"Violating our rights, confiscating our belongings and treating us badly has become costumary. Zoroastrians who denounce such violations to authorities are completely ignored."
Bravo, Kurosh Niknam. May you be safe. From AKI, with thanks to Fjordman:
Tehran, 23 Jan. (AKI) - Kurosh Niknam, an Iranian MP representing Zoroastrians in Parliament, has denounced state discriminations against members of his faith. "Violating our rights, confiscating our belongings and treating us badly has become costumary," he told Iranian daily Khatam Yazd on Tuesday. "Zoroastrians who denounce such violations to authorities are completely ignored."Niknam also complained about the scrapping of his faith, the oldest religious community of that nation to have survived, from the list of officially recognized religions, which only includes Abrahamic religions.
"We have the impression that someone wants to cancel us gradually from the history of the country where our faith was born," he said....
The Zoroastrian community in Iran was estimated to number 32,000 individuals at the beginning of the 1980s but reports suggest that their number has halved since the 1979 Iranian revolution established an Islamic Republic. However, conservative Iranian papers have denounced that in the past few years an increasing number of Iranians, especially youths, have converted from Islam to the Evangelical Church and Zoroastrism, claiming the phenomenon is growing and becoming "extremely worrying."
You know that persecution is at an extreme when even their own puppet denounces them for it.
Zoroastrism is the real religion and culture of the Persian people, being a muslim as a Persian is like being a christian as a Japanese, it has no life there, if the arab muslims never forced their religion on the Persians then Zoroastrism would be the head religion of Iran today!
It's unfathomable to think that Zoroastrianism was once the main religion in Iran and that it has now been reduced to such a state. This is proof positive of how voracious Islam's appetite is-it consumes everything until absolutely nothing remains-including the memory of those it had consumed. Not even locusts are as voracious or efficient.
How nice it would be if real Iranian liberals, instead of co-signing expressions of outrage about Holocaust-denial in Iran, expressions of outrage in which they deliberately offer a false history of Iran and the treatment of Jews under Islamic rule, including their being punished, potentially by death, for merely being out in the rain (a drop, you see, might ricochet off a "najis" Jew's skin and fall on the skin of a pious Believer, and that simply wouldn't do). Many Iranians simply do not know the history of what may be called Muslim antisemitism, or mistreatment of Jews that went beyond, often, what was meted out as a general mistreatment of Infidels, and acolytes of Bernard Lewis are unlikely to have gone beyond to the real experts in this area, such as Georges Vajda (whom Lewis claims to have consulted), and Fischel, and Goitein, and Lawrence Loeb the sociologist (who lived with Jews in Iran in the 1970s, the way that Mary Boyce, the great historian of Zoroastrianism, lived with Zoroastrians in Iran in the same period).
How nice if the assorted Nafisis who signed this New-York-Review-of-Books peittion would no longer settle for pseudo-reformers who are actually apologists for Islam -- Shirin Ebadi with her insistence that the mistreatment of women in Islamic countries has "nothing to do with Islam" but is merely "cultural," or others who keep confusing their own jeunesse doree, lycee and all, in pre-Khomeini Iran, with their liberal and secular parents and friends, with the real Islam as believed, and put into effect, by the masses, who are always far more numerous than the elite -- hence, of course, their name: the "masses." How nice it would be if Ms. Nafisi and a dozen others living in Americna or European safety would publicly announce that they "had decided to return to the religion of Persia, the religion of their ancestors, a religion not identified with any power bloc or any civiilization other than that of Persia" (rhetoric to that effect), and that they were announcing to the world here and now that, for the purposes of identification, they rejected the "Arab gift" which "had brought such woe to the people of Persia, and stunted their mental growth and would have done damage to their art and even caused the disappearance of their beautfiul language had not Firdowsi, and Hafiz, and Sa'adi continued to write in Persian and by their immmortal works (pile it on, here, ad libitum) managed to prevent the eradication of Persian as a living language, and the cultural and linguistic imperialism of the Arabs, for which Islam has always been a vehicle, was now being rejected by the Undersigned, and they hoped that other Iranians, in exile and in Iran, would join them in throwing off the Arab-Muslim yoke.
That's the general idea.
