Written by What this is
Three centuries after the Arab conquest of Sasanian Persia, a small body of Zoroastrian intellectuals undertook one of the most remarkable projects in religious history: the defense of their religion in writing, against the religion that had destroyed their state. They did this from inside the Caliphate, under conditions of legal disability, demographic collapse, and ongoing pressure to convert. They wrote in Pahlavi (Middle Persian), a language that was already becoming archaic, for a community that was shrinking. They knew the audience for their work would be small and would shrink further. They wrote anyway.
The two most important figures in this resistance literature are Adurfarnbag-i Farroxzadan, who served as hudenan peshobay (leader of the orthodox) in 9th-century Iran and compiled the original core of the Denkard, and Mardan-Farrukh, who in the late 9th century composed the Shkand-gumanig Wizar — “The Doubt-Dispelling Exposition” — a sustained polemical defense of Zoroastrianism against Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Manichaeism.
These texts are not well-known outside specialist circles. They survive in a small number of manuscripts, mostly preserved by the Parsi community in India after the flight from Iran. They have never had wide popular readership in any language. They are, however, among the most important documents we have for understanding what Zoroastrians themselves thought about the catastrophe their religion had suffered and how they understood themselves theologically in its aftermath.
This post introduces them.
The setting
To understand what these texts are doing, you have to understand what their authors were facing.
By the 9th century — roughly two hundred years after Qadisiyyah and Nahavand — the Zoroastrian community in Iran was in advanced decline. The conversion pressure had been operating across multiple generations and was structural: dhimmis paid jizya and faced legal disabilities; non-Muslim inheritance was complicated and sometimes forfeited to Muslim relatives; non-Muslim testimony was discounted in legal proceedings; non-Muslim public religious practice was restricted; non-Muslims could not hold positions of authority over Muslims. Each generation, the social and economic incentives pointed in one direction.
By Adurfarnbag’s time, Zoroastrians in Iran were a minority — possibly already a small minority — in their own homeland. The intellectual centers had largely moved or been lost. The fire temples were under continuous pressure. The priesthood had been reduced enough that maintaining the chains of memorization and ritual transmission was a constant struggle.
In addition to Islam, the community faced other religious challenges. Manichaeism, the dualistic religion founded by Mani in the 3rd century CE, had drawn on Zoroastrian elements in ways the orthodox community considered heretical, and was making converts among educated Iranians. Christianity had a substantial presence in Iran, with the Church of the East (often called Nestorian, though the term is contested) maintaining institutional continuity and producing theological literature in Syriac. Judaism had communities throughout Iran, particularly in Mesopotamia, and Jewish-Zoroastrian theological exchange had been happening for centuries.
The defense of Zoroastrianism in this period was therefore not a defense against one opponent but against several, each making different claims and each requiring different responses. What the resistance literature did was articulate, for a Zoroastrian community under pressure from multiple directions, why the religion was true on its own terms and why its rivals’ claims failed.
Adurfarnbag-i Farroxzadan
Adurfarnbag (sometimes spelled Adur-farnbag, Adur Farnbag, Aturpat-i Farrobay) flourished in the early 9th century. He served as hudenan peshobay — variously translated as “leader of the orthodox,” “leader of those of the good religion” — which was the highest religious office of the Zoroastrian community in Iran. He was based at the major fire-temple of Karkoy in Sistan and was recognized across the dispersed Zoroastrian communities as the senior religious authority of his time.
What survives of his work comes through two main channels:
The Denkard‘s original core. Adurfarnbag began the compilation of the Denkard — the great encyclopedic work of 9th-century Zoroastrianism — although the version we have today was substantially expanded by Adurbad-i Emedan a generation or so later. The Denkard in its surviving nine books (the first two are lost) covers theological doctrine, religious history, ethics, polemic, and most importantly the chapter-by-chapter summary of the lost nasks of the Sasanian Avesta. Adurfarnbag’s contribution was the foundational salvage operation: gathering what could still be remembered of the destroyed canon and writing it down before the last priests who knew it died.
