Introduction
At the height of its power, the Sasanian Empire stretched from the shores of the Mediterranean to the heart of Central Asia. This was an empire of laws – sometimes very elaborate laws – presided over by the King of Kings and a hierarchy of priests. Indeed, the Zoroastrian clergy were in many cases also jurists and government officials, who ensured that the affairs of the state were conducted in accordance with the principles of the “Good Religion” (Pahl. wehdēn).Footnote 2
This system came crashing down in the wake of the Arab conquests of the seventh century. Henceforth, there was no Sasanian Empire for the priests to serve, nor imperial law for them to enforce.Footnote 3 Zoroastrians were suddenly a people without a state of their own – a predicament shared by a range of Christian groups across the Near East, North Africa, and al-Andalus, who also witnessed their imperial power dwindle almost overnight.
This is an essay about how Zoroastrians in the early ʿAbbasid period (c. ninth–tenth centuries) made sense of this predicament. In particular, it is about the shrinking legal authority of the clergy, who claimed jurisdiction over a more limited range of matters than their counterparts had done at the height of Sasanian power, now mostly issues of internal concern to the Zoroastrian faithful. It is also about how priests used law, broadly construed, to conserve their flocks and reinforce their identity at a time of increasing conversion to Islam. The great narrowing of horizons implied by the sources may seem like a melancholy tale. But the responses of the clergy to the challenges of the day reveal a religious elite of tremendous creativity and adaptability.
We know precious little about the social history of Zoroastrianism in the early centuries of Islamic rule.Footnote 4 This applies especially to how Zoroastrians negotiated their place in the reconfigured cosmos created by Islam, as well as how the former lands of the Sasanian Empire became predominantly Muslim. This essay is an attempt to improve our understanding of these important issues.
Along with this, the essay aspires to make a strong historiographic and methodological point, namely, to show what scholars of early Islam and the premodern Middle East stand to gain by integrating Zoroastrian sources into their view of the past. As is well known, the field of early Islamic history has been transformed in recent decades by efforts to read Islamic sources in Arabic alongside non-Islamic sources in languages such as Syriac, Greek, and Armenian. This approach, pioneered by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook in Hagarism (1977), has greatly enhanced the way we understand the momentous changes which swept cross the Near East and Central Asia in the wake of the Arab conquests.Footnote 5 One body of literature has escaped this trend, however, and these are Zoroastrian sources in Book Pahlavi (otherwise known as literary or Zoroastrian Middle Persian), mostly written between the ninth and tenth centuries. By and large, they have not been tapped to tell wider histories of medieval Iran or the rise of Islam in the post-conquest period.Footnote 6
Of course, Pahlavi sources from the ʿAbbasid period are far from unknown. But as I have argued elsewhere, specialists in Zoroastrianism tend to read them with an eye to the prior “Golden Age” of Sasanian history, not the early medieval environment in which they were written and redacted.Footnote 7 Islamicists, meanwhile, are largely unaware of these sources, and if they do happen to know them, their attitude tends to be dismissive. This view is reflected in Robert Hoyland's Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (1997), a magisterial survey of the non-Islamic sources for early Islamic history and an indispensable reference work in the field:
Zoroastrian lore continued to be transmitted, and in the ninth century it began to be set down; but it represented the literature of an already moribund society and so was concerned with preserving the glorious tradition of the past, not recording the decadence of the present. And except for question-and-answer collections, which frequently discuss issues such as apostasy and relations with non-Zoroastrians, this literature is largely inward-looking, concentrating on the life and heritage of its own community.Footnote 8
Among Islamic historians, Hoyland deserves great credit for flagging these texts in the first place. After all, they are usually completely ignored. But his portrayal of Zoroastrian society as “moribund” and “decadent” perhaps inadvertently makes it seem as if there is little worth reading in the Pahlavi books (especially in contrast to works by Christians and Jews).
In this essay, I would like to explore one of the most important genres of Zoroastrian literature from the Islamic period (which Hoyland rightly singles out as significant): legal responsa, often known as questions-and-answers, or in Pahlavi, pursišnīhā (“questions”). They are also sometimes called rivāyats, a New Persian term which is both late and something of a misnomer, for it encompasses a wider array of texts than simply questions-and-answers.Footnote 9 These works show strong parallels with the responsa of Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the same time (which have recently been studied in a series of important articles by Uriel Simonsohn).Footnote 10 What is more, they contain a tremendous reservoir of information about Zoroastrian society which cannot be gleaned from other texts or communities.
From one point of view, the sources are well known: we have multiple editions and translations of varying quality, along with scattered scholarly commentary across books and articles.Footnote 11 From another point of view, however, as a body of literature and as expressions of Zoroastrian culture in the Islamic period, these texts are essentially unknown. Indeed, thanks to the work of scholars such as Maria Macuch, we understand far more about the influence of Zoroastrianism on certain aspects of early Islamic law (for instance, temporary marriage, religious endowments, or inheritance) than we do about how Zoroastrian jurists responded to the Islamic environment of their day.Footnote 12 This article is an attempt to fill this gap by historicizing a body of texts which are seldom historicized.
Among other things, the responsa show how Zoroastrian priests tried to: stem the tide of conversion; discourage intermarriage; regulate social and economic exchanges with outsiders; emphasize distinctive Zoroastrian beliefs and practices; and use law to reshape their flock into members of the ahl al-dhimma. The article begins by providing an overview of the responsa genre. It then explores the methodological challenges of using these sources for social history before summarizing the contents of the texts which may reflect the changing Islamic environment of their day. Finally, it concludes by considering how the texts throw new light on the Islamization of Iranian society during the early ʿAbbasid period.
The genre
There are three main collections of legal responsa in Pahlavi produced between the ninth and tenth centuries. These include: 1) the Rivāyat of Ādurfarnbag ī Farroxzādān;Footnote 13 2) the Dādestān ī Dēnīg of Manuščihr son of Gušn-jam;Footnote 14 and 3) the Rivāyat of Ēmēd ī Ašawahištān.Footnote 15 The three texts were produced in Baghdad, Fars, and Kirman, respectively. It is important to note they are not the only examples of Zoroastrian question-and-answer literature. Indeed, there are a number of other sources which belong to the genre which were written both before and after the Arab conquest.Footnote 16 By and large, I will steer clear of these texts because they generally have less to say about Islam, and/or because it is hard to situate them firmly in the Islamic period on account of their ambiguous authorship.
