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 gahambars [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 o
ther 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.”
I visited this temple when I attended the memorial service for Laal and Shahriar, who died within months of each other in 2004. (They are buried at the Zoroastrian cemetery at Brookwood, where a prayer service is regularly held in a small chapel. The chapel is surrounded by neatly tended graves, their stones often marked with the fravahar, while grander stone tombs in Persian style house the dead of the wealthiest families.) At the ceremony a priest, his mouth veiled by a cloth mask that came down well below his chin—its purpose being to prevent contamination of the holy fire by breath or spittle—chanted rhythmically for ninety minutes in old Farsi, with his wife seated beside him, a scarf partly covering her hair. On the table in front of them were wine, milk, water, fruit, and white and purple blossoms, the last used as symbols of the spirits of the dead. Also on the table were pictures of Laal and Shahriar themselves; other photos showing their life in Iran and Britain were beamed onto a screen by a projector. Sandalwood twigs were burning in a small brazier, which was carried at intervals around the congregation, who waved their arms to waft the scent toward them. Afterward a selection of food was served, including both Indian and Iranian dishes.
As I talked to the Zoroastrians afterward over wine in plastic cups, I realized: at last, in this northern suburb of London, in a disused movie theater, I was in the tavern of Hafez’s Magi.
4: Druze
Lebanon’s capital city, Beirut, is a twenty-mile-long, million-resident stretch of modern buildings on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean sea—dotted here and there with an old, honey-colored, red-roofed house that has survived from when the city was smaller and more picturesque. Walking in 2011 along its Corniche past discreet lovers and seaside clubs, I heard everywhere the pounding of waves against rocks. Another metaphorical sea was obvious as well. Up by the colder waters of the English Channel a century ago, Matthew Arnold heard the sea of faith’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” At Beirut, that sea was still at the full, and stormy.
Though Lebanon’s fourteen-year civil war officially ended in 1989, the various religious groups whom that war pitted against each other still eye each other warily. The war wounded one in four Lebanese and killed one in twenty. All groups committed atrocities; all suffered them. But Lebanon’s diversity is not only a source of conflict. This country, whose five million people are divided between eighteen recognized sects and religions, offers the closest thing to religious equality that exists in the Middle East—a constitution declaring that “the State respects all creeds” and a people more tolerant of religious diversity than most others in the world, according to Gallup polling.
“Pity the nation that is full of religions and empty of faith. Pity the nation that is divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation,” wrote the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran in the Garden of the Prophet, referring acerbically to this multiplicity of sects. The reason for all this variety, though, is a virtuous one: these groups were safer in Lebanon than in most other places, because it consisted largely of mountainous areas that government forces could enter only with difficulty. Meanwhile, its location on the Mediterranean Sea made Lebanon part of both West and East. It was the Mediterranean, not the landmass of Europe, that was the heart of ancient Western civilization: around it the ancient Greeks lived, as Socrates once put it, “like frogs around a pond.” Traders shipped spices, wheat, dyes, and slaves across the sea. Philosophers and saints traded ideas and knowledge across it. The eighth-century Greek poet Homer, the fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus, and the Greek mathematician Euclid were none of them from mainland Greece: they were from an Aegean island, southern Italy, and Egypt, respectively. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras was born on the Aegean island of Samos to a Lebanese father and ended his days teaching in southern Italy. I was in Lebanon to meet members of one of its eighteen religious groups, called the Druze. I wanted to see if they might be the modern-day successors to Pythagoras’s followers, an ancient and secretive group of Greek philosophers called the Pythagorean Brotherhood.
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Pythagoras featured in the philosophy syllabus that I had studied at university, as he may have been a teacher of Socrates, but I could not remember anything he had written. In a Beirut bookstore I bought a book about the philosopher that had been translated into Arabic from a French original. As I read the book, I realized why I had seen so little of his work: he never wrote any of it down. Although Lebanon was part of the Greek world, it was also seen by the Greeks as exotic and mysterious (rather as it was by nineteenth-century Orientalists) because of the ancient civilizations that had existed there. Pythagoras played on this exoticism and the perception that the Orient contained esoteric wisdom passed on from the ancient Chaldeans and Israelites: legends spread that he had been taught by Jewish rabbis, Egyptian priests, and Chaldean astrologists. He was not willing to reveal what he had learned, however, except to the chosen few who were allowed to join his school. These pupils apparently had to keep absolute silence for five years, and only at the end of that time were they even allowed to catch a glimpse of their teacher. Those who gave away the secrets of Pythagoras’s teaching could expect merciless vengeance from the other members, who considered any breach of secrecy to be an unforgivable betrayal. This extended even to some of their more inexplicable teachings. Everybody knew, for instance, that the Pythagoreans were not allowed to eat beans, or even tread on them. Nobody understood why, because the Brotherhood would rather die than explain. Their spirit of secrecy, denounced by others at the time as charlatanry, was summed up by a motto at the beginning of the book, put there by its French writer: “Come near, you few philosophers, the Pythagorean way of life embraces you! But you, ordinary mass of everyday people, are far from it.”
Enough people did betray those secrets, though, for at least some Pythagorean beliefs to emerge. The Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation, and this drove them to purify the soul, which was immortal, and neglect the body, wh
ich they viewed as only its temporary casing. They wore white, undyed garments as a symbol of their commitment to living austere, self-denying lives. (When Julius Caesar encountered the Celtic Druids in Gaul, he thought they, too, must be Pythagoreans, because they also believed in reincarnation, dressed in white, guarded their teachings, and studied the stars. It is possible that he was right, since the Gauls had been exposed to Greek ideas for centuries.) Some Pythagoreans held their possessions in common, and they tended to avoid eating meat, animal products, or even cooked food. They were so unified that they were capable in their early years of taking over entire cities, and even in later centuries they were known for their solidarity. They identified themselves to each other through secret phrases and symbols deriving from their fascination with numbers and geometry. A Druze magazine that I had found completed the story. In an article titled “The Wise Pythagoras,” it noted that “persecution suppressed the sect and scattered its members, but Pythagoreans preserved their teachings over the generations.”
It might seem more natural to look for the successors to these Greek philosophers in Greece, not Lebanon. But that would be to neglect an event some historians regard as the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. In the year ad 529 the Academy of Plato closed its doors for the last time. Nine centuries had passed since Plato founded it in Athens. The idea of the Academy—a place where people might study at no cost, and which kept alive a certain interpretation of Greek philosophy—had survived the philosopher’s death, the burning of the city by the Romans, and the dispersal of its teachers. Its professors tried to combine the teachings of the ancient philosophers they most revered: Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. They taught that there was an ultimate cause for the existence of the Universe, which they called “the One.” But this One really was like the number 1—utterly timeless, and free from human imperfections such as mind or will.
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Page 15