This is itself a profound act. Adurfarnbag understood, by his time, that the Sasanian Avesta could not be reconstructed in full. What he could do was preserve the table of contents — what each nask had contained, what subjects it had covered, what teachings it had transmitted. He was writing the index of a destroyed library, knowing that the books themselves were gone but trying to preserve at least the memory of what had been in them. The Denkard‘s book 8, with its summary of the twenty-one nasks, exists because Adurfarnbag and his successors did this work.
The Madigan-i Gizistag Abalish. This is a remarkable text — a record of a public theological debate held at the court of the Caliph al-Ma’mun (reigned 813–833) between Adurfarnbag and a heretic named Abalish. Abalish (the name means “the cursed one” in Pahlavi) appears to have been a Zoroastrian-turned-skeptic who attacked Zoroastrianism at the caliph’s court. The text records Adurfarnbag’s responses to Abalish’s challenges across some twenty-three theological questions. The format is question-and-answer, with Abalish raising objections and Adurfarnbag defending the orthodox Zoroastrian position.
The questions cover central topics: the problem of evil in a dualist framework, the meaning of various rituals, the status of the Avesta, the rationality of Zoroastrian doctrine. What makes the text striking is not only what is said but what it tells us about the conditions of religious discourse in the early Abbasid period: the caliph permitted public theological debate; a Zoroastrian high priest was invited to defend the religion at the caliph’s court; the proceedings were recorded and preserved by the community. The Caliphate was not, in this period, only the destroyer of Zoroastrianism. It was also, occasionally, the host of its theological self-defense.
The Rivayat of Adurfarnbag. A collection of legal and ritual responses (rivayat literature, similar in genre to Jewish responsa) attributed to Adurfarnbag, addressing questions submitted by the community. The text shows a religious authority working out applied theology under conditions of minority status — what to do when Muslim laws conflict with Zoroastrian ones, how to handle conversion pressure on family members, how to maintain ritual integrity when the resources of a state are no longer available.
What unifies Adurfarnbag’s work is a specific posture: the refusal to allow the destruction of the state to mean the destruction of the religion. The state was gone. The fire temples were diminished. The priesthood was thin. But the religion was a body of teaching that could be preserved, defended, and transmitted by the surviving community if its leaders did the work. Adurfarnbag did the work.
Mardan-Farrukh and the Shkand-gumanig Wizar
A generation or two after Adurfarnbag, Mardan-Farrukh-i Ohrmazddadan composed what is, in many ways, the most ambitious work of the resistance literature: the Shkand-gumanig Wizar, “The Doubt-Dispelling Exposition” or “The Decisive Solution of Doubts.”
What we know about Mardan-Farrukh is mostly what he tells us in his own text. He was a layman, not a priest. He had traveled extensively, encountering communities of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Manichaeans, and engaging in theological discussion with each. He wrote the Shkand-gumanig Wizar in part for his own community and in part, apparently, in response to specific challenges his contemporaries were facing as they encountered competing religious claims. His prose is direct, sometimes biting, and methodical.
The text has sixteen chapters. Its structure:
Chapters 1–4: The defense of dualism. Mardan-Farrukh argues that Zoroastrian dualism — two opposing principles, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman — is the only theologically coherent answer to the problem of evil. If one God is good and is the source of all things, including evil, then God is the source of evil, which is a contradiction. If one God is good and is not the source of evil, then evil has another source, which is dualism. The trilemma becomes: monotheism cannot account for evil without contradicting itself; the only resolution is to acknowledge an opposing principle.
This is a sustained philosophical argument and it is the load-bearing core of the book. Mardan-Farrukh does not appeal to revelation here. He argues from logic. The structure of the argument anticipates by several centuries what later philosophy of religion would call “the logical problem of evil,” and his proposed solution — that the existence of evil requires an opposing principle independent of the good — is one of the standing options in that philosophical literature today.