Each collection of responsa is structured around an exchange between a petitioner and a priest. While clearly emanating from a clerical milieu, these texts contain queries which seem to reflect the quotidian concerns of the laity. This suggests that they were written with a pastoral purpose in mind, if not also a readership made up of educated laymen. Indeed, the names of petitioners are sometimes given in the texts, and we should not automatically assume these were all priests.Footnote 17 In general, the texts are shorn of the kinds of contextual details that could help us establish a clear Sitz im Leben, such as references to places, events, or people (other than the interlocutors). This is in sharp contrast to the contemporary responsa of the Geonim, the rabbis of the talmudic academies in Iraq.Footnote 18 In the case of these Jewish texts, we sometimes know where the questions came from, how they were transmitted to the rabbis, how the answers were disseminated to readers, and even whether the advice was actually followed. The same cannot be said of the Zoroastrian material. Here, it is important to note that when we speak of responsa as “legal sources”, we must remember they are not law books in the conventional sense of the term (like the famous Mādayān ī Hazār Dādestān, to be discussed below); nor are they collections of case law based on actual events and people. Rather, they are miscellanies of legal, ethical, and theological topics, couched within the framework of petitions and responses.
In general, the responsa do not follow a set order, nor do they necessarily touch on a consistent range of subjects. Certain themes recur from one source to the next, especially matters related to ritual, inheritance, pollution caused by dead matter (nasāy), the fate of the soul after death, and marriage by proxy (stūrīh). Contact with religious outsiders is also a popular theme, but the status of non-Zoroastrians is never treated as a discrete domain of law (comparable to the way Muslim jurists conceived of dhimmī laws).Footnote 19 Rather, non-Zoroastrians tend to appear in a variety of semi-disconnected contexts, such regulations about marriage, sex, inheritance, commerce, and ritual defilement. By and large, what binds the responsa together is less their contents than their common structure and goal of providing priestly advice.
Zoroastrians did not begin writing law in the Islamic period, of course. The responsa of the ninth and tenth centuries built on a tradition of legal writing going back centuries. Unfortunately, with the exception of the Mādayān ī Hazār Dādestān (“Book of a Thousand Judgments”), none of these Sasanian-era law books survive, making it difficult to establish just how much Zoroastrian law changed with the coming of Islam.Footnote 20 All scholars agree, however, that Islamic-era texts contain plenty of pre-conquest material, though we lack a reliable heuristic for sifting apart the Sasanian and post-Sasanian content (a problem common to nearly all domains of Pahlavi literature, not just law).
As the work of Maria Macuch has shown, Zoroastrian law before the advent of Islam was concerned not only with matters of theology and daily practice, but also the administration of a state. This is because before the conquests, priests were entrusted with numerous civil and political responsibilities, including tax collection, crime and punishment, and the administration of government offices.Footnote 21 Naturally, this vast power shrank with the collapse of the Sasanian Empire, and the texts of the Islamic period seem to reflect this diminished state.Footnote 22 For instance, as Macuch notes, the responsa tend to use simplified legal terminology and avoid discussing complex institutions such as those that must have existed before Islam. What is more, the ninth- and tenth-century sources usually obscure the existence of conflicting legal opinions or schools. Such information seems to have been a common feature of Zoroastrian law in the Sasanian period, but this was streamlined in the Islamic period in order to project a semblance of simplicity and coherence within the tradition. Finally, the responsa present theology and jurisprudence as a unity, such as was uncommon under the Sasanians, who treated them as separate disciplines.Footnote 23
From time to time, ʿAbbasid-era works contain anachronistic passages which recall the former power of the Zoroastrian clergy. A good example comes from the Pahlavi Rivāyat accompanying the Dādestān ī Dēnīg (a text I will not discuss here, but which shows interesting parallels to the three responsa works). At one point, it states that those guilty of a margarzān sin, one worthy of death (such as apostasy), should have their heads cut off. As the Persian martyr acts written in Syriac show, this was common practice in the Sasanian period, but implementing it would have been much harder after the conquests, particularly when the sinners in question were Zoroastrian converts to Islam. In a seeming admission of these changed circumstances, the text states that while it may not be possible to decapitate a sinner now, punishment may be deferred to the afterlife.Footnote 24
Flashes of “imperial law” like this are rare in Islamic-era legal literature. Indeed, if we take stock of the sources as a whole, it is clear that they are mainly concerned with internal matters among the Zoroastrian faithful, such as marriage, guardianship, and inheritance. In this, we see the transformation of the Zoroastrian clergy from political functionaries, as they had been during the Sasanian period, into dhimmī leaders not unlike contemporary Jewish rabbis and Christian priests. The powers of the Sasanian state had been absorbed into the Islamic caliphate, and what was left over for the priests were essentially private matters of immediate concern to the flocks they served. That being said, as the Ṭabaristān archive of Pahlavi legal documents from the eighth century shows, priests did not completely give up their old combination of judicial and spiritual power.Footnote 25 The key change was that their sphere of influence – while still extending to certain civil matters – now lay mainly with their own communities, not the whole of Iranian society.Footnote 26
This brings us to the purpose of the texts. As Macuch has put it, their goal “was to conserve age-old Zoroastrian customs, including especially those on marriage, family, and inheritance which differed basically from the new regulations of Islam”.Footnote 27 One could go a step further by arguing that the responsa played an important role in consolidating the legal, social, and cultural identity of Zoroastrians at a moment when they were diminishing in size and being forced to reconceive of themselves as members of the ahl al-dhimma. Zoroastrians were no longer the dominant community in Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia, but one of a variety of subordinate groups who were notionally subject to the law of Islam. In such a world, it fell to elite priests to articulate core Zoroastrian beliefs and rituals, and then to present these in a digestible form to the lower clergy and laity. This is what we find in many ʿAbbasid-era responsa. We can measure the importance of these works by the fact that they were copied and transmitted across the centuries. Considering how little Pahlavi literature from the medieval period survives to the present, this is no small sign of their significance.
