- 02 Dec 2014
Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrian Communities in Modern Iran
Abstract:
What does it mean to be Zoroastrian in Iran today? How have Zoroastrians negotiated their minority status in order to practise their religion and survive as a community? What makes them different from their fellow Iranians, and from Zoroastrians living outside Iran, and what are the sources from which they derive their sense of community history? These are some of the themes of self-definition that will be discussed with reference to a large corpus of interviews undertaken in Iran over the past six years. Through the personal testimony of Zoroastrians living in towns and villages across Iran, as well as in Tehran, an attempt will be made to account for some of the changes to their religious and social lives that have taken place since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
About the Speakers
Lecturer, Department of the Study of Religions
School of Oriental and African Studies
Sarah Stewart studied Asian Civilisations (BA) at the Australian National University with Prof. A.L. Basham. She completed her PGCE (London) and MA and PhD in religions at SOAS. Formerly Deputy Director of the London Middle East Institute (LMEI) at SOAS she joined the Department of the Study of Religions full-time in 2014 as a lecturer in Zoroastrianism, where she also convenes a course on Muslim Britain: perspectives and realities. Currently she is developing a distance learning module for the Centre for International Relations and Diplomacy (CISD) at SOAS on Muslim Minorities in a Global Context.
She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Middle East in London magazine published by the LMEI, a member of the Advisory Committee of the Centre for Iranian Studies, SOAS, the Advisory Council of the British Institute for Persian Studies (BIPS), and the Academic Council of the Iran Heritage Foundation. She is co-convenor, with Sussan Babaie (previously with Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis), of the annual Idea of Iran series of symposia, established in 2006, and co-editor of the proceedings published by IB Tauris. In 2013 she was the lead curator of the exhibition: The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in history and imagination at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, which is due to go to the National Museum in Delhi in 2016.