Chapters 5–10: Defense against specific objections. Various challenges to Zoroastrian doctrine, addressed in turn. The status of the Avesta. The question of why Ahura Mazda did not simply destroy Ahriman. The relationship between the spiritual and material realms. The justification for Zoroastrian ritual.
Chapters 11–16: Polemic against rival religions. This is where the text becomes most distinctive and most difficult.
Chapter 11: Polemic against Islam. Mardan-Farrukh raises questions about the Quran’s coherence, about specific passages that he reads as theologically problematic, about the apparent contradictions between different Quranic statements. He is careful — he is writing under Islamic rule — but the criticism is direct.
Chapters 12–14: Polemic against Judaism. This is the most extended section of the polemical material. Mardan-Farrukh raises questions about specific Hebrew Bible narratives that he reads as theologically problematic — episodes in Genesis that he considers unworthy of God, the relationship between the Tanakh’s various accounts, what he reads as anthropomorphism in the depiction of God. He is engaging the Hebrew Bible as a polemicist and pointing out what he considers its weaknesses.
Chapter 15: Polemic against Christianity. Similar treatment of Christian doctrine — particularly the Incarnation, which Mardan-Farrukh reads as theologically incoherent (how can the infinite become finite? how can God die?), and the Trinity, which he reads as compromising monotheism.
Chapter 16: Polemic against Manichaeism. This is perhaps the most fierce section, because Manichaeism was the closest competitor — a dualistic religion that had drawn on Zoroastrian material but, in Mardan-Farrukh’s view, had distorted it into a hostile-to-matter system that the orthodox tradition rejected.
Reading Mardan-Farrukh honestly
A few things need to be said about the polemical chapters, especially the long anti-Jewish section, because they will not surprise anyone who has read medieval polemical literature but they will mislead readers who imagine that Mardan-Farrukh’s approach to other religions was characterized by interfaith generosity.
He was a polemicist. His chapters on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Manichaeism are written to refute, not to dialogue. He uses standard polemical techniques of his period: selecting passages from the rival’s scripture that he reads unfavorably, pressing logical contradictions, accusing the rival tradition of theological inadequacy. The anti-Jewish material in particular reads, in places, like the Christian Adversus Judaeos literature of the same period — not because Mardan-Farrukh was drawing on that literature directly, but because medieval polemical genre had certain conventions and he worked within them.
This does not invalidate the philosophical core of the book. The argument from the problem of evil for dualism is a serious philosophical argument that stands on its own merits, regardless of what Mardan-Farrukh says about Genesis. But it does mean that the Shkand-gumanig Wizar should be read for what it is — a 9th-century work of theological polemic by a beleaguered religious minority defending its tradition against multiple competitors — rather than mined for arguments that can be transported into contemporary religious discourse without acknowledgment of their original polemical context.
The historical importance of the text is not in its polemic. It is in its existence. A Zoroastrian layman, in the late 9th century, in a community under sustained pressure, wrote a sixteen-chapter philosophical defense of his religion. He engaged the major theological challenges of his world systematically. He produced an argument from the problem of evil that holds its place in the philosophy of religion today. He preserved, by the act of writing, the intellectual self-confidence of a tradition that the conquerors had assumed would simply die out under the pressure of conversion.
It did not die out. Mardan-Farrukh is part of why.
The Denkard and the encyclopedic project
Returning to the Denkard: the work that Adurfarnbag began and that his successors expanded over roughly a century became, in its final form, the most comprehensive Zoroastrian text we possess. It runs to nine surviving books (originally there were probably nine plus an introductory one or two; the first two are lost in the manuscript tradition).
The books cover:
Book 3: Theological doctrine, including extensive discussions of the relationship between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, the nature of the soul, ethics, and responses to common objections.