My argument is fundamentally similar to the one Lev Weitz has recently made in a brilliant book about Christian family law in the early Islamic period. As he puts it:
Bishops in Syria, Iraq, and Iran responded to Islamic law and governance by creating a new Christian law of their own, one centered on marriage, inheritance, and the distinctive features of Christian family life… . Encounters like the one in question – in which the caliphate's non-Muslim subjects transformed themselves in response to Islamic institutions and traditions – lie at the very heart of the story of the medieval Middle East's formation.Footnote 28
One could rewrite this paragraph with Zoroastrians instead of Christians in mind and make the same point. While we know far more about Christian law – how it was codified, how it was implemented, and how it was debated under Islamic rule – it is clear that Zoroastrians engaged in a similar process of communal self-fashioning, centred on legal texts, practices, and institutions.
Challenges of using the genre
While Pahlavi responsa are a promising source for social historians, reading them historically is by no means straightforward.Footnote 29 They present familiar challenges to anyone wishing to write social history on the basis of legal texts. Such sources are shaped by convention and the need to make prescriptive statements, not necessarily reflect reality.Footnote 30 As we have seen, the responsa rarely provide contextual clues about their origins other than the names of their authors. Yet even these cannot be trusted. It is not obvious, for instance, whether the priests named in the texts actually wrote them, or if the texts were ascribed to these authors at a later point as a way of burnishing their authority.Footnote 31 What is more, the manuscripts containing the responsa are all late – copied down in the sixteenth century and beyond – a common feature of Pahlavi literature across the board (not to mention other literary traditions from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages). This is outside the scope of the present article, but suffice it to say, it is impossible to measure just how much change took place between the time of their composition and their recording in manuscript form. What is more, as Albert de Jong has recently noted, in classical Pahlavi literature, we are dealing with a tradition in which the importance of texts does not derive from their having authors, titles, discernible subjects, structures, dates, or boundaries.Footnote 32 These characteristics, common to many forms of Zoroastrian writing, can make the task of historicizing the material very difficult.
Another problem is that medieval Zoroastrian authors saw themselves as working within an unchanging scholarly tradition. The dēn (that is, the Zoroastrian religion, associated with the wisdom of Ohrmazd) was the dēn no matter the vicissitudes of time.Footnote 33 To state otherwise (or to anchor a text in the present too explicitly) was to disrupt the illusion of continuity and coherence. For the historian, the problem of timelessness is compounded by a special feature of the Zoroastrian worldview: humanity was thought to be split between “Iranians” or “Iranianness” (ērān, ērīh) and “non-Iranians” or “non-Iranianness” (anērān, anērīh), as well as adherents of the Good Religion (wehdēnān, or Zoroastrians) and of the Evil Religion (agdēnān, or infidels).Footnote 34 These reflected the still greater rivalry between Ohrmazd and Ahrimen, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. Although Zoroastrian authors sometimes drew nuanced distinctions among religious outsiders, by and large they were indifferent to the shades of grey separating Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others.Footnote 35 They were all manifestations of the same demonic force which had entered the world through Ahrimen.
This worldview creates obvious problems for any scholar wishing to see the presence of Muslims in the responsa. Technically speaking, whenever we encounter a word like anērān or agdēnān, there is no surefire way of knowing which group the author is alluding to.Footnote 36 Sometimes there are contextual clues pointing to one community or another, but such passages are few and far between.Footnote 37 A fascinating – and to my eyes, unique – example comes from the Rivāyat of Ēmēd ī Ašawahištān, which mentions a Zoroastrian apostate “who bears a brand on his member as the infidels do” (pad handām drōš ī čiyōn agdēnān pad kardag darēnd) and whose severed member is then placed in water or fire or buried in the ground. This is probably a reference to the Islamic practice of circumcising converts and then discarding their foreskins (though of course, converts to Judaism would also have undergone circumcision).Footnote 38 Again, such details are exceptional and, more often than not, we are simply left to guess the identity of the outsiders in question (if such an identity is even relevant in a passage).
That being said, a number of scholars have argued that when Islamic-era sources use terms like anērān and agdēnān, they are mainly referring to Muslims.Footnote 39 I am inclined to agree with this too, mainly because the texts were all written in Iran and Iraq at the height of ʿAbbasid power. The main threat to Zoroastrianism came not from Manichaeism or Christianity, as it had done in Late Antiquity, but from Islam. Thus, the archetypal “non-Iranian” or “infidel” in the responsa must have been a Muslim (even if the laws were theoretically meant to apply to a wide range of outsiders).
Responsa were a popular literary genre among many religious communities in the early medieval Middle East, not just Zoroastrians.Footnote 40 The central methodological question which confronts the reader of Zoroastrian responsa is the same as for readers of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic legal texts: which aspects of these sources reflect social reality, and which aspects reflect the conventions of the genre? Put differently, do the responsa tell us something about daily life among Zoroastrians, or are they mainly theoretical works penned by elite clergy? In my view, the sources are a bit of both. Many of the questions posed in the responsa are straightforward, showing clear connections to experiences that would have been familiar to any Zoroastrian person of the time, elite and sub-elite alike. They also would have been familiar to other dhimmī communities struggling to defend and define themselves in a new era of Muslim domination. Indeed, we find strong parallels between the contents of these sources and the responsa of non-Zoroastrian groups, especially when it comes to topics such as conversion, apostasy, repentance, intermarriage, inheritance, and commercial exchanges with outsiders. Such parallels underscore the impression that we are dealing not with legal fictions, but with reflections of real scenarios.Footnote 41
Despite the traces of lived experiences, there is also plenty of abstract and theoretical material in the responsa. Indeed, practical-seeming questions often prompted highly academic replies which exhibited the priests’ intricate mastery of theology, exegesis, philosophy, and law. Indeed, in the case of certain texts like the Dādestān ī Dēnīg, the ideas themselves – not to mention the written style – can be so abstract and recondite as to make one wonder who could have understood them other than a small circle of learned priests.Footnote 42 Other responsa are more straightforward, such as the Rivāyat of Ādurfarnbag ī Farroxzādān. In such cases, one can imagine a wider audience of readers and listeners other than simply educated clergy.Footnote 43 Still, the problem remains that in many instances, straightforward questions provoked a cascade of complex answers. Many have the flavour of Christian debates about “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”. This may be a universal feature of the responsa genre, for a similar tendency is evident in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources, which revel in scholastic complexity and contingency.
