Well, they were taking over the country, and they didn’t do it in a very nice way. But after Persia was conquered and resistance was put to an end, while state support for Zoroastrianism was removed, there wasn’t immediately much persecution.
Same link:
Destruction of Fire Temples & Libraries. Murder of Priests
The destruction of Zoroastrian places of worship started during the conquest campaign. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (R. Hillenbrand, P. J. Bearman, C.E. Bosworth, editors) notes under Masdjids in the Central Islamic Lands that those fire temples that were not destroyed were converted into mosques. In Istakhr and Bukhara, the Chahar Taqi Zoroastrian temples with their four arched openings were turned into mosques by setting a mihrab (prayer niche) on the place of the arch facing (and therefore nearest) to the qibla (the direction of Mecca).
According to a BBC article, “Many libraries were burnt and much cultural heritage was lost.”
Further, thousands of Zoroastrian priests were executed, hundreds of temples destroyed, religious texts burnt, and the use of the ancient Avestan as well as Persian languages was prohibited [cf. Edward Granville Browne, A year Amongst the Persians (1893)]
Humiliation as Untouchables
Prof. John Hinnells writes that Zoroastrians were identified as ‘najis’ and therefore impure and a source of contamination to Muslims. This label made the Zoroastrians untouchables and unfit to live alongside Muslims. As a further consequence, this meant Zoroastrians could be forced to leave the cities and were subject to all manner of restrictions in the presence of Muslims in all spheres of life.
Under the Umayyads (661-750 CE)
The Umayyads completed the Arab conquest of Iran. Yazid-ibn-Mohalleb, a Umayyad general lead an expedition to subdue the province of Mazandaran. As the Arabs won battle after battle, the general ordered that all captives to be hanged on both sides of the road leading to its capital. When the provincial capital was subdued, he took 6,000 of its Zoroastrian residents as slaves and ordered the massacre of the remaining 12,000 residents. In Gorgan, he ordered that the watermills be run for three days by draining the blood of its victims. He is reputed to have mixed the bread flour produced with the blood of his victims, feeding the bread to his army and partaking of the meal himself.
The Umayyads made Arabic the official language of of Iran, and while the newly converted Iranians accepted the new language as their own and adopting the Arab culture while being ashamed of their own, the Zoroastrians despised Arabic as the language of their Muslim conquerors. This in turn meant that the Zoroastrians were excluded from all government positions. The language issue became redundant since in 741 CE, the Umayyads decreed that all non-Muslims would be excluded from governmental positions.
The weight of religious oppression increased steadily and an Arab governor appointed a commissioner to supervise the destruction of fire temples throughout Iran, regardless of treaty and other agreements. One of the Umayyad Caliphs was quoted saying, “Milk the Persians and once their milk dries, suck their blood.”
Under the Abbasids (752 - 833 CE)
The Abbasids continued and added to the repressive measures employed by the Umayyads. Zoroastrian temples were searched out and destroyed or converted to mosques. The status of Zoroastrians was changed from dhimmi to kafirs meaning non-believers. Zoroastrians were labelled as fire-worshippers and polytheists. The treatment of Zoroastrians as najis (unclean and polluting) grew and Zoroastrians were denied access to common public facilities including bathhouses.
Abdollah-ibn-Tahir, Abbasid Governor of Khorasan, banned publication of Persian, that is Pahlavi books and decreed and all Zoroastrians were required to bring their religious books for a ritual burning, failure to comply being execution. It was during this period that many Pahlavi works were lost forever.
It was during the 9th century CE that Zoroastrians became a minority throughout Iran.
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That’s not “much persecution”? I shudder to think what “much persecution” is then.
I’m hardly an expert on the situation and don’t speak either Hebrew or Arabic, but I don’t think anyone would seriously suggest I have a “superficial” view of the Middle East, particularly people insisting the Arabs are more “warlike” than westerners.
What a shock, someone who has issues with Muslims and Arabs found an anti-Muslim website.
I’m not sure why that website is considered anymore reliable than say Tall Armenian Tale or similar websites.
