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A Zoroastrian Dispute in the Caliph’s Court: The Gizistag Abāliš in its Early Islamic Context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Abstract
The Gizistag Abāliš is a ninth- or tenth-century Pahlavi text, recording a debate which took place at the court of al-Maʾmūn between a Zoroastrian priest and a heretical dualist. This article, the first in-depth study of this important work, examines the text in its broader Islamicate environment. It argues that the narrative itself is probably fictional, but reflects a real historical phenomenon, namely the interreligious debates which took place among Zoroastrians, Muslims, Christians, and Jews during the ʿAbbasid period. It argues that the text is a unique Zoroastrian example of a literary genre that was common among Christians at the time, namely, “the monk in the emir’s majlis.” By comparing the Gizistag Abāliš to these Christian texts, it explores why Zoroastrians generally did not launch explicit polemics against Islam, comparable to those of other non-Muslim communities. It seems that Zoroastrian authors were more concerned with explaining their own doctrines than critiquing the beliefs of others. This is curious considering the large numbers of Zoroastrians who were converting to Islam at the time. Finally, the article proposes new ways of refining the way we read Pahlavi texts, by analyzing them alongside the literatures of other religious communities in the early Islamic empire.
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- Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2019
Footnotes
My thanks go to Dan Sheffield, who introduced me to the Gizistag Abāliš and suggested that it might make a good project for someone interested in Zoroastrians and Muslims. Later, I was lucky to read the text in manuscript form with Prods Oktor Skjærvø and the other members of the Pahlavi reading group, all of whom helped me understand it much better.
This article was originally prepared for “The Majlis Revisited: Inter- and Intra-Religious and Cross-Cultural Disputations in the Islamicate World,” a conference held in Córdoba in April 2018 and sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Project, “Practicing Knowledge in Islamic Societies and their Neighbours,” directed by Maribel Fierro, Anneliese Maier Award, 2014) and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. I am grateful to the organizers for the invitation to participate, to the participants for their feedback, and to Yuhan Vevaina and Luke Yarbrough for their comments on an earlier draft. Finally, I am also grateful to the John Fell—OUP Fund at the University of Oxford which supported research which led to this article.
The Córdoba conference was held in honor of the late Patricia Crone, and I dedicate this piece to her, as well.
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