Still, given the pastoral thrust of the genre, few questions posed in the responsa are completely divorced from reality – whatever the elite identity of the respondents and the abstract quality of their answers. For this reason, I believe the responsa contain insights into the social history of Zoroastrianism in the ninth and tenth centuries, but we must read them constantly with an eye to the genre. Put simply, the responsa may not tell us about reality, in the sense of actual events affecting actual people we know by name. But they can tell us about the kinds of scenarios which petitioners and respondents regarded as plausible or pertinent. Of course, we should be careful not to confuse the views of the sources with those of Zoroastrians at large. In a sense, the responsa collections do nothing more than reflect the opinions of three highly educated male priests in Baghdad, Fars, and Kirman, hardly a representative cross-section of Zoroastrian society as a whole. What is more, as the work of Patricia Crone has recently shown, Zoroastrianism and related religious movements in this period were far more diverse than just the views of the highly-educated clergy who produced the Pahlavi books.Footnote 44 But as a window into their small but highly influential world, they are a priceless source of information.
Rivāyat of Ādurfarnbag ī Farroxzādān
The oldest of the Pahlavi responsa is the one linked to Ādurfarnbag son of Farroxzād, who was active during the early ninth century. In manuscripts, the text consists of 147 answers from Ādurfarnbag, along with a further five from a priest named Farnbag-srōš son of Wahrām, who was alive in the eleventh century and seems to have belonged to an illustrious family of clergy.Footnote 45 A further 30 questions and answers are anonymous. For reasons of relevance and dating, I will focus only on the portion of the text attributed to Ādurfarnbag.
Ādurfarnbag was one of the most prominent scholar-priests of the medieval period.Footnote 46 The leader of the Zoroastrians of Baghdad (the hudēnān pēšōbāy), he seems to have played a role analogous to that of the East Syrian catholicos or the Jewish exilarch, mediating relations between his non-Muslim community and the ʿAbbasid court. Ādurfarnbag was the first compiler of the Dēnkard, the great compendium of Zoroastrian religious knowledge. He also features as the main disputant in a text known as the Gizistag Abāliš, in which he is shown debating a heretical dualist (a zandīk) in the presence of the caliph al-Maʾmūn.Footnote 47 Along with this, Ādurfarnbag is widely quoted as an authority in later Pahlavi works such as the Dādestān ī Dēnīg. If Ādurfarnbag was indeed involved in the composition of this text, we might see his views as reflecting the cosmopolitan environment of Baghdad in which he lived, where contact and competition with religious outsiders was a constant feature of everyday life.Footnote 48 We might also contrast Ādurfarnbag's perspective with that of Zoroastrians living in other parts of the Islamic empire, especially more homogenous areas to the east, far from Muslim power and influence (a point we shall revisit below).
The rivāyat of Ādurfarnbag touches on many topics that seem to reflect the social environment of the day, especially the challenge of living under Islamic rule. For instance, several questions explore the issue of apostasy and repentance – that is, what happens when someone leaves the Good Religion and then wishes to return. Since these questions have recently been studied by Yishai Kiel and Prods Oktor Skjærvø in an important article, I will leave them aside and examine a related series of questions about what happens to the legal status of a Zoroastrian when a close family member apostatizes.Footnote 49 In one instance, the question revolves around a family which has become entirely “non-Iranian” except for one woman. Ādurfarnbag was asked whether this woman may become a pādixšāy wife or only a xwasrāyēn. The term pādixšāy refers to the highest form of marriage in Zoroastrian law, one with full marital rights; with guardianship (sālārīh) of the woman passing from her father (or brother) to her husband; and with their children serving as legal successors. By contrast, a xwasrāyēn marriage was lower in rank and usually occurred when a man and woman decided to marry without the consent of a guardian. Thus, the question sought to resolve the fate of a woman who no longer had Zoroastrian male relatives to give her away in marriage. Absent a guardian of her own, Ādurfarnbag stated that the clergy – including rads, mowbeds, and dastwars (religious judges, the highest-ranking priests, and religious teachers/consultants, respectively) – could appoint a guardian for her. If such clergy did not exist, a local man who was learned in the law, the Avesta (the Zoroastrian sacred scripture), and the Zand (the Middle Persian translation and commentary of the Avesta) could appoint a guardian for her.Footnote 50
A related section in the rivāyat sought to address the guardianship of a woman whose husband became “non-Iranian” – that is, converted to a non-Zoroastrian faith. Specifically, the questioner asked whether this woman was eligible to become a pādixšāy wife of another man, presumably because the marriage to her original husband was nullified following the man's conversion. Ādurfarnbag reported that scholars disagreed about the matter: some said that she could become a pādixšāy wife as before, others merely a xwasrāyēn. Footnote 51 Yet another section explores what happens when a man died, leaving his wife and daughter on their own. His wife then became “non-Iranian” or died (demonstrating the principle that apostasy and death were, legally speaking, the same thing), thereby bringing the daughter's marital status into question. Ādurfarnbag stated that the daughter could still become a pādixšāy wife to someone, this seemingly in spite of her mother's apostasy or death and provided the mother had herself been a pādixšāy wife at the time of her own husband's death.Footnote 52 Taken as a whole, these questions try to solve what must have been common dilemmas for Zoroastrians in a period of religious change: what happened to girls whose marital prospects were dependent on the consent of senior male relatives when these very relatives were busy converting? Could the Zoroastrian community come up with alternative solutions which protected the girls as prospective wives and mothers?