You’re welcome to counter with a web site that will show that the conquering Arabs treated the Zoroastrians with respect and admiration.
All right, now I see the argument. I think the issue is that while most of us know there’s a difference between “Arab” and “Muslim”, it’s not always so clear when we use those words (at least in the US). For me, as a geography teacher, “Arab” may mean “Arab region” or “political affiliation”. There used to be Arab Jews, but not any more because that kind of designation just isn’t allowed. So I think it’s fair to say that the distinctions between 19th and 20th C Arabs are nuanced and sometimes complicated, while it is certainly appropriate to say “Arabs of the 8th C” isn’t always a falsehood (depending on the context).
I try to use phrases like “Arab world” when talking about a geographical location and “Arab” when referencing a political aspect, eg, Arab League nations or some such. But I’m not always careful enough and I don’t think many are. Aren’t you being a little hard on Terr?
This. And in my head, I tend to think of Iranians -and even Lebanese I know in the U.S. of more Persian, even if Lebanese aren’t Persian. (Maybe it’s the food. :D) And of course a Christian from Lebanon isn’t in the same ethnic/tribal/religious/political category as a Muslim and so forth.
Ibn is always good for a history lesson.
But is it fair to say that Americans treated Indians poorly in the 1600 and 1700s (before there was an America) when it was in fact different colonialist groups - mostly French, Spanish, & English - all competing European nations? Pale skin and an affinity for Jesus links those groups, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Unfortunately, a couple hundred years later, it’s “Whites” or “Europeans” without much distinction unless you’re a history teacher. I also hear a lot of things attributed to ‘early Americans’ post 1776 even when a national identity was still weak and people’s loyalty was typically regulated to immediate geographical region.
I’m not really seeing much religious persecution by the Ummayads in that snippet. There’s a lot of “You’re a conquered place, so we’ll put down rebellions, milk you economically, and force you to speak our language”, and some usurpation of temples, but that’s pretty much it.
Best Israel-thread-tangent ever.
Heh true. 
To jump into the fray - what I get from Ibn’s posts is that the concept of “arab-ness” as being the significant signifier of self-identity is a creation of the diffusion of European notions of ethnic nationalism, often misleadingly read into historical accounts about people who had very different notions of what constituted the important aspect of self-identity.
Some facts somewhat complicate the debate:
(1) Of course, most of the intitial followers of the Prophet spoke Arabic and the Koran was written in Arabic, making the Arabic language highly presigious as a lingua francia throughout the Muslim world and making connections to these initial followers highly presigious;
(2) The actual numbers of Arabic-speakers were, compared with the folks they conquored, relatively few;
(3) The areas they conquored were by and large of much higher levels of culture and civilization, and very soon after the conquest the centre of the Muslim world shifted out of the homeland of the Arabic-speakers and into first Syria then what is now Iraq;
(4) The Arabian penninsula reverted back into a backwater after this (enriched somewhat by the Hadj pilgrims). The Arabic-speaking peoples of the Arabian penninsula went back to doing what they had always been doing - running caravans to incense-growing Yemen, raising camels, fleecing pilgrims ( );
(5) As a culture, Islam cared little for genetics, what mattered was submission;
(6) Due to the bizzare tax structure initially imposed by the conquorers, it was ver advantageous to convert to Islam - you basically stopped paying taxes;
… all of which lead to a vast number of people having absolutely no genetic link to the Arab-speaking warriors of the Arabian penninsula adopting Islam as a religion, Arabic as a language (at least of scholarship), and finding or inventing ties to heroic “Arab” ancestors who knew Mohammed personally and participated in the conquest.
They may not have considered themselves as “Arabs”. Those would be, as before, the folks actually living in the Arabian penninsula, moreover identified with a certain lifestyle as practiced by such folks. Far more significant than (probably fictional) noble “Arab” ancestors was their local and religious affiliation. This was of course to change in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Operation Storm happened about 15 years ago. Maybe you did not get updates but just two points: two Croatian army generals were convicted in ICTY in Hague for exactly crimes committed during Operation Storm and displaced Croatian Serbs are returning and more than half of them are back home as it was expected that certain amount will integrate in areas in Bosnia from where Bosnian Croats and Bosnians were expelled.
