Monica Ringer studied with Hossein Ziai and Nikki Keddie at UCLA, receiving an MA in Islamic Studies (1992) and her Ph.D. in Modern Middle Eastern History (1998). Her first book is entitled Education, Religion and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran (amuzesh va goftoman-e eslah-e farhangi dar dowran-e Qajar). She has published articles in a number of books and journals, including “Madares-e Novvin dar Iran-e Qarn-e Nuzdahom” in Irannameh and most recently, “Rethinking Religion: Progress and Morality in the Early 20th Century Women’s Press” in CSSAAME. Prof. Ringer is a past Executive Director for the International Society of Iranian Studies, and currently serves as co-editor of CSSAAME. She teaches Middle Eastern history at Amherst College. Her current research explores religious reform and "modernization" in the Zoroastrian community in Iran and India in the 19th and 20th centuries.

 “Iran and Iranian Studies in the 20th Century” Conference

Zoroastrian Religious Reform in the 20th Century

Monica M. Ringer

This paper explores the various major phases in Zoroastrian religious reform in the 20th century. Beginning in the mid 19th century, Zoroastrian reformers established modern schools, organized their community politically, and  began enacting religious reforms that they believed essential for “modernization.” These reforms were partly inspired by the reform movement amongst Zoroastrians in India (the Parsis), but were nevertheless indigenous Iranian responses to the larger process of reconceptualizing state and society in the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the reforms, religious “modernizing” occupied a central position, as it was believed that “modern” religions played important parts in generating larger social and political reform.
This paper examines the principal phases of the religious reform movement, in the larger context of Iranian “modernization” over the course of the 20th century. For purposes of clarity and brevity, I have divided the reform movement into several chapters. First, the 19th century spawned by Parsi reformist and representative in Iran, Maneckji Limji Hataria, who took the first measures to organize the community, as well as modify its religious practices. 
Second, the Dakhmeh debate in the 1920s and 1930s. The Dakhmeh debate concerned the religious permissibility of changing the Zoroastrian practice of exposing corpses in “towers of silence” --dakhmehs -- as an alternative to burial. This practice was believed to be religiously imperative since it protected the earth and water from “pollution” associated with corpses. Advocates of Zoroastrian religious reform believed that that time had come to reevaluate the religious necessity of a practice which they increasingly viewed as inconsistent with modern notions of the body and hygiene. In the 1930s, Kay Khosrow Shahrokh, a leading Zoroastrian, proposed burial instead.
Third, the example of the establishment of new communities in the Tehran area for recent Zoroastrian migrants from the southern cities of Yazd and Kerman. These communities were imagined, engineered and constructed by Tehran Zoroastrian elites in the mid 20th century who envisioned them as strongholds of Zoroastrian custom and religion.
Fourth, the paper will discuss the efforts of women’s and youth Zoroastrian organizations to sponsor religious ceremonies and religious instruction in the last third of the century. These lectures and events shaped the nature and form of Zoroastrian religion, and its connection to identity, both religious and vis-à-vis the larger state and society.
The paper concludes with various observations concerning the evolving conception of the nature and form of modern religion, and its role in shaping citizens, as well as Zoroastrian identity.