A related subset of questions in the responsa of Ādurfarnbag concerned illicit sexual relations between Zoroastrians and non-Zoroastrians. In one, Ādurfarnbag was asked about a man whose wife slept around with “non-Iranians” and whether he could divorce her. Ādurfarnbag replied that he could choose to divorce his wife or keep her, in the latter case because he thought she may sin less if they remained together. Regardless of what he chose, the priest emphasized that the husband bore no responsibility for the wife's philandering – that is, unless he was in a position to stop her and did not do so.Footnote 53 Later in the work, Ādurfarnbag discussed the opposite scenario: what happened to a man who had illicit relations with a non-Zoroastrian woman and conceived a child with her? Furthermore, what happened if the infidel woman was menstruating while they were having sex (given that menstrual blood would defile him)? On all three counts, Ādurfarnbag stated that the man had committed a grave sin by having sex with an outsider.Footnote 54
Were Zoroastrian men actually fornicating with non-Zoroastrian women, and if so, could these women have been Muslims? Such relationships were theoretically forbidden by Islamic law, which prohibited Muslim women from marrying or otherwise engaging in sexual contact with non-Muslim men.Footnote 55 For their part, Muslim jurists banned sexual relations with Zoroastrians tout court because they did not count as “People of the Book” (like Jews and Christians). This is not to say that such relations never happened, especially in mixed areas where Muslims and Zoroastrians lived in close proximity to one another and may have been related by prior ties of kinship. It may have also happened in rural areas where Islamic legal norms were weaker, or in cities where Zoroastrian slaves were being sold as concubines into Muslim households. As much is stated in early works of ḥadīth and fiqh, which discuss the permissibility of sex between Muslim men and Zoroastrian women – insisting that the women convert before doing so. This suggests it was a common practice, at least in some parts of the empire.Footnote 56 That being said, my hunch is that if the question in the Rivāyat reflects a social reality, it may be the phenomenon of Zoroastrian men taking Jewish and Christian consorts (as was common at the elite level, at least during the Sasanian period; the evidence dries up after the conquests).Footnote 57 Regardless, the topic is found in other Zoroastrian responsa, indicating that it must have been perceived as a threat to the community.
As we have seen, the responsa literature was preoccupied with matters of purity and pollution, and debates over how to handle the corpses of non-Zoroastrians crystallized these concerns. In one question, Ādurfarnbag was asked to describe what counted as the corpse of a “non-Iranian”. He replied in a manner which strongly suggested that he was talking about Muslims, identifying these as “the corpses of those who come to the land of the Iranians to attack it and who [now] dwell in it”.Footnote 58 Many questions about the corpses of “non-Iranians” pertain to the setting of the caravanserai, where Zoroastrians and non-Zoroastrians might rub shoulders as they transacted business. For instance, Ādurfarnbag was asked about the fate of a Zoroastrian who died in a caravanserai with no dog on hand to purify his body (a common practice known as sagdīd in Pahlavi, since dogs were thought to have the power to drive away demons which normally lingered around a corpse, thereby rendering it impure).Footnote 59 Furthermore, Ādurfarnbag was asked whether one could trust that a body which had died in the land of the non-Iranians had actually been seen by a dog (no, unless it was obvious that a dog had been present with the corpse).Footnote 60 In both questions, the text's concern is less for intercommunal fraternization than the proper treatment of dead bodies.
Dādestān ī Dēnīg
The second major collection of responsa from the ʿAbbasid period is the Dādestān ī Dēnīg, consisting of 92 questions posed to Manuščihr son of Gušn-jam (or Juwānjam), who was high priest of Fars and Kirman at the end of the ninth century. The main questioner was Mihrxwaršēd son of Ādurmāh, about whom nothing is known other than his name. There are also several anonymous questioners in the text. Manuščihr was a very important figure in Zoroastrian history, hailing from a priestly family that also included his brother Zādspram, a prominent priest in his own right, who was based at Sirjān in Fars province.Footnote 61 The two engaged in a famous dispute about the merits of simplifying the barašnūm purification ritual, which we know about thanks to three lengthy, slightly baroque epistles penned by Manuščihr. Zādspram supported the reforms, while Manuščihr bitterly opposed them.Footnote 62
Through this debate, Manuščihr presented himself as an arch traditionalist at a time when a faction of Zoroastrian elites was clamoring for reform and new approaches to the Good Religion. Indeed, we might read his epistles (as well as the Dādestān ī Dēnīg) as conservative reactions to new rationalist approaches ascendant at the time (reflected in polemical works such as the Škand-gumānīg Wizār of the Zoroastrian layman Mardānfarrox son of Ohrmazddād, which may date from the ninth century).Footnote 63 In this, geography may have been an important factor: Manuščihr hailed from Fars, one of the traditional strongholds of Zoroastrianism which, according to medieval Arabic geographers, retained a large Zoroastrian population long after the conquests.Footnote 64 If this is true, it seems possible that Manuščihr was writing from the vantage-point of a more homogenous environment than his earlier counterpart in Baghdad, Ādurfarnbag, who lived in the cosmopolitan capital of the Islamic empire. The worldviews of the two men may have reflected these different milieux.
While the dispute between Manuščihr and Zādspram over the barašnūm ritual may seem esoteric to modern readers, it was related to a broader crisis facing Zoroastrian clergy during the ʿAbbasid period. At this time, more than 200 years after the Arab conquest of Iran, Zoroastrians were far poorer and weaker than they had been in Late Antiquity. As a result, as the Dādestān ī Dēnīg makes clear, there were fewer resources to support the still-extensive network of clergy found across Iran. Indeed, the push for simplified rituals may reflect this social and economic crisis. In a brilliant article about the Dādestān ī Dēnīg, Philip Kreyenbroek showed how the two main classes of clergy at the time – hāwišts, the priestly students who performed the rituals, and hērbeds, who studied the canonical texts – came into increasing conflict over money and patronage during the ninth century.Footnote 65 The Zoroastrian laity could not afford to pay both groups, and therefore focused their largesse on the priests who performed the most essential services, such as celebrating the liturgy. This had the effect of sidelining the hērbeds, who had deep knowledge of the scholarly tradition but were not licensed to preside over religious ceremonies. To support themselves, hērbeds had a choice of either pursuing secular work (such as farming) or acquiring the liturgical skills of their competitors. In the long term, this led to a gradual erosion of any distinction between a hāwišt and a hērbed, such that hērbed came to signify priests generally (as opposed to scholar-priests specifically). Indeed, the term ervad today merely refers to a man who has undergone the first stage of initiation into the priesthood.