That is light years advance over any progress and sense of justice in Israel-Palestinian conflict and more so none of the international power brokers (US, EU) and institutions (UN, ICTY) is actively engaged in misrepresenting the case. There is no UN official who, for example, first accuses Israel of war crimes and then on a second “attempt” establishes that while a lot of civilians did die, it does not amount to a war crime. That’s not just laughable but morally bankrupt reversal that no sane person can accept and that was the point of my post.
It’s rather odd for you to gripe at this having occurred 15 years ago seeing as how it is your example, not mine. Let’s see how this stands up to your theory that “a common understanding and kind of consensus regarding the questions of peace, justice and what really is happening or has happened” here and that the Serbs are “accepting of what transpired and why NATO bombed it.” Let’s see, the ICTY told a pair of generals what naughty people they were and acquitted a third. With the common understanding of justice and peace, the Croats applauded this just like the Serbs are glad that NATO bombed them, right? Hmm, it seems after Ante Gotovina was finally caught in the Canary Islands after he’d spent years at large in Croatia, the Croatian people weren’t so happy about the questions of justice and peace.
So much for the two generals. How about the half of the ethnically cleansed Serbs who have returned and the other half that you think are happy with living in their new homes? Doesn’t look like either is true.
Oddly, the Balkans remains a morass of grudges going back a millennia, and Serbia doesn’t celebrate being bombed by NATO. Some think that NATO not only allowed the Croats to launch Operation Storm but in fact encouraged it to happen; both by allowing the military build up in the face of the embargo and as leverage to force Serbia into the Dayton negotiations.
Yes, no double dealing by the power brokers or misrepresentation of the case at all. Nobody at all on the Serbian side thinks NATO was behind the Croat actions, or thinks NATO was taking sides when it bombed them. On the Croat side, everyone agrees that the token two generals the ICTY finally got its hands on were bad people and the 18 year sentences they got makes up for ethnically cleansing a quarter million people. Truly, the Israel-Palestine conflict is unique in human history because “there is a common understanding and kind of consensus regarding the questions of peace, justice and what really is happening or has happened” "for all conflicts BUT this one.”
If that were true, one would expect that the coverage would generally be pro-Israel or at least neutral. However there is lots and lots of anti-Israel coverage in the US.
For example, the case of Tuvia Grossman.
Can you give 3 examples of “misrepresentation” which you are referring to?
Just as a quick update on the subject, there was an attempted kidnapping outside my daughter’s base last week. Her commander went over it in quite a bit of detail with her unit.
For those who care, these soldiers are not occupying anything other than time and space, since her base is well within the Green Line.
Question: are there security checks going INTO Gaza or the West Bank? How were these kidnappers planning on getting out of Israel?
You find me ANYWHERE on EARTH where one nation does this kind of immoral and criminal act to another and you win.
You should learn about international law before you claim that things violate it.
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](http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/385ec082b509e76c41256739003e636d/6756482d86146898c125641e004aa3c5)
Not that the word of a proven liar like Jimmy Carter is a basis for political worldviews, in any case. It’s interesting that he can’t stop lying, even in the video, like when he claims that the wall is “all built on Palestinian land” (it isn’t), implies that it’s all a wall (it isn’t), claims that Israel controls Egypt’s border crossing with Gaza (it doesn’t).
So other than the fact that you’re wrong on basic international law and Jimmy Carter finds it near impossible to talk about Israel without lying, yes, you’ve got a good point.
:rolleyes: I thought the 1/4 million ethnically cleansed Serbs that you are unable to dispute already did that.
Despite Carter’s lies, everyone knows that Egypt controls the southern entrance to Gaza. So if Gaza is a “prison,” Egypt is a jailer and is behaving just as immorally and criminally as Israel.
What do I win?
Here’s a quote from Carter:
Interestingly, he uses the word “Sinai.” Given that he helped to negotiate the withdrawal of Israel from the Sinai, he should know perfectly well what country controls the Sinai. Why doesn’t he mention it?