The final product can be left up to the Iranians to put in the artful local allusions, to Persian miniatures (that break the strictures of the dour Arabs), and Persian literature (see E. J. Browne), and to fabulous creatures of Persian mythology (how many of Islam's djinns would you trade for just one Simurg).
Back to Zoroaster. Better living through Zoroastrianism. Ask Zubin Mehta.
Kemal Ataturk replaced the Arabic with the Roman script for Turkish (although he made the mistake of not obliterating Islam from Turkey). The Soviets replaced the Arabic script with Cyrillic for all the Turanian languages (and given that they didn't believe in Christianity any more than Islam, replaced Islam completely with Marxism). Similarly, any liberation of Persia from Islam would have to include Persian using the Roman script instead of Arabic.
Also, part of the Shia claim on Persia is that Imam Hussein married Shahrbano, supposedly the daughter of Yazdgird III, and all the descendents of Imam Hussein are also therefore descendents of the Sassanids, thereby lending the Mullahs a branch of legitimacy. Any idea whether this has been historically proven true? After all, after the battle of Kadeshiya, Yazdgird fled Ctesiphon (near Baghdad) with his son Firuz, who after his death, fled to China. It is therefore very unlikely that he'd have left his daughter in the capital when he knew it was going to fall to the Arabs. Given that Muslim conquerors and historians love claiming victories that didn't happen, and infidel princesses who married into Islam (thereby signifying an Infidel tilth that was there to be conquered) regardless of whether or not that actually happened, this claim of the Shia is worth investigating.
Or Ratan Tata, or any of the inheritors of the Tata empire - today one of the largest, if not the largest coglomerate in India. Parsis, as a % of the Indian population are an asterisk, as opposed to Muslims, who are 13%. Look at what they have achieved, and contrast that with what Muslims have achieved, not only in India, but also in Pakistan and Bangladesh.If not for these examples, all Iranians would look like losers, just like Arabs and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.
Also, is Kurosh the Persianized version of Cyrus? I love Persian names that aren't Islamic.
And Firdowsi, as a convert, may have mourned the destruction of the Sassanids, but he was also a sycophant to Mahmoud of Ghazni.."
-- from a posting above
Apparently, then, Firdowsi must have written panegyrics in Persian (a recognized form in Arabic-language literature -- see Mutanabbi who, when the expected sums were not forthcoming, could turn on a dime or toman of his own minting, against a ruler he had formerly praised) to Mahmoud of Ghazni, the earliest Muslim mass-murderer of Hindus in India. I had no idea. The only thing I knew about Firdowsi was the supposed role of the Shahnameh in Persian history, as a work of such literary art, that it served as an exemplary bulwark against the Arab linguistic imperialism that threatened to supplant the native Farsi with Arabic.
"I love Persian names that aren't Islamic."
-- from a posting above
Yes, an inward sigh of relief is often prompted by one's coming across a Cyrus, a Darius, a Kaveh.
ARAB DEATH CULT CRUSHES ANCIENT CIVILIZATION
The Zoroastrian-Persians established the first known international empire. The Hakkamanishiya (Achaemenian) empire founded by Cyrus (Kurush) the Great stretched from Greece to Egypt and from Central Asia to India. . . .
Zoroastrianism was founded by Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) in Persia which followed an aboriginal polytheistic religion at the time. He preached what may have been the first monotheism with a single supreme god, Ahura Mazda. Zoroastrians belief in the dualism of good and evil as either a cosmic one between Ahura Mazda and an evil spirit of violence and death, Angra Mainyu, or as an ethical dualism within the human consciousness. The Zoroastrian holy book is called the Avesta which includes the teachings of Zarathushtra written in a series of five hymns called the Gathas. They are abstract sacred poetry directed towards the worship of the One God, understanding of righteousness and cosmic order, promotion of social justice, and individual choice between good and evil.
http://islamic-danger.blogspot.com/2007/01/upstart-arab-barbarism-crushes-ancient.html
""We have the impression that someone wants to cancel us gradually from the history of the country where our faith was born,"
....OK ...US, Great Britain, France, Germany, et al....Take note...You could be saying the same thing....
More on the Zoroastrians can be found in the works of the historian Mary Boyce, who also lived among them in the 1970s, under the more tolerant ancien regime of the much-maligned but in fact essentially decent and, for Muslim Iran, amazingly tolerant Shah.