From the point of view of Islamic history, the crisis of the priesthood seems to reflect wider shifts in Iranian society that were underway at the time. The competition for resources between these two groups was a downstream consequence of the Zoroastrian community's economic and social marginalization, of the fact that a poorer and gradually shrinking Zoroastrian church could no longer support its leaders and institutions. The Dādestān ī Dēnīg provides an especially clear picture of the clerical crisis induced by the coming of Islam. One can easily imagine similar dilemmas affecting Jewish and Christian clergy at the same time, and in fact, there are hints of precisely this in the sources.Footnote 66 For Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians alike, the early ʿAbbasid period was a time when financial resources were dwindling, when the number of potential recruits to high office was shrinking, and when Muslim officials were increasingly interfering in the institutional life of dhimmī communities. The full extent of these difficulties can be hard to grasp from Jewish and Christian sources, yet they are spelled out in vivid detail in the Dādestān ī Dēnīg (though not linked explicitly to Islam, it must be said). This makes it a tremendously valuable mine of information.
In addition to these insights about priests, the Dādestān ī Dēnīg discusses other themes that seem to reflect the Islamic environment of the ninth century. Like other contemporary Pahlavi texts, it laments the present as an era of “damage and fear which affect us because of the rulers of the time […].”Footnote 67 Indeed, it bemoans how the “good people [have been] scattered like jewels” due to persecution and other hardships.Footnote 68 In contrast to other responsa, however, the Dādestān ī Dēnīg does not have much to say about marriage, inheritance, guardianship, and dead matter – the sorts of issues which tended to prompt discussion of non-Iranians and infidels in most other legal works. Rather, it contains interesting passages about apostasy (including one in which Manuščihr is asked about the rewards awaiting a believer who saves someone from converting to an infidel faith [agdēnīh]) and passages about commerce with non-Zoroastrians.Footnote 69 To my eyes, these latter sections are unique and deserve an extra look.
In one chapter, Manuščihr was asked whether Zoroastrians were permitted to take property away from non-Iranians (anērān) and infidels (agdēnān). In the course of his reply, he stated that if non-Iranians took the property unlawfully in the first place, Zoroastrians should be free to seize it back (though it is not clear how this could have worked in practice, considering that Muslims – if they are the ones implied here – had the power of the state on their side).Footnote 70 He then added something remarkable: in the case of an infidel who was not a foreigner (agdēn ud nē anēr), it was permissible to give him food, clothing, or medicine in order to save him from death, hunger, thirst, cold, or heat. Under no circumstances, however, was it permissible to give him property, horses, weapons, instruments, wine, or land. The clear conclusion was that Zoroastrians were free to help non-Zoroastrian Iranians in dire circumstances. They were not free, however, to give them material which could be turned against them. If we assume the passage is speaking about Iran's Muslim rulers (or, given the wording, local Muslims of Iranian descent), this was sensible advice.Footnote 71 Other questions about commerce sought to clarify whether Zoroastrians could sell cattle and other goods to outsiders;Footnote 72 and whether Zoroastrians could sell wine to non-Iranians (anērān) and infidels (agdēnān).Footnote 73 We also find an interesting discussion of the children of mixed unions, like the ones we have already encountered above and will read about below.Footnote 74
Rivāyat of Ēmēd ī Ašawahištān
The final rivāyat work is a collection of questions posed to Ēmēd son of Ašawahišt by one Ādur-gušnasp son of Mihr-ātaxš.Footnote 75 Ēmēd was a nephew of the illustrious Manuščihr and succeeded his uncle as high priest of Fars and Kirman during the first half of the tenth century.Footnote 76 Interestingly, Ēmēd is also mentioned in two medieval Arabic texts. Al-Masʿūdī (d. 345/956), for instance, almost certainly referred to him while speaking about a priest named “Anmādh ibn Astawahisht” (likely a corruption of “Umīd ibn Ashawahisht”, per Yāqūt below), who was alive at the time. This man presided over “the Jibāl, Iraq, and all the lands of the Persians (wa-sāʾir bilād al-aʿājim)”. Al-Masʿūdī mentioned him in relation to a massive book about ancient Iran, which could only be found in the possession of mawbadhs like Ēmēd.Footnote 77
The geographer Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (d. 626/1229) also quoted Ēmēd as an authority on the Sasanian kings, with special knowledge about the ruined palace known as Īwān Kisrā near Baghdad.Footnote 78 Yāqūt quoted Ēmēd on the authority of another man named Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī (d. after 250/961), who wrote a well-known history of his home town of Isfahan and had much to say about Iran in the pre-Islamic period. We know from his history that Ḥamza relied on Zoroastrian priests for information, and Ēmēd was clearly one of these informants.Footnote 79 Taken as a whole, the two reports suggest that Ēmēd was in contact with contemporary Muslim intellectuals and served as an important mediator of traditions about the Sasanian kings. The interest he showed in non-Zoroastrians throughout his rivāyat work may have stemmed from these encounters. It may also have stemmed from his role overseeing a large and geographically diverse flock of Zoroastrian believers across Iran, many of whom lived alongside Muslims.
On balance, the rivāyat of Ēmēd is much more varied in its questions and detailed in its answers than the rivāyat of Ādurfarnbag. Still, in contrast to the Dādestān ī Dēnīg of Manuščihr, it returns to the familiar set of themes, including dead matter, marriage, and the structure of the family. New topics also appear, including consanguineous marriage (xwēdōdah, the highest form of sexual union, along with the lowest, sodomy) and the fate of the soul after death.Footnote 80 There is also a lengthy discussion of priests, which reflects some of the same concerns we find in the work of Manuščihr. Yet Ēmēd pushed the conversation in new directions, for instance, discussing the status of sinful priests and of priests who were defiled by fighting in an army against the enemy.Footnote 81 Possibly reflecting the precarious state of the clergy at a time of “hardship, confusion, [and] misery”, Ēmēd told his audience that to be obedient to priests was to fulfil the law.Footnote 82 Reading against the grain, one wonders whether this was a statement of clerical strength or weakness. Was it actually a plea to fall in line at a time when the clergy's authority was eroding under pressure from apostasy and the emergence of new centres of leadership in the Zoroastrian community? Both are possible.
