Zoroastrians struggle for survival in Iran

Flicking through photographs of immigrant Zoroastrian friends in sunny California, 40-year-old Farzad Dehnavizadeh sighs and wishes the young people of his faith would stop leaving Iran for the west.

His 40,000-strong Zoroastrian community has survived centuries of conquest, oppression and forced conversion to keep their 3,200-year-old monotheistic faith alive and guard ancient traditions in Shiite Muslim majority Iran.

Having withstood the ravages of history, the community is now threatened by emigration, which is day by day robbing the Zoroastrians of their precious youth.

Precise figures on the scale of the exodus are not available but sources in the community estimate that at the very least hundreds of young Zoroastrians are leaving Iran for the United States or Canada every year.

Some of the resettlement has also been encouraged by a US programme for religious minorities -- the HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) -- which originally facilitated the immigration of Jews.

"I am very sad that they are leaving, their second generation will have no idea of Iran and Zoroastrian culture," said Dehnavizadeh, a successful engineer and an active member of the Zoroastrian community.

"I do not like the term 'religious minority' for us. Iran can be home to all world Zoroastrians," he said of some 200,000 followers of the Zoroastrian prophet Zarathustra.

Bureau Report