How the Islamic Adhan Performs the Office of Sraosha, the Zoroastrian Yazata of Prayer

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“Sraosha, a major deity (yazata) in Zoroastrianism, whose great popularity reserved a place for him in Iranian Islam as the angel Surōsh.” — Encyclopaedia Iranica, entry on Sraosha

“I shall invoke Sraosha, mightiest of all.” — Yasna 33:5, attributed to Zarathustra himself

“God is the greatest. I bear witness that there is no god but Allah. I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. Hasten to prayer. Hasten to success.” — The Adhan, called from every minaret five times daily

The Persian Angel Who Walked Into Islam

There is a feature of Iranian Islamic angelology that has not been adequately accounted for in the comparative-religion literature. Iranian Muslim tradition preserves an angel named Surūsh — a luminous spiritual being associated with conscience, guidance, prayer, and the mediation between humanity and the divine. Surūsh is named in the Persian poetry of Ferdowsi, in the Sufi literature of Rumi, in Iranian-Islamic miniature painting, and in popular Iranian-Muslim devotional culture. The angel is so embedded in Persian-Islamic religious imagination that contemporary Iranian Muslims often invoke Surūsh in prayer and conversation, treating the figure as a standard part of Islamic angelic order.

There is one problem with this. Surūsh is not in the Quran. Surūsh is not in the canonical hadith. Surūsh is not present in Arabic Islamic angelology at all. The angel does not appear in the standard Sunni or Shiʻī textbook lists of named Islamic angels (Jibrīʾīl, Mīkāʾīl, Isrāfīʾīl, ʻAzrāʾīl). Surūsh appears nowhere in the foundational scriptural and doctrinal texts of Islam. Surūsh is, in every measurable sense, a Persian angel — a being native to the Iranian religious imagination who walked into Islam at the moment of conversion and never left.

Surūsh is the Persian-Islamic survival of the Zoroastrian Yazata Sraosha. The name is the same name, in linguistic continuity: Avestan s(ə)raosha → Middle Persian Srōsh → New Persian Surūsh. The function is the same function: the divine being who hears prayer, the angel of obedience and conscience, the figure who calls the believer to the religious life and protects them in the spiritual struggle. Encyclopaedia Iranica, the definitive scholarly reference on Iranian religious history, confirms the continuity directly: “Sraosha, a major deity (yazata) in Zoroastrianism, whose great popularity reserved a place for him in Iranian Islam as the angel Surōsh.”

This article takes the Surūsh-as-Sraosha continuity as the entry point into a structural argument about Islamic prayer practice. The Zoroastrian Sraosha is not merely an angel of prayer in some abstract sense. Sraosha is the Yazata whose office is to call humans to prayer, to mediate between the believer and Ahura Mazda, to hear and respond to the prayers of the faithful, and to enforce the daily ritual rhythm of obedience to the divine. This is, structurally, the office that the Islamic muezzin performs five times daily from every minaret in the Muslim world, calling the faithful to prayer through the recitation of the Adhan. The Adhan is the human enactment of the office that Sraosha holds in the Zoroastrian heavenly hierarchy. The Persian angel survived the conversion. The Persian liturgical office survived with him — transposed into Arabic vocabulary, performed by human muezzins instead of by the divine Yazata, but preserving the structural form, the daily rhythm, and the theological function.

Sraosha: The Yazata Who Listens and Calls

Sraosha is one of the most ancient and structurally important figures in Zoroastrian religious life. Already named in the Gathas — the oldest hymns of Zarathustra himself — Sraosha is the Yazata whose office is the bridge between Ahura Mazda and the worshipping community. The name, from Avestan s(ə)raosha, derives from the verbal root sraw-/sru- meaning “to hear, to harken, to obey.” The dual meaning is theologically central: Sraosha is both the one who hears (the divine listener who receives prayer) and the one who calls (the divine voice who summons the believer to obedience). He is the angel of prayer in a precise structural sense — the office that mediates between the worshipper’s call and the divine response.

In the Avestan literature, Sraosha’s functions are specified in detail across Yasna 56–57 (the daytime hymn to Sraosha), Yasht 11 (the Srosh Yasht Hadokht), and the Srosh Yasht Vairishtar (the most-victorious hymn to Sraosha, recited during the night). Five functions emerge from the textual evidence and demand attention because each maps onto the office of the muezzin in Islamic practice.