As one would expect, conversion constitutes a major topic throughout the work. In one passage, Ēmēd puzzled over what to do with a family made up of a father, wife, daughter, and two sons when one of these sons went to a foreign place and converted to an infidel faith (ō dād ī agdēnīh šud būd, perhaps reflecting the well-known practice of emigrating to the amṣār – the Muslim garrison towns, which had become religiously-mixed cities by the ʿAbbasid period). The other brother then died. Meanwhile, the daughter married and gave birth to a boy. Ēmēd was asked to address the fate of the daughter, specifically whether she was allowed to remain the pādixšāy wife of her husband or if she had to become the ayōgēn stūr of the apostate brother. The role of the ayōgēn stūr was to provide heirs to a male relative who had died without children of his own through a process of posthumous adoption. Because apostasy was considered equivalent to death (as it was for some Jews and Christians at the time), the question was, did the sister have to serve as the proxy wife of her “deceased” brother? Provided the apostate brother did not have a pādixšāy wife and child of his own, Ēmēd stated that the sister's primary duty was to her brother, and she was henceforth joined to her husband as an ayōgēn.Footnote 83 Although this scenario reflects the notoriously complex and idiosyncratic details of Zoroastrian family law, it is not hard to see a social concern behind it: what did Zoroastrians owe to relatives who had abandoned their communities – not through natural death – but through conversion, presumably to Islam?Footnote 84
Conversion also had profound consequences for inheritance. In one case, Ēmēd was asked about a son who became an infidel and whether this man was entitled to inherit from his Zoroastrian mother and father. As mentioned above, this is a rare example of a passage which gives just enough information to know the religion of the apostate: Ēmēd referred to the circumcision of the convert and the disposal of his foreskin, signifying that he was talking about Muslims (though conversion to Judaism is technically possible, too). If the man did not repent, we read, then he automatically forfeited his inheritance and the family's property passed into communal ownership. Ēmēd called this principle “to the first of the ‘faithful’” (meaning that the property belonged to whichever Zoroastrian managed to seize it first). But in an interesting admission of the difficult conditions facing Zoroastrians in the ʿAbbasid period, Ēmēd stated that it was sometimes difficult to stop converts from taking their inheritance. This was presumably because of the high status they enjoyed as Muslims, which enabled them to act with relative impunity when they seized family assets (though it is unclear how often this would have happened, since Islamic law theoretically forbade inter-confessional inheritance).Footnote 85 If Zoroastrians did manage to retake their property, Ēmēd said, “They ought to arrange things in the most careful and least harmful way”.Footnote 86 Again, one wonders whether there is a social reality behind this question. To one degree or another, Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians all regarded converts as outsiders to their original communities, and therefore as ineligible to inherit. But all three groups had to reckon with the reality that Muslim converts enjoyed privileged access to social and political power, and this meant they could not necessarily be stopped from taking what was theirs.Footnote 87 Furthermore, we know that apostates sometimes occupied a legal grey zone, in which they continued to inherit despite their conversion.Footnote 88
While Zoroastrian jurists may have been unforgiving towards those who remained outside the community, they showed leniency towards those who were willing to return and repent. Again, this is a feature of Zoroastrian law with strong parallels in Jewish and Christian texts. In all three cases, it was considered preferable to recover wayward sheep than to lose them permanently to an infidel faith. As we have seen, Kiel and Skjærvø have discussed the laws governing apostasy in Zoroastrianism, so I will not dwell on this point for long.Footnote 89 Suffice it to say, the most interesting part of Ēmēd's discussion deals with those “infidels whose infidel faith is inherited and not from selfhood” (agdēnān kē-šān agdēnīh az abārmand nē az xwadīh) – in other words, the descendants of converts who ended up outside Zoroastrianism not by their own choice, but by that of their ancestors. Ēmēd's attitude towards these people was remarkably liberal: provided an individual “acts like an Iranian [and] abstains from a sin that is a sin in the Good Religion, and performs a good deed that is a good deed in the Good Religion to the best of his ability”, his infidel status was not considered a sin. Unfortunately, the chapter trails off at this point, so it is difficult to establish precisely what Ēmēd had in mind. What is clear is that the text shows sympathy for what we might call “Zoroastrians outside the Zoroastrian fold”, members of a vast Muslim (or Jewish or Christian) population who were descended from Zoroastrian converts. In a way, we might see the passage as a Zoroastrian version of the well-known Christian debate over “salvation outside the church”. This applied particularly to virtuous infidels with a family connection to the Good Religion. Again, this seems to be a practical question reflecting the rapid Islamization of Iranian society and concerns about the salvation of infidel relatives.Footnote 90
As we have already seen, Zoroastrian jurists often fretted over the prospect of sexual contact with outsiders. Ēmēd was no different in this respect from other contemporary priests, as we see in a passage in which he discusses a Zoroastrian man who has had relations with an infidel woman. What was the status of the child which issued from this union? If the woman was already married, should the child be raised as a Zoroastrian with its father or as an infidel with its mother? Ēmēd was resolute that the child should be reared as a Zoroastrian, though such a position (to say nothing of the scenario itself) strikes me as wildly unrealistic.Footnote 91 That being said, we encounter a similar passage in a later Pahlavi responsa work known as the Wizirgerd ī Dēnīg, which discusses a child born to a Zoroastrian man and an infidel woman (juddēn) who ended up serving as his father's proxy (stūr) – again, automatically assuming that the child would be raised as a Zoroastrian!Footnote 92
Earlier, we saw how the priest Ādurfarnbag attempted to regulate interactions between Zoroastrians and non-Zoroastrians in mixed settings such as caravanserais and markets. One similar environment was the bathhouse, especially one owned by infidels (garm-ābag ī agdēnān), where believers and non-believers went to wash side-by-side. For Ēmēd, the main problem with a bathhouse was the risk of encountering hixr and nasāy, that is, dead matter shed by the body (such as hair or nails) and dead matter in the form of human flesh. Because infidels – possibly meaning Muslims – did not protect water or fire from these pollutants, there was a high risk of contamination. Ēmēd's solution was simple: if Zoroastrians wished to use a bathhouse, especially for medicinal purposes, they could simply build one of their own. After all, he noted that the infidels had originally taken the idea from Zoroastrians, who used to build bath houses near their fire temples. Once again, the question and answer reflect a plausible social reality, given Zoroastrians’ concern for pollution and contact with infidels.Footnote 93
Conclusion
This article has attempted to accomplish two things: first, to show what scholars stand to gain by integrating Pahlavi sources into the social history of Iran and the medieval Middle East; and second, to highlight a group of Zoroastrian legal texts whose contents reflect the changing Islamic environment of the day. Through these, the article has tried to explain how a small circle of elite Zoroastrian priests used the instruments of law to help their flocks navigate the changed circumstances of the post-conquest world. Now, what does all this mean for the social history of Zoroastrianism and the gradual Islamization of Iranian society?
