Andrew D. Magnusson’s monograph offers a fascinating exploration of an edge case of dhimmiya (protected minority status) in early Islamic legal discussions and practices, and provides an admirable methodological intervention into the study of agenda-driven historical sources. Magnusson illustrates how “Zoroastrians”—whether referred to as Persian maghān, Arabic majūs, ʿabadat al-awthān (idol worshippers), or mushrikūn (polytheists)—served a paradigmatic function in Islamic discussions of non-Muslims and the indeterminate boundaries between People of the Book and other religious minorities, from the early centuries of the Islamic era through to the present day. He demonstrates how Zoroastrians’ formerly elite status in the Sasanian ancien régime, along with their continued presence in the Islamic East, bolstered their salience as lieux de mémoire (“sites of memory,” per Pierre Nora) and as subjects of legal, political, and social contestation.
Although his review of relevant sources and their problems is itself illuminating, Magnusson is at his most compelling when examining how these sources have been used in historical and contemporary polemic. He details how ambiguous interpretive traditions and reports about the status of Zoroastrians, often mobilized for specific local or personal agendas, subsequently take on far more generalized import in Islamic thought and practice. Likewise, agenda-driven narratives of early Muslim-Zoroastrian conflict or coexistence, which often diverge from actual historical dynamics, eventually play important roles in retrospective accounts. His efforts to “chart a course between myth and countermyth” (p. 27)—applying methodological insights from scholars such as Georges Duby, David Nirenberg, and Michael Stausberg, alongside overall lessons from the study of Jewish and Christian Islamicate history—are commendable, yielding fruitful results.
In his introduction, Magnusson surveys relevant late antique Zoroastrian concepts and terminology. He explains the cataclysmic nature of Islamic conquest from that perspective. But this is rather pro forma, as his study is decidedly focused on Islamic sources and perspectives, dealing primarily with “rhetorical Zoroastrians” within Muslim discourse. His defense of “accommodation” as the organizing concept for his study of the premodern Islamic world is well articulated, and his examples for each chapter are well chosen.
Chapter 1 is a brief extension of the introduction that highlights the significance of historiography for contemporary Zoroastrians and Muslims; noting that scholars have both perpetuated and questioned overarching tropes. Chapter 2 presents the first thorough case study, correctly identifying Zoroastrians’ eligibility to pay the jizya tax (and therefore their status as dhimmis, or protected non-Muslims) as the key issue around which subsequent questions revolve. Magnusson demonstrates that neither Quranic exegeses nor prophetic hadiths dispositively resolve the matter, concluding that taxation was likely an ex post facto development, more to do with practical exigencies than the settled practice it would later become. He clarifies that this taxation came about despite the view of early Quranic exegetes that Zoroastrians were not People of the Book (ahl al-kitāb).
In Chapter 3 Magnusson examines some of the social consequences of the above distinction, in which Zoroastrians were treated as People of the Book in some regards but not others. Despite accepting the jizya from them, the majority of early Muslims did not condone intermarriage with them or consumption of their meat. Consumption of Zoroastrian cheese (prepared with rennet) and affording Zoroastrians a lower blood price (diya, i.e., payment to victims of violent crime) were more ambiguous cases with varied opinions across schools and inconsistent practical outcomes. Magnusson also highlights how particular events, figures, and tribes feature prominently in the relevant hadiths and their transmission, and how Sabeans also played an important mediating role in jurists’ conceptualization of hierarchies and interactions with non-Muslims.
Chapters 4 and 5 are perhaps the most compelling. In Chapter 4, Magnusson analyzes the historicity of the ahd-nama, or charter of religious freedom, supposedly granted by Muhammad to the Zoroastrian household of Salman al-Farisi. (The Iranian and Indian recensions are translated in his appendices). A document still referenced in modern times for varying rhetorical purposes, he convincingly argues that it is likely inauthentic, probably based on earlier writs to Christian communities in Egypt and Iraq and closely resembling Muhammad’s treaty with the Jewish Banu al-Nadir in Medina. Yet versions of the ahd-nama have been preserved since the late 9th century, transmitted to Salman al-Farisi’s relatives and devotees (along with Khabar Salman, or Salman’s narrative hagiography) and cited by successive generations, from the Middle East to South Asia, for political and social benefit. The charter’s continued status as lieu de mémoire for Muslims and Zoroastrians, with real-world effects, cannot be denied. As Magnusson writes, it is properly understood as “a place for remembering, forgetting and contesting histories of Muslim-Zoroastrian relations,” regardless of authenticity (p. 102).
In Chapter 5, the author makes a similar point about tales of violence against Zoroastrians and desecration of Zoroastrian fire temples. Although they are often cited as evidence of the “lachrymose” view of Muslim–Zoroastrian history (see pp. 19–23), some of these accounts were likely exaggerated or even fabricated for various reasons: to bolster triumphal Islamic narratives of supersession, to overstate the history of Muslim–Zoroastrian hostility, or for other purposes entirely. In summary, Magnusson calls on scholars to “contextualise even the most credible claims, consider the writer’s intent and compare sources of information against each other” (p. 130). In these two chapters, especially, he has effectively demonstrated the advantages of such reading strategies.
In Chapter 6, Magnusson takes a somewhat broader view, considering how the label “Zoroastrian” was employed paradigmatically—mostly by Muslims outside of the Iranian heartland—to categorize different marginal groups such as North African Berbers, Khazars, Azerbaijanis, Syrian Shiʿa, Vikings, South Asian converts, and others. He describes how a range of “suspicious, threatening, or marginal groups” were compared to Zoroastrians in an “unflattering but rhetorical” manner that “demonstrates a simultaneous recognition of and discomfort with the exceptional place of Zoroastrians in early Islamic history” (pp. 152–53).
In his conclusion, Magnusson extends this point to contemporary dynamics, specifically with respect to the 2014 discourse surrounding Yazidi Kurds and the violence perpetrated against them by ISIS. An open letter from Muslim jurists admonishing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declares that “From the legal perspective of Islamic law (sharīʿa) they are Zoroastrians,” and therefore properly to be protected as dhimmis—a modern illustration of accommodation and its limits, and the continued salience of these early Islamic discussions (pp. 160–62). Summarizing his overall argument, Magnusson correctly observes that neither the “dismal conceptions of Zoroastrian history” nor narratives of “blissful intercommunal harmony” do justice to the historical and legal complexities of the case: “Non-Muslims were legally subordinate to Muslims, and Zoroastrians occupied a rung in the theological and social hierarchy below Jews and Christians” (p. 165).
Magnusson’s monograph is an important, thoughtful, and nuanced contribution to the study of early Islamic history and the unique rhetorical role of Zoroastrians in these contexts. Although there is some introductory material, the book seems primarily intended for scholars with background in the relevant subject areas and a stake in the historiographical issues. It is avowedly not a study of Zoroastrian historical realities, but it is a cogent argument for why such a study may not be possible—and why past and present historiographies are equally if not more edifying to investigate.