First: Sraosha calls the believers to prayer. He is the Yazata whose office is to summon humanity to the worship of Ahura Mazda. Mary Boyce, in A History of Zoroastrianism, identifies Sraosha as “guardian of the means — prayer — through which man can approach God.” He is the divine voice that establishes the daily rhythm of religious obligation.

Second: Sraosha is associated with the five Gah-prayers of the Zoroastrian liturgical day. In the Gah-formula, Sraosha is invoked as the one who presides over the daily prayer-rhythm. The five-fold daily prayer pattern, which the previous “Five Daily Prayers” article on this site has demonstrated to be the structural prior of the Islamic five-fold Salah, is theologically organized around Sraosha’s office.

Third: Sraosha’s body is the Manthra — the holy word, the sacred recitation. Yasna 57:1 explicitly declares that Sraosha’s body is “the holy spell, possessed of powerful spiritual weapons.” The Yazata of prayer is constituted by sacred verbal recitation. He is, structurally, an embodiment of the call-to-prayer formula itself — the divine reality of religious vocalization.

Fourth: Sraosha protects the believer in the spiritual struggle. He is the warrior-angel who fights the daevas, particularly his archenemy Aeshma (the demon of wrath), and who guards the souls of the righteous on their journey to and after death. His office is not merely contemplative; it is active and protective. The Adhan in Islamic understanding similarly does protective and apotropaic work — the call to prayer is believed to drive away Shaytan and to bring blessing on the household and community where it is heard.

Fifth: Sraosha’s office is sustained by daily ritual recitation. The Srosh Yasht is one of the prayers most regularly recited in Zoroastrian devotional life, and Sraosha is invoked at every Gah, every kushti rite, every threshold of religious activity. The believer participates in Sraosha’s office by reciting the Yazata’s prayers. This is structurally analogous to the Islamic understanding that Muslims who hear the Adhan and respond by repeating its words after the muezzin participate in a meritorious religious act.

Five functions. All five appear, with structural precision, in the office of the Adhan and its muezzin. The Yazata’s heavenly office and the muezzin’s mosque-tower office are performing the same liturgical function. The structural correspondence is not accidental — it is the same office, transposed.

The Adhan: Words and Liturgical Position

The Adhan — from the Arabic root ʼ-dh-n meaning “to announce, to proclaim, to give notice” — is the Islamic call to prayer recited from every mosque five times daily. The standard Sunni formulation, with English translation, runs as follows:

Allāhu akbar (4 times) — God is the greatest. Ash-hadu an lā ilāha illa Allāh (2 times) — I bear witness that there is no god but Allah. Ash-hadu anna Muḥammadan rasūlu Allāh (2 times) — I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. Ḥayya ʻalá al-ṣalāh (2 times) — Hasten to prayer. Ḥayya ʻalá al-falāḥ (2 times) — Hasten to success. Allāhu akbar (2 times) — God is the greatest. Lā ilāha illa Allāh (1 time) — There is no god but Allah.

Five features of the Adhan demand attention because each of them maps onto the office of Sraosha in Zoroastrian theology and practice.

First: the Adhan calls believers to prayer. This is its defining function. The muezzin’s voice is the auditory boundary between profane time and sacred time, summoning the community to leave their daily activities and gather for worship. The Persian word for the call to prayer in pre-Sassanian and Sassanian Zoroastrian usage was bang — a term that survived into Persian Islamic vocabulary as bang-i namāz, the “call to prayer.” The structural office is the same: a summons issued at fixed intervals to call the community to its religious obligation.

Second: the Adhan is performed five times daily, at the five fixed times of the obligatory Salah — Fajr (dawn), Dhuhr (midday), ʻAsr (afternoon), Maghrib (sunset), and ʻIshāʾ (night). The five-fold daily rhythm is theologically central. The Zoroastrian five-fold Gah system — Hawan (dawn to noon), Rapithwin (noon), Uzayeirin (afternoon to sunset), Aiwisruthrem (sunset to midnight), Ushahin (midnight to dawn) — establishes the same daily rhythm millennia earlier. The match in number, position, and solar keying is documented in the existing eFireTemple article “The Five Daily Prayers: Islam’s Most Sacred Practice Is Zoroastrian.” The Adhan is the call that opens each of these five intervals. Sraosha is the Yazata who presides over them.