Book 4: The history of the religion, including material on Sasanian-period redactions of the Avesta and on the religious policies of the various kings.
Book 5: Apologetic and polemical material, including responses to challenges from outside the tradition.
Book 6: A collection of andarz — wisdom sayings and ethical maxims attributed to various religious authorities.
Book 7: The life of Zarathustra, drawing on the now-lost Spand Nask. This is one of the most important sections because it preserves what the priestly tradition still remembered of the prophet’s biography after the canonical nask was lost.
Book 8: The summary of the twenty-one nasks of the Sasanian Avesta. This is the salvage operation — the table of contents of the destroyed library.
Book 9: Detailed commentary on three of the gathic nasks (the Sūdgar, Warštmānsr, and Bag Nasks), preserving in summary form what the lost commentary tradition contained.
The whole work is roughly 170,000 Pahlavi words. It is not a single coherent treatise. It is a community’s collected memory, organized by theme, written down before the memory could be lost. Reading it is like reading the proceedings of an emergency archive: a tradition that knows its time is short, gathering what it can and committing it to writing for whatever future might receive it.
This is, in its own way, what Maimonides was doing for Judaism in the Mishneh Torah a few centuries later, and what the Talmudic redactors had done for Judaism several centuries earlier. The difference is the conditions. Maimonides was writing in a flourishing community with patronage and institutional support, organizing a corpus that was not in danger of being lost. The compilers of the Denkard were writing in a community that was demographically collapsing, in a language already becoming archaic, gathering what they could from a tradition that had already lost three quarters of its canonical literature.
The Denkard is what cultural preservation looks like under conditions of catastrophe.
What this literature accomplished
The Zoroastrian theological resistance literature did not save the religion in Iran. The conversion pressure continued, the demographic collapse continued, and by roughly the 13th century the Zoroastrian population in Iran had been reduced to small enclaves around Yazd and Kerman that have continued in attenuated form to the present.
But the literature did several things that mattered:
It preserved the intellectual self-understanding of the tradition. The Denkard, the Shkand-gumanig Wizar, the Bundahishn, the Selections of Zadspram, the Pahlavi Rivayats, and the related works document how Zoroastrians thought about their own religion, its doctrines, its history, and its rivals. Without these texts, modern reconstruction of late-antique Zoroastrian theology would be largely speculative. With them, we can articulate the tradition’s positions with reasonable confidence.
It transmitted the canonical literature, however partially. The summary in Denkard book 8 is not the lost nasks themselves, but it is enough to know what was lost, what topics were covered, what the structure of the canon had been. The Denkard‘s book 7 is not the Spand Nask, but it preserves a substantial biography of Zarathustra that would otherwise be entirely lost.
It produced philosophical arguments that retain force. Mardan-Farrukh’s argument from the problem of evil for dualism is still a serious philosophical contribution. The Zoroastrian theological tradition, even in its 9th-century resistance form, developed arguments that the philosophy of religion has continued to engage with.
It preserved the religion long enough for the Parsi community to carry it to India. The flight to Gujarat (8th–10th centuries) preserved the religion in the long term. The resistance literature ensured that what was preserved was a religion with intact theological self-understanding, not just a body of ritual practice. The Parsis carried not only the fire but the intellectual framework that explained why the fire mattered.
What we owe these texts
These are not famous texts. The Shkand-gumanig Wizar has been translated into English (E.W. West’s translation in Sacred Books of the East vol. 24, 1885, is the standard, though now nearly 140 years old). The Denkard has partial translations, mostly in older specialist publications. The Madigan-i Gizistag Abalish has been edited and translated but is rarely read outside Iranian studies. There is no popular treatment of any of these works in English. There is no general-audience presentation of who Adurfarnbag was or why he matters.
This is partly because the texts are difficult — Pahlavi is a hard language and the conceptual framework is unfamiliar to most modern readers — and partly because the audience for them has been small. But the result is that an extraordinary body of religious and philosophical literature, produced under conditions that should not have permitted its production, sits largely unread.
