Is Zoroastrianism Still Practiced Today? The Parsi Diaspora and the Modern Community
Yes — but not many, and the demographic trend is the wrong way. The modern Zoroastrian population is somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 worldwide, with the largest community in India (the Parsis, perhaps 60,000 to 70,000 people) and a smaller community in Iran (the Zartushti, perhaps 15,000 to 25,000 in the cities of Yazd and Kerman and the villages around them). The rest is the diaspora: Los Angeles, Toronto, London, Sydney, Dubai, with fire temples, mobeds, and Gatha days observed in the same form as in the Indian and Iranian homelands. The future of the religion depends on the community’s ability to maintain its identity in the face of intermarriage, low birth rates, and assimilation. The recent accounts I work from are Michael Stausberg’s Zoroastrianism (2022), the relevant chapters in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (2015, ed. Stausberg and Yuhan Vevaina), and the work of the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America (FEZANA). For the Iranian community, the work of Farhang Mehr and the Zoroastrian Association of Iran is the working reference. The cluster on Zoroastrianism treats the religious tradition in detail, and the History of the Persian Empire treats the historical background.
The Parsi community of India
The Parsi community, the Parsi of the English sources, is descended from a group of Zoroastrians who migrated from Iran to the Indian subcontinent in the eighth and tenth centuries CE, fleeing the Arab conquest. The traditional date of the migration, 716 CE, and the legend of the Jadi Rana of Gujarat, are preserved in the Qissa-i Sanjan (the earliest redaction, the Bayān-i Sanjān of Bahman Kaikobad, is sixteenth century; the tradition is older but not independently verifiable for the early date). The Parsis settled in Gujarat, on the western coast of India, and later moved to the major cities of western India, particularly Mumbai, where they developed a prosperous mercantile and industrial community.
The Parsi community is a successful religious diaspora in modern history. The Tata family, founders of the Tata Group; Homi Bhabha, the founder of the Indian nuclear programme; the conductor Zubin Mehta; the novelist Rohinton Mistry; the industrialist and cricket patron Pallonji Mistry; the jurist Soli Sorabjee; the field hockey legend Dhyan Chand’s Parsi contemporaries. The Parsi Tower of Silence at Malabar Hill, the fire temple at Udvada, and the calendar of Gatha days are distinctive marks of Indian religious pluralism, and the Parsi community is a respected minority in modern India.
The Parsi community has been in decline, however, for several decades. The Parsi population of Mumbai, the centre of the community, has fallen from a peak of about 100,000 in the mid-twentieth century to around 57,000 in the 2011 census (the 40,000 figure sometimes cited is a low-end estimate; the 2011 census is the most reliable number), and the average age of the community is rising rapidly. The fertility rate is around 0.8 children per woman, well below the replacement rate. The community has responded with the Jiyo Parsi programme, a fertility and matchmaking programme launched in 2013 with the support of the Indian government and the Parzor Foundation, but the long-term trend is the wrong way and the response is too small.
The Iranian Zoroastrian community
The Iranian Zoroastrian community, the Zartushti, is the second largest Zoroastrian community in the modern world, and the community has preserved the priestly tradition and the fire temples in the desert cities of Yazd and Kerman, in central and southeastern Iran. The Iranian Zoroastrian community was the largest in the world until the twentieth century, and the community has maintained the priestly tradition through more than thirteen centuries of Islamic rule. The fire of Yazd, an atash behram that has been burning, by tradition, since the 470s CE, is the most important religious site of the Iranian community.
The Iranian Zoroastrian community has also experienced a decline in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, due to emigration, intermarriage, and economic pressure. The community has lost many of its members to the diaspora, particularly to the United States, Canada, and Europe, and the population has fallen from a peak of perhaps 100,000 in the mid-twentieth century to 15,000–25,000 in the early twenty-first century. The Iranian Zoroastrian community is relatively well-integrated into the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the community has a single reserved seat in the Iranian Majlis, its own recognised holidays, and its own anjomans (associations) in Yazd, Kerman, and Tehran. The dakhmeh, the Towers of Silence, are in decline: the Iranian government has restricted the practice of sky burial in recent years, and the vulture population of the Iranian plateau has not been hit by the diclofenac crisis of South Asia but is under other pressures.
The Zoroastrian diaspora
The Zoroastrian diaspora has become a major centre of the religious and cultural life of the community. The major diaspora communities are in the United States, particularly in the Los Angeles area (the largest single Zoroastrian community in the world outside India, by some estimates); in Canada, particularly in Toronto; in the United Kingdom, particularly in London; in Australia, particularly in Sydney; and in the Persian Gulf states, particularly in Dubai. The diaspora communities have built new fire temples, established cultural centres, and created organisations to support the preservation of the religious tradition.
The diaspora has produced a flourishing literary and scholarly tradition. The Iranian-American scholar Farhang Mehr wrote The Zoroastrian Tradition (1990), the best short introduction to the modern community in English. Mary Boyce, the great British Iranist of the twentieth century, was based at SOAS and trained a generation of Zoroastrian studies scholars. The Fezana Journal in North America, Parsiana in India, and Zoroastrian Heritage in Iran are the principal diaspora periodicals, and the Zoroastrian Studies programmes at UCLA, the University of Toronto, and SOAS in London are the principal academic centres.
The future of Zoroastrianism
The future is uncertain. The community is small, the birth rate is low, the intermarriage rate is high, and the rate of emigration from the traditional centres is significant. The orthodox position on intermarriage and conversion is the harder side of the tradition to defend in the diaspora, and the disputes are real. The orthodox tradition prohibits marriage with non-Zoroastrians and prohibits conversion to Zoroastrianism; the reformist tradition allows both. The community is also divided on the ordination of women as mobeds, with some communities allowing it and others not. These are the major fault lines of the modern community, and the answers that the community gives to them will determine the shape of the Zoroastrian tradition in the twenty-first century.
The community has been active in the modern interfaith movement. Zoroastrian representatives have participated in the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the World Council of Churches, and the modern interfaith dialogues. The community is, on the world religious scene, larger than its numbers would suggest: the antiquity of the tradition, the role of Cyrus the Great in the Western imagination, and the visibility of the Parsis in the Indian diaspora give the religion a presence disproportionate to its small size.