ABSTRACT
Zoroastrianism is the religion started in Iran by the prophet Zoroaster in approximately 1,200 BCE. It is, therefore, one of the earliest of the prophetic religions. For over a thousand years, from the founding of the Persian empire in the sixth century BCE until the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE, it was the official religion of the world's largest empires of those eras. When Islam conquered Iran, the Zoroastrians were increasingly oppressed and forced to retreat into the secure obscurity of remote desert settlements, mainly near Yazd and Kerman, where a few thousand survive to the present day.1 During the regime of the last Shah many Zoroastrians flourished, but with the founding of the Islamic Republic by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 they assumed a lower public profile, and a number (mostly, but not only, well-to-do people from Tehran) migrated to the West, mainly to California and British Columbia and some to Europe.
