Voices Across Boundaries Vol.1 No.3: What Is Community?
Zoroastrian.com
Internet reunites a scattered community
by Dolly Dastoor
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The Zarathushti (Zoroastrian) religion originated in the Iranian plateau and was the state religion of three great Persian empires, the Achaemenians (559–334 BCE ), the Parthians (250 BCE–227 CE) and the Sassanians (226–651 CE). It was dominant for more than a thousand years, stretching across central Asia, west towards Rome and Greece, east into India, north into Russia and south into Egypt.
Under the great Achaemenian King Cyrus, honoured in the Hebrew Scriptures for ending the Babylonian exile of the Jews and allowing them to return to Jerusalem, the Zarathushtis gave the world the first "Declaration of Human Rights." The Edict of Cyrus, a clay cylinder with inscriptions in cuneiform script, was discovered in 1879; a copy is displayed at the United Nations building in New York. Fifty years later, under Darius the Great, they gave the world its first courier postal system, with a motto -- "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" -- later immortalized by the U.S. Postal System and inscribed on the façade of the General Post Office in New York.
But this powerful community disintegrated with the seventh-century Arab invasion of the Persian Empire. The Zarathushtis lost their political empire, and the small band of the faithful strove to safeguard their religion and with time came to stress the religious dimension rather than the communal aspect of their group identity.
In 971 CE a disparate group of Zarathushtis left their native Khorasan in northeast Iran by sea and arrived in Sanjan, a town in Gujarat in western India. Safeguarding their religion was the initial motivation of their flight from Iran, and the religious dimension was the chief feature of the group. This religious community remained distinct and separate from the mainstream Hindus, and its members were free to practise their religion. The Indian environment allowed the group to grow into a very progressive community, making contributions well beyond its small size.
The Zarathushtis who remained in Iran following the Islamization of the country had a different history from their kin who found refuge in India. Successive waves of invasion of Iran, by the Abbasid caliphs in the ninth century and the Mongols in the thirteenth century, all spurred by religious fervour, led to the systematic decimation of the Zarathushti community. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the chief dastur (priest) withdrew the group to the inhospitable desert cities of Yazd and Kerman. It is here that the Zarathushtis stayed, a small community with minimal contact with the world beyond, until late in the nineteenth century. They remained a religious-ethnic grouping reduced to minority status over a period of 1,300 years, domiciled in two vastly different religious-cultural milieus. There was very little interaction between the two communal groups.
By the middle of the twentieth century, with the end of British rule in India (1947), the Zarathushtis began to look westward to settle. There were small waves of settlement in Britain, the United States and Canada, as well as Australia. They were joined in the early 1980s by substantial numbers of Iranian Zarathushtis, compelled to leave a fundamentalist Islamic Iran to escape the aftermath and political fallout from the 1979 Islamic revolution and the fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty. Zarathushtis from Iran and India, who had had little contact with each other, found themselves interacting for the first time. At first the contact was guarded, and limited to the people in their own areas of settlement.
As Zarathushtis with technological skills began acquiring jobs in the high tech industry in Silicon Valley and elsewhere during the boom years of the seventies and eighties, they met Zarathushtis from other parts of the world working in the same industry. Chat groups were formed to exchange perfunctory messages. This later grew into the Zoroastrian Alias, a newsgroup with Zarathushtis from all over the world joining in. The latest addition are the neo-Zarathushtis from the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan who wish to reclaim their Zarathushti identity.
The technological advances of cyberspace have suddenly brought together disparate Zarathushtis from different cultural milieus who had not interacted with each other for more than a thousand years. With information exchanged with a flick of a finger between Zarathushtis in Azerbaijan and Singapore, Houston and Montreal, this cyber community has grown into a virtual nation, capable of organizing a World Congress in the year 2000 with more than 2,000 people attending, and giving birth to such organizations as the Zarathushti World Chamber of Commerce, the Zoroastrian Women’s International Network and the Mobeds’ Council. The cyber community is able to mobilize Zarathushtis around the world to raise funds for medical aid, as it did for baby Nazin in Finland who needed a heart transplant. Prayer sessions were arranged globally at the same time. Scholarly discourses on different meanings of the Avesta, the Zarathushti Scriptures, have also flourished in the cyber community. I had no idea that there were so many people who had done such in-depth study of the religion.
But this growing cyber community has its downside as well. It is becoming polarized, with each group interpreting the Scriptures against its own cultural background. It is much easier to lash profanities at a faceless address than at a person in front of you. The enormous amount of information produced is available on different Zarathushti websites, but its authenticity is often in doubt.
Maybe this will change with the next generation. The Internet communities are no different from geographical communities. They are what we make of them. They are social levellers. For Zarathushtis, the Internet has been a boon, melting away 1,300 years of anxiety and separation and joining us into a single virtual but very tangible community.
Dolly Dastoor is a clinical psychologist, former president of the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America and a member of the Voices Across Boundaries editorial board.