Efforts to explain the collapse of the Sasanian Empire and Iran's conversion to Islam frequently fall back on well-known tropes. One of these is that the empire was rotten from within, too consumed with petty rivalries at the court and too distracted by la dolce vita to care about – and thus halt – the Arab invasions. The collapse of the Sasanian Empire is sometimes given as an explanation for the allegedly rapid conversion of Iran to Islam. Since Zoroastrianism was the official religion of the toppled state, the logic goes, it could no longer thrive in a world in which this imperial patronage had dried up. Since priests were also government functionaries, they found themselves suddenly rudderless, no longer capable of protecting their flocks, who were irresistibly drawn to the religion of Iran's new rulers. In short, Zoroastrianism is sometimes portrayed as a brittle, aristocratic religion, destined to disappear along with the brittle, aristocratic system that sustained it.
There is little to recommend this way of seeing things. In recent decades, scholars have arrived at a more nuanced understanding of what led to the death of the Sasanian Empire. This was less a result of some intrinsic flaw at the highest echelons of the state than a consequence of the Arabs’ strategic advantages.Footnote 94 These included their prowess on the battlefield, their capacity to co-opt local elites, and their pragmatism in administering the newly conquered territories. There is only slightly more to recommend the thesis about Iran's de-Zoroastrianization. While it is wrong to view Zoroastrians as powerless and passive in the face of the new religion, according to our best estimates, Islam may have spread more rapidly in Iran than in other parts of the early Islamic empire, such as Egypt or Syria.Footnote 95 Be that as it may, we must acknowledge that we understand this change all too little. What is certain is that the emergence of an Islamic society in Iran over the course of the medieval period can be attributed to myriad factors – political, economic, intellectual, and otherwise – and our best explanations must take this full range of factors into account.
How do Pahlavi legal sources tie into these wider debates? As I have argued, the responsa literature of the ʿAbbasid period helps us see how elite Zoroastrian priests – whose predecessors in Late Antiquity had been custodians of a vast legal, administrative, and political system – were forced to reconceive of themselves as leaders of a dhimmī community instead. This entailed shedding many of their claims to worldly power, at least of the kind which stemmed from the existence of a Zoroastrian state. Instead, they refocused on becoming shepherds of a discrete confessional community. No longer did these priests provide rulings on taxation, capital punishment, and the running of government offices. They focused instead on internal matters of the Zoroastrian faithful, especially marriage, inheritance, purity, and pollution. In this, elite Zoroastrian clergy were not so different from high-ranking Christian and Jewish leaders of the time. These clergy also used law to establish their authority over dhimmī flocks, ceding much else to the jurisdiction of the state. While their sphere of influence was much diminished vis-à-vis the situation in Late Antiquity, they were no less proactive in using law to lay claim to their place at the head of the Good Religion.
Thus, we should see the composition and dissemination of legal texts as part of a broader power play aimed affirming the authority of elite priests at a time of great uncertainty. This occurred in competition with other centres of power in Iranian society, most notably, Iran's Muslim rulers, but perhaps also non-Zoroastrian communities (including Christians, who were actively proselytizing at this time) and alternative claimants to leadership among the faithful (who can be difficult to detect in the sources, but must have included Zoroastrian lay elites and even non-priestly religious leaders).Footnote 96 In short, one way of reading the responsa is as part of a campaign to refashion the adherents of the Good Religion into respectable members of the broader ahl al-dhimma. They were also part of a campaign to secure the power of priests at the head of this refashioned community.
The responsa reveal the Zoroastrian clergy to be leaders of tremendous creativity and flexibility. Remaking a religion from a position of dominance to one of subservience was no small feat, yet this is precisely what the clergy of the ʿAbbasid period attempted to do. Their core mission was to conserve their flock at a moment of political, social, and economic marginalization. It was also to create laws which discouraged things like conversion, intermarriage, and the flight of wealth from the community. At the same time, their goal was to establish a modus vivendi that would enable the faithful to live alongside Muslims constructively. This entailed erecting walls in some contexts – including especially dangerous settings like the bedroom – yet creating passageways for communication in others – including less threatening spaces such as the market. Far from being brittle and unimaginative, the authors of the responsa were adept at encouraging behaviours which walked a fine line between outright rejection of the heathen world and constructive engagement with it. This they wrapped in the language of an unchanging religious tradition – what Zoroastrians called the dēn – so as to make their innovations look safe and conservative.
This article is a first step towards showing the potential of Pahlavi sources to enrich our understanding of Iranian and Middle Eastern history at this crucial juncture. They reveal that the experiences of Zoroastrians had strong parallels with those of other non-Muslim communities. Indeed, a path forward in research could be to compare and contrast how Zoroastrian, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim jurists used law to wrestle with common social dilemmas. This would no doubt reveal fascinating similarities, but also important differences. Yet this is an exercise best left for another time.
