Episode 415: Zoroastrianism > Freddie Mercury
Transcript! (because accessibility is mandatory)
PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.
Shownotes! (because citations are political)
Can you believe it? We are 15 episodes into HISTORY OF THE WORLD (RELIGIONS), Part 1 — and we have even more coming for you! On this episode, we are demonstrating why Zoroastrianism > Freddie Mercury. This episode, we’re joined by Kainaz Amaria, a Fulbright scholar, filmmaker, journalist, visual artist, and Zoroastrian.
The 101! (in which we did the professor-work)
Religion: it’s imperial! We started calling the cluster of things we now call religion (rituals! Sacred texts! Holy spaces! Ways of marking time and stages of life as special! Ways of knowing and explanations for how things got to be the way they are! Et cetera!)--we started calling this cluster “religion” precisely AS we started having things like nation-states, and those nation-states started using this cluster to explain why they could and should and would take over the territory and resources and humans of other regions.
And boy howdy do we see imperialism in action when we’re talking about Zoroastrianism.
As we’ve been saying for what feels like forever, religion is imperial. And Zoroastrianism is one of the ways people do religion in the world (duh). So learning more about Zoroastrianism makes you more religiously literate. This is a small tradition compared to, say, Buddhism, but it’s still internally diverse and deeply interesting.
Since most folks do not know what Zoroastrianism is, we started at the beginning. Zoroastrianism is an ancient Persian monotheistic religion and is possibly/probably the world’s oldest monotheism. Most of the world’s Zoroastrians live in India (and also Iran). I know Zoroastrians in India also call themselves Parsis. In fact, in India they call themselves (and are called) Parsis because they’re Persian — Parsi basically means Persian, and Pars (or Fars) is a region of Iran still today.
Also, because imperialism is important, you should know practitioners of this tradition did not start out calling themselves Zoroastrians. The tradition was founded by a man named Zoroaster or Zarathustra and – surprise, surprise – when European colonizers showed up in India, they asked about founders and holy books and then started calling this community after the name of its founder. Thus: Zoroastrianism in textbooks, Parsis for many community members, and other names for self in other periods.
Zoroastrianism is often summed up by: good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.
This effort is reflected in a symbol called the faravahar – this example works really well in an audio medium, obvs, but picture a big beardy dude with huge three tiered wings, facing to the left. The three tiers of his left-hand wings represent good thoughts, good words, and good deeds; the tiers on the right-hand wings represent bad thoughts, bad words, and bad deeds. Zoroastrians are supposed to turn toward the good and away from the bad; some Zoroastrians wear the faravahar as a reminder for them to do just that.
Even though it’s comparatively small, with something like 200,000 practitioners worldwide, Zoroastrianism is still very much a global religion!
There are Zoroastrians all over the world—and Zoroastrianism is shaped by its global spread, sometimes under explicit religious persecution, other times based on broader, European imperialist distaste for their colonized subjects, and other times because of how people move about in modernity. Most Zoroastrians live in India and Iran, as we said above, but there are also Zoroastrian communities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, the UK, Australia, Zanzibar, Kenya, New Zealand, and the USA. So, in short: small religion by population, not by global spread, and some of that we live everywhere thing is about, you guessed it, colonialism.
Guest Expert! (because together we are a genius)
Kainaz Amaria joined us to share her experiences as a Fulbright scholar documenting the Zoroastrian community in India, her experiences as a member of this small-but-global community, and her approach to religions visually.
Ms. Amaria is Vox’s Visual Editor, formerly an editor for NPR’s Visual Team, and before that she was a freelance photographer in Mumbai for outlets like the New York Times, Vogue India, and Reuters.
Little Bit Leave It! (in which we leave you a little bit to remember)
Megan wanted us to remember that Zoroastrians are still Zoroastrianing! When this community makes the news, the story is usually about the people and the religion supposedly dying out. But Zoroastrianism is NOT dying out – it’s just changing, because the communities who do Zoroastrianism are changing.