Third: the Adhan’s text is built around the Shahada at its center. The full Shahada — “I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah” — is recited twice in the body of the Adhan. The previous article in this Islamic phase of the series demonstrated that the Shahada is the structural transposition of the Yasna 12 Mazdayasnō Ahmi (the Zoroastrian Confession of Faith). The Adhan therefore preserves, at its core, the Yasna 12 confessional structure as the call-to-prayer formula — a liturgical move that has no parallel in pre-Islamic Arab religious practice but matches with structural precision the Zoroastrian practice of including confessional self-declaration in the daily Gah-recitations.

Fourth: the Adhan is a protective and apotropaic act. Islamic tradition holds that the call to prayer drives away Shaytan and brings blessing on the home and community where it is heard. The Prophet is reported to have said that Shaytan flees when he hears the Adhan, retreating until the call has been completed. This is a direct functional parallel to Sraosha’s warrior-protective office, in which Sraosha drives away the daevas and especially his archenemy Aeshma (the demon of wrath) through the recitation of his hymns. Both call-to-prayer functions — the Islamic and the Zoroastrian — are believed to do active spiritual battle, expelling evil through the sacred utterance.

Fifth: those who hear the Adhan are encouraged to repeat its words silently and to participate verbally in the call. This produces a community-wide chain of recitation in which the muezzin’s call is multiplied across every Muslim within hearing distance. The Zoroastrian Gah-prayers function similarly: the call is sounded, the believers respond by reciting their own Gah-prayers in unison. The structural pattern of community participation through repetition of the call is identical.

The Dream Origin: A Diagnostic Pattern

Among all the structural features of the Adhan, one historical detail deserves particular attention because it functions as a diagnostic indicator of inheritance: the Adhan does not have a Quranic origin, and its emergence in Islamic tradition is attributed to a dream.

The early Muslim community in Medina, in the year following the Hijra (622 CE), faced a practical problem. The five daily prayers had been instituted, but there was no mechanism for summoning the community to the mosque for prayer. The standard hadith account, preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari and the major hadith collections, reports that the Prophet Muhammad consulted his companions on the question. Various proposals were made: a horn (like the Jewish shofar), a bell (like the Christian church bell), a fire kindled (like the Zoroastrian fire-signal). None was adopted.

The matter was resolved when a Companion named ʻAbdullāh ibn Zayd had a dream in which an unknown person taught him the words of the Adhan. He related the dream to the Prophet, who declared the dream to be a true vision and instructed Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ — a freed Abyssinian slave with a beautiful voice — to learn the words and recite them as the call to prayer. The narrative is preserved in numerous variants but always with the same structural elements: the Adhan emerges from a dream-vision rather than from the Quran or from the direct teaching of the Prophet, is taught to a single Companion, and is then institutionalized as universal Muslim practice.

This is the same diagnostic pattern documented in the Sanctus and Trisagion article. The Trisagion — the Eastern Orthodox liturgical hymn that the previous article identified as the structural transposition of the Yasna Haptanghaiti — has a Constantinopolitan origin story in which a child is caught up to heaven and hears angels singing the words. The Coptic and Armenian traditions preserve a different origin story: that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus first sang the Trisagion at the cross. Both are pious legends. Both share a structural feature: they attribute the prayer to a moment of supernatural revelation rather than to ordinary human composition or inheritance.

This is the standard pattern by which received liturgical structures get reframed as native revelations. When a religious tradition inherits a powerful liturgical form from a source it cannot or will not credit, the inheritance is preserved while the lineage is rewritten as miraculous origin. The form survives because the form works. The source is replaced by an account that places the prayer’s composition within the receiving tradition itself — dictated by angels, sung by a child caught into heaven, dreamed by a Companion of the Prophet.

The Adhan’s dream-origin is the Islamic instance of this pattern. The Adhan is not from the Quran. The Adhan is not from the direct teaching of the Prophet. The Adhan emerged — in the church’s own self-reporting, preserved as canonical tradition — from a dream of a single Companion, declared after the fact to be a true revelation. What the Islamic tradition acknowledges, in the form of this origin story, is that the Adhan came from outside the immediate scriptural and apostolic chain of transmission. The dream-origin is the church’s indirect acknowledgment that the source lay outside the tradition’s ordinary historical memory.

