranian peoples and was the state religion of the Sasanian Empire from the 3rd century CE until the Arab conquest in the 640s. During the subsequent centuries, most Iranians converted to Islam, and a small group of Zoroastrians emigrated to India where they established the Parsi ("Persian") community.2 In Iran, numbers have now dwindled to less than 20,000, at least according to official figures,3 although since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 there has been much speculation about the extent of "re-conversion" to Zoroastrianism by Iranian Muslims disaffected by the country's present Islamic regime.
The causes of the Zoroastrian community's decline in Iran date back to the Arab conquests and have been compounded by some contemporary issues. In historical terms, there have been various explanations as to why a majority of Iranians abandoned their traditional faith in favor of Islam, especially since the long-popular "conversion by the sword" theory has now been largely discredited. Indeed, the evidence is rather that at least during the first century or so, the Arabs were actually mostly reluctant to allow non-Arabs into their prospering community,4 requiring them to acquire an Arab sponsor [mawla] through whom they could obtain a kind of honorary Arab tribal identity.5 That so many non-Arabs chose to do so can be taken as evidence that membership in this community was very attractive, and encompassed temporal as well as spiritual advantages. Another factor often cited is the dependence of the Zoroastrian priesthood on state support, which was lost to them with the fall...