Ilyse wanted us to remember colonialism, and why the patterns of movement — like Freddie Mercury’s own family! — reflect colonial violence.
If You Don’t Know, Now You Know! (in which we get one factoid each)
Ilyse talked to us a lot about Freddie Mercury, much beloved late lead singer of Queen, who is (arguably) the world’s most recognizable Zoroastrian/Parsi.
Megan cheated and gave us two factoids this week. She’s unstoppable. First, Megan shared with us the relationship between India’s PM Modi and Parsis being held up as a model minority within his (very Hindu nationalist) government.
Second she shared a deeply embarrassing and problematic memory of our cherished guest, Kainaz Amaria, who happened to be Megan’s college roommate for a minute. And this is a story of Megan’s tragic love of Kipling meeting an actual-factual person of South Asian descent. Shenanigans ensue. Work has been done to repair and reflect.
Homework! (because there’s always more to learn)
Megan wants us to check out Kainaz Amaria’s recent work on the website for Vox, where she is the Visual Editor.
She’s done some really striking photography-driven political reporting; I’ve especially appreciated her voice and insights on how racism and exploitative images of human suffering inform reporting on people of color particularly in times of crisis. We’ll link to her Vox page in the shownotes, but listeners might be especially interested in the piece she did with Sigal Samuel (former religion editor at Atlantic, now senior reporter at Vox) on 45’s praising India for religious freedom while anti-Muslim violence was erupting in February 2020.
Ms. Amaria also curated a fascinating (and deeply upsetting) gallery of images from the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem in 2018, which can be found here.
The must-watch piece of Ms. Amaria’s work is the short film she produced as a Fulbright scholar in Mumbai in 2010. It’s called “Being Zoroastrian,” runs about 10 minutes, and provides complex personal and community insights into contemporary Parsi belonging.
Beyond Ms. Amaria’s work, check out:
A piece from Middle East Eye about the Zoroastrian priestesses of Iran, available here
Megan likes to juxtapose the piece Shaun Walker wrote for the Guardian called “The Last of the Zoroastrians” with Amy dePaul’s “Zoroastrianism Rises in North America” for WSJ.
Megan also did a big lecture thread on Zoroastrianism when she was teaching Global Religions remotely.
While prepping for this episode, Megan found a cool item about ancient Zoroastrian texts being found in China, written by Ursula Sims-Williams, who is Curator of Iranian languages at the British Library and thus, I assume, knows whereof she writes. Check it out.
And lastly and perhaps most randomly, Dave Malloy’s “Moby Dick: A Musical Reckoning,” includes a fourth-wall break moment where a character does a real quick compare and contrast between Zoroastrianism and Islam.
Ilyse also assigned things!
Mahnaz Moazami, Zoroastrianism : A Collection of Articles from the Encyclopaedia Iranica. 2016.
Mitra Sharafi, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947 (Studies in Legal History)
Jenny Rose has some great stuff. She has two intros, one more academic and the other more for mass audiences:
Zoroastrianism: An Introduction (I.B. Tauris, 2011)
Zoroastrianism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2011)
But the one Ilyse likes best because colonialism and intellectual history is: The Image of Zoroaster: The Persian Mage Through European Eyes (Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2000)
For YA with a dash of angst about belonging, queerness, and the background noise of being Zoroastrian: Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram and its sequel, Darius the Great Deserves Better
Ilyse couldn’t leave Queen out of her recs. Freddie Mercury, aka Farrokh Bulsara, whose own life–of Parsi-Indian descent but born in Zanzibar, who later Anglicizes his name for all the reasons–shows the colonialism & violence inherent in the system. Go listen wherever you get music, since no one consumes albums as wholes anymore, says this millennial, I guess. But if you do, Queen and Jazz and A Night at the Opera are places to start.
Wanna hear Parsis talking about Freddie? Check here.