Ancient religions clash in modern Iran

The village of Chak Chak consists of a shrine perched beneath a towering cliff face.
The village of Chak Chak consists of a shrine perched beneath a towering cliff face. Photograph: Robert Tait.



She was one of thousands of Zoroastrians gathered at Chak Chak in the central Iranian desert for a five-day pilgrimage that is the biggest annual event in the religion's calendar.




Kourash Niknam, the sole Zoroastrian MP in Iran's parliament, insisted the gesture was voluntary. "We just wanted to show respect because it is they who rule and we are living in their community," he said.

Yet it highlighted the difficult plight of Iran's estimated 25,000 Zoroastrians under the country's Shia Islamic governing system.



Nor do they feel wholly free in a land where their faith was the majority denomination until the forced mass conversions to Islam that followed the seventh century Arab invasion.

"We don't have the right to make programmes about our religion," complained Mr Niknam. "I have no platform on radio or television to go and speak about Zoroastrianism. We cannot get any budget for building a new fire temple when mosques are being built one after another."

Yet many Zoroastrians say they feel better treated by their Muslim fellow-countrymen than under the last shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Paradoxically, they attribute this to the uniform dress code imposed by the 1979 Islamic revolution, combined with a decline in religious prejudice among younger Muslims.

"Before the revolution, all Muslim women in my home town of Yazd wore chadors and only we Zoroastrians didn't," said Goharbanoo, 40. "The Friday prayer leader ruled that on Fridays, Zoroastrian men had to wear white and women traditional clothes. It meant people could recognise us easily and they would be very rude to us. When we went into a grocer's shop, we wouldn't be allowed to touch the fruit. We even sat on separate benches at school and had separate drinking water.

"Thanks to the revolution, everyone dresses the same now. People back then were more religious. Today's generation is ashamed of the prejudice of their ancestors."

Some Zoroastrians have sought refugee status in America under an officially backed programme to help Iranian religious minorities. But Behzad, 31, an unemployed computer graduate who complained of being denied a gun during his national military service, rejected that option. "Why should we leave? This is our mother country," he said. "Iranian culture is wonderful. Western culture is stress, stress, stress."

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