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Communitarian Neighborhoods and Religious Minorities in Iran: A Comparative Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan
Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan*
Affiliation:
UMR Mondes Iranien et Indien (CNRS), Paris
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Abstract

This paper analyzes the urban insertion of some Iranian religious minorities, focusing on three communities, all of which lived in separated neighborhoods: Armenians of Isfahan, Jews of Shiraz, and Zoroastrians of Yazd. After a discussion on the link between non-Muslims' spatial and social isolation and Iranian culture and Shiism, the paper goes on to describe the organization of these neighborhoods during the recent centuries and the recent—and contrastive—evolutions of two of them: while Zoroastrians view their quarter like a humiliating ghetto, of which they wish to go out, Armenians are proud of it, and try up till now to jealously preserve their isolation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 5 , December 2007 , pp. 593 - 603
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2007

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References

1 For a good synthesis of Julfa's history, see Baghdiantz-McCabe, I., “Princely Suburb, Armenian Quarter or Christian Ghetto? The Urban Setting of New Julfa in the Safavid Capital of Isfahan (1605–1722),” Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 107–110 (2005): 415–436CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 I use this term not in its very historical sense (ghetto as a particular urban organization proper to Jewish quarters in some European cities) but in its more common sense: as a distinct and quite separated neighborhood suffering from stigmatization and poverty.

5 On Shiite doctrine, and its particular severity, see M. Ayoub, “Dhimmah in Qur'an and hadith,” in Muslim and Others in Early Islamic Society, ed. Hoyland, R., (Trowbridge, 2004): 25–35Google Scholar; Sanasarian, E., Religious Minorities in Iran (Cambridge, 2004): 21Google Scholar; Tsadik, D., “The Legal Status of Religious Minorities: Imami Shi'i law and Iran's Constitutional Revolution,” Islamic Law and Society 10, no. 3 (2003): 376–408CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 Savory, “Relations between the Safavid State,” 451.

10 Ghougassian, The Emergence of the Armenian Diocese, 211; Loeb, Outcaste, 1977, 16–17.

11 For more details on the precise status of these religious minorities, see Morony, M., “Religious Communities in Late Sassanian and Early Muslim Iraq,” in Muslim and Others in Early Islamic Society, ed. Hoyland, R. (Trowbridge, 2004): 1–23Google Scholar.

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26 Noted in the seventeenth century by the Italian traveler, Valle, Pietro della: I viaggi di Pietro della Valle. Lettere dalla Persia (aux soins de F. Gaeta et L. Lockhart), (Rome, 1972 [1670]), 77Google Scholar. For the Zoroastrians, see Boyce, A Persian Stronghold of Zoroastrianism, 12.

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30 Loeb, Outcaste, 57–60.

31 Loeb, Outcaste, 250–51. The author presents an interesting illustration of such a conflict aroused about the “synagogal” affiliation of a very prestigious family.

32 Loeb, Outcaste, 134. It is worth noting that these Jewish religious schools were called like the Muslim ones (maktab). In the same way, Jewish teachers were called mulla.

33 Ghougassian, The Emergence of the Armenian Diocese of New Julfa in the Seventeenth Century, 104.

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38 Loeb, Outcaste, 145.

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40 Loeb, Outcaste, 74.

41 Baghdiantz-Mc Cabe, “Princely Suburb, Armenian Quarter or Christian Ghetto?”

42 Baghdiantz-Mc Cabe, “Princely Suburb, Armenian Quarter or Christian Ghetto?” See also the numerous reports of foreign travelers, such as Olearius, Relation du voyage en Moscovie, Tartarie et en Perse des ambassadeurs du Holstein avec celui de S.A. de Mandelslo aux Indes Orientales (Paris, 1666); Pietro della Valle (1972 [1670]); Lebrun, C., Voyage de Corneille Lebrun par la Moscovie, en Perse et aux Indes Orientales (Amsterdam, 1718)Google Scholar.

43 Even if this neighborhood was first in the periphery of the city: Green, “The Survival of Zoroastrianism in Yazd,” 116.

44 This more open-minded attitude, if true, would be recent, because in the past and especially in Safavid time, it seems that the life conditions of religious minorities in Esfahan were worse than in Yazd. See Firby, European Travelers and their Perceptions of Zoroastrians in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 77; Fischel, “The Jews in Medieval Iran,” 279.