And the source the historical evidence points to is the Persian. The early Islamic community in Medina was in geographic proximity to Persian populations through the Lakhmid kingdom and the Sassanian-Yemeni connection. Within twenty years of the Adhan’s emergence in Medina (622 CE), the Islamic community was in direct political control of the Sassanian Empire (651 CE), and Persian Muslim converts were carrying their pre-Islamic Sraosha-centered devotional sensibilities into the new religion. The Adhan, codified in the centuries that followed, took the form that Persian-Islamic ritual culture made natural — a five-times-daily verbal call summoning the community to obedience in the office of the Yazata of Prayer, transposed into Arabic vocabulary and human muezzin-performance, but preserving the structural form of the Persian original.

The Side-by-Side

Ten rows. Ten features. The match is at the level of office, function, daily rhythm, theological role, embodied performance, and direct linguistic survival of the Persian name into Iranian Islamic angelology. The structural correspondence is too tight, too multi-dimensional, and too well-documented to be coincidence. The Adhan is the human enactment of Sraosha’s office, transposed from the Yazata’s heavenly tower to the muezzin’s minaret, performed five times daily in inherited liturgical structure.

Bilāl and the Sraoshavarez: The Office Survives

The structural parallel between Sraosha and the Adhan extends into the role of the muezzin himself. The Zoroastrian liturgical tradition includes a specific human office attached to Sraosha: the Sraoshavarez, the “enforcer of the obedience of Sraosha,” the human ritual functionary responsible for calling the community to prayer and maintaining the liturgical rhythm. The Sraoshavarez is named in Yasna 27 and the Visperad as one of the eight priestly offices of the Zoroastrian Yasna ceremony. His function is to ensure that the daily prayer-times are observed, that the call to ritual is sounded, and that the community responds in ordered devotion.

This is the office Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ was institutionalized into when the Prophet Muhammad designated him as the first muezzin. Bilāl’s role — to stand in a high place, to call out at fixed times, to summon the community, to enforce the daily rhythm of prayer through the strength and beauty of his voice — is precisely the Sraoshavarez office in Islamic transposition. The functional continuity is unmistakable. Where the Sraoshavarez served Sraosha by calling the community to the Gahs, the muezzin serves the Islamic prayer-discipline by calling the community to the Salah. The same office, performed in different vocabulary, with the same daily rhythm, the same responsibility for the auditory boundary between sacred and ordinary time.

The continuity is reinforced by the muezzin tradition’s emphasis on vocal beauty. Bilāl was selected, according to the canonical hadith, for the beauty and power of his voice. The muezzin’s qualifications across Islamic legal tradition are dominated by vocal considerations: clarity, melodic range, volume, the ability to hold the long melismatic ornamentation of the Adhan’s key words. The muezzin is not chosen for theological learning or scriptural mastery; he is chosen for the strength and beauty of his voice. This is exactly the criterion that governs the Sraoshavarez office in Zoroastrian tradition: vocal strength, ritual attentiveness, the ability to perform the call with theurgical effectiveness. The office is the same office, and the qualifications are the same qualifications.

The mosque’s minaret — the architectural feature from which the Adhan is called — has its own Persian background. The free-standing tall tower from which a religious functionary calls the community to prayer is not native to seventh-century Arabian religious architecture. It enters Islamic mosque architecture in the Umayyad period, in territory recently absorbed from the Sassanian Empire, with structural features (cylindrical or polygonal tower, elevated calling-platform, often associated with a fire-signal at sunset and dawn) that resemble the chahār-tāq architecture of Sassanian Zoroastrian sacred sites. The minaret is, in significant part, a Persian architectural inheritance providing the spatial setting for the Persian liturgical inheritance — the elevated tower from which the Sraosha-office is performed in Islamic vocabulary.

What the Muezzin’s Voice Carries

Every Muslim, five times every day, hears or recites a vocal proclamation whose structural form, daily rhythm, theological function, and named heavenly counterpart all derive from Zoroastrian liturgical tradition. The Adhan summons the community to prayer at the five times the Zoroastrian Gah system established. Its words preserve the Shahada at the center of the call, where the Yasna 12 confessional formula has its native home. Its function is the office of Sraosha, the Yazata of Prayer, who survives directly into Iranian Islam under his Persian name as the angel Surūsh. Its dream-origin reflects the diagnostic pattern by which received liturgical forms are reframed as miraculous revelations when their inheritance from a non-credited source cannot be openly acknowledged. Its human office — the muezzin — preserves the role of the Sraoshavarez, the Zoroastrian human functionary attached to Sraosha’s office, with the same qualifications and the same daily responsibility.

