Religion & Philosophy of Iran

Iran is one of the oldest continuously religious cultures on earth. Long before the Hebrew Bible was complete, the prophet Zoroaster taught the Iranian tribes a moral monotheism that would profoundly influence Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in turn. After the rise of Islam, Iranian thinkers reformed the new faith from within — producing the mystical poetry of the Sufis, the speculative theology of the philosophers, and a rich syncretic ethics that endures to this day.

Zarathustra — Greek Zoroaster — lived somewhere on the steppes of eastern Iran or modern Afghanistan in the second millennium BCE. His teachings, preserved in seventeen hymns called the Gathas, present an austere ethical vision: there is one supreme creator, Ahura Mazda; the universe is the battlefield of truth (asha) and the lie (druj); each human soul is a free agent who must choose, and will be judged after death on the bridge of Chinvat.

When Persian poetry rose to its golden age, much of it was Sufi mysticism in literary form. The Sufis taught that the divine is reached not through dogma but through love — that the soul, alienated from its origin, must annihilate its small self (fanā) and rejoin the One. The vocabulary of love-poetry — wine, the cup-bearer, the lover, the rose — became the natural Persian idiom for this annihilating love.

Across the plateau, Iranians built — and still maintain — some of the most lyrical sacred architecture in the world: city-sized shrine complexes of mirrored halls, gilded domes and tiled courtyards that absorb millions of pilgrims a year. These places are living institutions of devotion, hospitality, charity and craft, and they remain among the most moving experiences any visitor to Iran can have.

Iranian philosophy after Avicenna split into two great currents that have continued in dialogue ever since. Suhrawardi (1154–1191) revived Platonic and Zoroastrian themes in his Philosophy of Illumination, arguing that all knowledge is ultimately a form of light. Five centuries later in Safavid Isfahan, Mulla Sadra (1571–1640) synthesised Avicennian rationalism, Ibn Arabi's mysticism, and the illuminationist tradition into a comprehensive metaphysics of being — still the dominant frame of philosophical instruction in Iranian seminaries today.

Long before it reached the Roman legions, Mithra was an Indo-Iranian divinity of contract, oath, friendship and the rising sun — already worshipped in the Vedas as Mitra and in the Avesta as Mithra. The Persian Mithra was a celestial witness to every agreement between humans; to swear by him was to bind the cosmos itself to the oath. The Achaemenids inscribed his name on royal seals from Susa; the Parthians built him a network of sun-facing shrines from Hatra to Nisa; under the Sasanians, Mithra's autumn festival of Mehragān ranked second only to Nowruz.

When Roman legionaries serving on the Parthian frontier carried the cult home, it changed shape: by the second century CE Mithraism had become one of the four major mystery religions of the Roman Empire, with hundreds of underground mithraea from Hadrian's Wall to the Danube. The image of Mithra slaying the cosmic bull — the tauroctony — is found across the empire; many scholars argue that the Christian iconography of the lamb, the date of Christmas (25 December — Sol Invictus, Mithra's day), and the orientation of churches toward the rising sun all carry a Mithraic inheritance.

Mani (c. 216–277 CE), born near Ctesiphon, was the founder of what was, for three centuries, a serious candidate to be the universal religion of Eurasia. Manichaeism synthesised Zoroastrian dualism, Christian Gnosticism and Buddhist asceticism into a single missionary system whose scriptures were composed by the founder himself in seven elegant volumes and translated, during his lifetime, into Syriac, Middle Persian, Parthian, Greek and (via his disciples) Sogdian, Old Turkic and Chinese. At its peak the religion had churches from Carthage to Chang'an.

The world's Zoroastrians today number perhaps 110,000–200,000 souls, divided between three communities: roughly 20,000–25,000 in the historic Iranian heartlands of Yazd and Kerman (where the eternal fire of the Ātash-e Bahram at Yazd has burned without interruption since the year 470 CE); 50,000–70,000 Parsis in India and Pakistan, descendants of the Iranian families who fled the Arab conquest by sailing to Gujarat between the 8th and 10th centuries; and an emerging diaspora of perhaps 30,000 in North America, Britain and Australia. Despite their small numbers, the Parsi community produced Mahatma Gandhi's lawyer Pherozeshah Mehta, the conductor Zubin Mehta, the industrialists Tata and Godrej, and Queen's frontman Freddie Mercury (Farrokh Bulsara).

In May 1844 in Shiraz, a young merchant calling himself the Báb ("Gate") declared himself the herald of a forthcoming universal manifestation of God. His movement spread rapidly across Qajar Iran; the Báb was executed in 1850 in Tabriz, but in 1863 in Baghdad one of his followers, Bahá'u'lláh (Mírzá Husayn-ʿAlí Núrí, 1817–1892), proclaimed himself that promised manifestation. The Bahá'í Faith that grew from his teachings holds the unity of God, the unity of religion, and the unity of humanity as its three foundational principles. With approximately 8 million adherents worldwide, it is today one of the most widely-distributed religions on earth, with elected councils in over 180 countries.