Seeing the Lights: Zoroastrians in the Islamic World

The project ‘Arcs of Time: Zoroas­tri­an Philo­soph­i­cal Anthro­pol­o­gy’ project (AOT) has two goals: the first is to crit­i­cal­ly ana­lyze how Zoroas­tri­an thinkers the­o­rized human psy­chophys­i­cal com­po­si­tion and its rela­tion to human his­to­ry, and the sec­ond is to schol­ars work­ing on Zoroas­tri­an Mid­dle Per­sian lit­er­a­ture and schol­ars work­ing on the mul­ti­fac­eted lit­er­a­ture pre­served in Ara­bic, since the Zoroas­tri­ans writ­ing in Mid­dle Per­sian were con­tem­po­raries with many well-known Islam­ic authors writ­ing in Ara­bic. The ‘See­ing the Light’ work­shop is designed to achieve the sec­ond goal of aca­d­e­m­ic inte­gra­tion. Par­tic­i­pants are invit­ed to explore the man­i­fold ways Zoroas­tri­ans inter­sect with the wider Islam­ic world; this includes the crit­i­cal inher­i­tance of Greek and Aves­tan thought; the var­i­ous ways the Sasan­ian state was remem­bered by Zoroas­tri­ans and Mus­lims, Per­sians and Arabs; as well as the local inter­ac­tions between com­mu­ni­ties. We hope to fos­ter dia­logue on the his­tor­i­cal set­ting, the philo­soph­i­cal issues, the con­crete debates, and the sociopo­lit­i­cal struc­tures beneath the texts.