What these texts deserve is engagement. Mardan-Farrukh’s argument from evil deserves to be read alongside Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and the modern philosophy-of-religion literature on theodicy. Adurfarnbag’s salvage of the nasks deserves to be understood as one of the great acts of cultural preservation in history. The Denkard deserves to be acknowledged as the encyclopedia of a religion in crisis, as important to the history of Iranian thought as the Talmud is to the history of Jewish thought.
Most readers in the religious world today have never heard of these books or these authors. The communities that produced them no longer exist in the geographies where they were written. The languages they were written in are no longer spoken outside academic and liturgical use.
But the books exist. They were preserved. The Parsi community carried them to India when the Iranian community was crushed. European Iranists from Anquetil-Duperron onward, working with Parsi scholars, recovered them for Western scholarship. The texts are there, in editions and translations, available to anyone willing to read them.
What they ask of us is not adoption or agreement. They ask only that we acknowledge what they are: the voice of a religion defending itself in writing during the centuries of its destruction, refusing to disappear quietly, producing serious thought under conditions that should have made serious thought impossible.
The fire was carried to Gujarat. The arguments were carried with it.
Sources
Primary texts
- Denkard, ed. B.N. Dhabhar (1949) and earlier editions; partial English translations in Sacred Books of the East vol. 37 (E.W. West, 1892); selections in J.M. Jamasp-Asana’s editions
- Shkand-gumanig Wizar — ed. and trans. P.J. de Menasce, Une apologétique mazdéenne du IXe siècle: Škand-Gumānīk Vičār (Fribourg, 1945) — the standard scholarly edition; older English translation in West, Sacred Books of the East vol. 24 (1885)
- Madigan-i Gizistag Abalish — ed. and trans. A. Barthélemy, Gujastak Abalish (Paris, 1887); see also the discussion in Albert de Jong’s writings
- Pahlavi Rivayats — ed. and trans. Alan V. Williams, The Pahlavi Rivāyat Accompanying the Dādestān ī Dēnīg (1990)
- Selections of Zadspram — ed. and trans. Philippe Gignoux and Ahmad Tafazzoli, Anthologie de Zādspram (1993)
- Bundahishn — trans. B.T. Anklesaria (1956)
Modern scholarship — Adurfarnbag and the Denkard
- Philippe Gignoux, “Dēnkard,” Encyclopaedia Iranica online (the standard reference article)
- Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 3 (covers the 9th-century context extensively)
- Jean de Menasce, Le troisième livre du Dēnkart (1973)
- Shaul Shaked, From Zoroastrian Iran to Islam (1995) — collected studies on the transition
- Shaul Shaked, Dualism in Transformation: Varieties of Religion in Sasanian Iran (1994)
Modern scholarship — Mardan-Farrukh
- P.J. de Menasce, Une apologétique mazdéenne (1945) — the foundational study
- Albert de Jong, “Religious Polemics in Context: The Pahlavi Škand Gumānīg Wizār” in T.L. Hettema and A. van der Kooij, eds., Religious Polemics in Context (2004)
- Carlo G. Cereti, La letteratura pahlavi (2001) — Italian survey of the Pahlavi corpus
Modern scholarship — the broader context
- Jamsheed K. Choksy, Conflict and Cooperation: Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Elites in Medieval Iranian Society (1997)
- Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia (2009) — for the imperial background
- Sarah Stewart, ed., The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination (2013)
- Michael Stausberg, Die Religion Zarathushtras (3 vols., 2002–2004) — German, but the most comprehensive recent treatment of Zoroastrianism overall
On Pahlavi literature generally
- E.W. West, “Pahlavi Literature,” in Grundriss der iranischen Philologie II (1896–1904) — old but foundational
- Almut Hintze, “Pahlavi Literature,” in A History of Persian Literature vol. 17 (2009)