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You are here: Home / Archive / Iraq’s Zoroastrian revival as a reaction against Islamic extremism?

Iraq’s Zoroastrian revival as a reaction against Islamic extremism?

June 1, 2015 by Jean-François Mayer

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In the current turbulence in the Middle East comes intriguing reports that locals in a rural part of Sulaymaniyah province, as well as in other parts of Iraqi Kurdistan, have started to revive the Zoroastrian religion, a faith that had more or less disappeared from those areas for centuries, writes Alaa Latif in Niqash: Briefings from Inside and Across Iraq (http://www.niqash.org, May 28). This phenomenon is understood by the people involved as a return to an ancient religion they see as associated with the culture of the Kurdish people. According to the article, the new Zoroastrian believers are not connected to still existing Zoroastrian communities such as those found in Iran—that do not proselytize anyway. They are rather said to represent a spontaneous movement in reaction to religious instability in the area as well as to radical Islamism. They intend to build temples in the region as well as to get Zoroastrianism recognized. However, some local observers, such as MP Haji Karwan, claim that those propagating Zoroastrianism “are few and far between.”

In the absence of statistical data regarding that new trend, the editor of the Middle East Journal, Michael Collins Dunn, writes on his blog (http://mideasti.blogspot.com, June 1) that the supposed trend seems to be regionally localized. It should be placed into the context of areas where elements of Zoroastrianism have been incorporated into the beliefs of a variety of small, syncretistic religious groups. He points that, while there is no consensus about where Zoroaster was born, he represents a religious figure and culture hero not only to Persians, but also to Kurds. [In its November 2013 issue, RW published an article on ethnic Kurds in the Caucasus starting to emphasize a Yezidi identity instead of a Kurdish one. There have also been attempts to revive the Zoroastrian legacy in Azerbaijan or Tajikistan, as observed twenty years ago by Shahin Bekhradnia (“The Tajik Case for a Zoroastrian Identity”, Religion, State and Society, 22/1, 1994). All cases illustrate striking attempts to reconfigure and redefine identities in those different areas, and how an old religion can become a resource for such purposes.]

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