Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran

7. Iranian Nationalism and the Zoroastrian Past

163 7 Iranian Nationalism and the Zoroastrian Past There are not wanting those who credit the Shah with entertaining thoughts . . . of the restoration of the ancient Zoroastrian worship. —US State Department, letter by Rives Childes, April 26, 1935 Twentieth-century Iran witnessed the fruition and intensification of nineteenthcentury reform efforts. Islamic law was largely, although not entirely, secularized, providing greater legal equality and the end of sartorial and other socioeconomic restrictions on religious minorities. Iranian nationalism was adopted as the ideology of state in order to promote concepts of the modern citizen and popular sovereignty. Iranian nationalism, owing to its identification with the preIslamic (and thus Zoroastrian) past, also created a special relationship between the state and the Zoroastrian community. Modernity was mapped onto a reimagined past, and the Zoroastrians held special status as the “authentic” Iranians unsullied by intervening years of decline, conversion, and distance from cultural origins. The Turn of the Century State efforts at increasing centralization and secularization continued over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Iranian political stability and European imperialism brought with them renewed European interest in Iran. This new context had a very real impact on the Iranian Zoroastrian community . The “Great Game” between Russia and Britain, and European aggressive political and economic policies more generally, lent Iran increasing international 164 | Pious Citizens importance. More and more Europeans, primarily belonging to the diplomatic and commercial communities, took up residence in Tehran. The Parsis, too, had representatives in Tehran who cultivated European diplomats and harnessed their support in attempts to secure improved legal rights for Iranian Zoroastrians. Renewed contact by the Parsis with their coreligionists in Iran spurred Iranian Zoroastrian entrance into trade and commerce, a niche formerly prohibited them. Parsi funding and support, combined with an easier trade route to Bombay , led to the predominance of Zoroastrian mercantile activities with India.1 This preference continued throughout the Reza Shah period, even as Zoroastrians gradually expanded into the domestic market. Increased centralization also implied increased secularization of the legal sphere. Although no formal, systematic changes occurred in the Islamic shari’a or the existing court system before Reza Shah became king, religious minorities (including the Zoroastrians) were eased of some of their restrictions, at least in theory. Minorities in Tehran could count on the Qajar shahs’ protection, whereas those in the provinces still suffered under the authority of local governors and populations who sometimes refused to comply with royal orders. Reza Shah accomplished a much tighter degree of centralization, but the divide between conditions in the capital and in the provinces continued to be relevant for minorities throughout his reign. The increasing centrality of Tehran, as the seat of both domestic authority and international connections, grew over the course of Reza Shah’s reign. Despite Reza Shah’s attempts to control and integrate the country as a whole, the capital remained the center of modernizing, Westernizing policies and benefited unequally from economic development and the expansion of the bureaucratic and professional middle class. Zoroastrians were attracted to the capital for a variety of reasons. Individual entrepreneurs arrived in the capital at the turn of the century primarily for commercial reasons and were quickly followed by a stream of others drawn by the economic incentives that the new Zoroastrian merchants held out. Before the Constitutional Revolution, the Zoroastrians lived predominantly in the southern towns of Yazd and Kerman and their environs.2 There were 50 Zoroastrian merchants living in Tehran by 1850, and Zoroastrian villagers used to travel to the capital in groups of 200 or so to seek summer work in the gardens Iranian Nationalism and the Zoroastrian Past | 165 north of the city.3 The first Parsi representative to Iran, Maneckji Limji Hataria, encouraged Zoroastrian merchants to move to Tehran, where he assured them they would receive more government protection and be the objects of less prejudice .4 With the lifting of bans on trade, Zoroastrians did come to Tehran, and by 1880 the number of Zoroastrian merchants in the capital had tripled to 150. The number doubled again in only a decade. By 1892 the Parsi Society for the Amelioration of Conditions in Iran estimated the number at 295.5 Although in the span of fifty years the Zoroastrian population of Tehran increased more than five times, they remained a small minority in the capital, which enjoyed a total population of approximately 200,000 at the turn of the...