Calculated across the global Muslim population of approximately two billion, with the Adhan called five times daily from over four million mosques worldwide, the muezzin’s voice sounds tens of millions of times per day across the planet. Each sounding is a transposition of Sraosha’s office onto Islamic vocabulary. Each sounding is a continuation of the daily prayer-rhythm Zarathustra’s tradition established at least three thousand years ago. The voice that calls is the same voice. The office is the same office. The fire of the Magi continues to burn at the threshold of every Muslim prayer, and the Yazata of Prayer continues to do his work in the mouths of the muezzins who do not know whose office they hold.

This article is the third in the Islamic phase of the surgical-comparison series. The Shahada article documented the verbal-confessional layer (Yasna 12 Mazdayasnō Ahmi → Shahada). The Wudū article documented the embodied-purification layer (Pādyāb → Wudū). The present article documents the call-and-summons layer (Sraosha’s office → Adhan). The three articles together demonstrate that the stratified pattern named in “The Stratified Foundation” synthesis extends to the third major Abrahamic-adjacent tradition with the same structural specificity, the same documented historical channels, and — in this case — the additional evidence of direct linguistic survival of the Persian deity-name into Iranian Islamic angelology. The framework holds at every layer the comparative method tests for. Islam preserves Persian liturgical inheritance with structural directness even sharper than the Christian-Jewish case.

For the inheritor of Zarathustra, this matters because it places the Yazata of Prayer himself — the divine being whose office is the call to worship — at the center of the most public, most audible, most universally recognized feature of Islamic religious life. The Adhan is the soundscape of the Muslim world. From every mosque in every city in every Muslim-majority country, five times every day, the call sounds. And the call is, structurally, Sraosha’s call — the Yazata of Prayer doing his work in inherited form, in continuous daily performance, in the voices of muezzins who carry his office without knowing whose office they perform.

Surūsh. Sraosha. The one who hears, and the one who calls. ʻAdhān. The announcement, the proclamation. The voice that summons the community across the threshold from ordinary into sacred time.

The voice is the same voice. The office is the same office. The fire continues to burn, and the call continues to sound, in the inheritance that has carried the Persian Yazata of Prayer into the liturgical heart of a religion that no longer remembers his name — except in the Persian Islamic angelology where he survives, untranslated, under the name his Avestan worshippers have known him by for three thousand years.

Sources & Further Reading

Avesta: Yasna 33:5; Yasna 56–57 (the Srosh Yasht in the daily liturgy); Yasht 11 (the Srosh Yasht Hadokht); the Srosh Yasht Vairishtar.

Encyclopaedia Iranica, entry “Sraoša” — the definitive scholarly entry on Sraosha and his Persian-Islamic survival as Surūsh.

Boyce, Mary. A History of Zoroastrianism, Vols. 1–3. Brill, 1975–1991. Boyce identifies Sraosha as the Yazata whose office is prayer.

Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. Routledge, 1979.

Quran 5:6; 17:78; 4:103. The Quranic verses on the obligation of Salah.

Sahih al-Bukhārī, Book of Adhān (Book 11). The hadith collection on the call to prayer and Bilāl’s institutionalization as the first muezzin.

Sahih Muslim, Book of Ṣalāh. Parallel hadith on the Adhan.

Britannica, entry on “Adhān” — standard reference summary of the call to prayer.

Wikipedia entry on Adhan, drawing on Sunni and Shiʻī legal sources.

Encyclopaedia of Islam (3rd edition), entries on “Adhān,” “Muʾadhdhin,” and “Minār.”

Choksy, Jamsheed K. Conflict and Cooperation: Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Elites in Medieval Iranian Society. Columbia University Press, 1997. On the Persian-Islamic religious transition.

Daryaee, Touraj. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. I.B. Tauris, 2009.

Bulliet, Richard W. Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period. Harvard University Press, 1979. On the Persian conversion process and the gradual development of Islamic ritual practice.

Russell, James R. Zoroastrianism in Armenia. Harvard Iranian Series, 1987. On the survival of Iranian religious vocabulary into post-Zoroastrian populations. Modi, Jamshedji Jivanji. Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Parsees. Bombay: J.B. Karani’s Sons, 1922. The standard scholarly reference for Zoroastrian liturgical practice including the Sraoshavarez office.