Bharat ( India) given shelter to Parsis settle in a Hindustan ( Bharat ) because Parsis religion & culture in Persian nation destoryed by lslamic terrorist muslim militants

Bharat ( India) given shelter to Parsis settle in a Hindustan ( Bharat ) because Parsis religion & culture in Persian nation destoryed by lslamic terrorist muslim militants

Parsis were originally Iranian Zoroastrians who emigrated to India in the past 1400 years to escape forced conversion to Islam. The first wave of Zoroastrians moved from Western Iran and Central Asia to what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan. As Muslim conquerors advanced on them they fled further South to Western coastal regions of India. Zoroastrians also migrated to West coast via the sea route. This is why we find the largest concentration of Parsis along the coastal cities of Gujarat and Maharashtra.

Why are Parsis different from other immigrants to India?
Why are they so comfortable being Indians?
Despite their small numbers why are they so successful intellectually and financially?
Why are they so loved and respected in India?
For answers we must go back some 2600 years — to the Axial Age when the known world underwent a major spiritual revolution and ushered in new belief systems that broke up with the existing tribal religions and cultures.

What happened in the Axial Age?
During a 3-century band 700—400 BCE, Eurasian continent underwent a spiritual and philosophical revolution — a dramatic shift from tribalism, animal sacrifice and violence and moved towards the unfamiliar terrain of empathy, tolerance and non-violence. This period also heralded a reduction in materialism, ritualism and animal sacrifice, questioned all holy books, and downgraded the priestly class.

In India the Vedic culture was audited and mostly refuted causing the Brahmins to lose much power and prestige. The skepticism and free-thinking brought in by the Axial Age caused the ruling class to prefer the new gospels of non-violence, non-ritualism and freedom to think and experiment, as taught by the Buddha, Mahavira, and the Sages of the Upanishads (all in India). In China Lao Tsu also taught a similar philosophy of skepticism, anti-ritualism, self enquiry and tolerance. In the West, Greek skeptics taught that their gods were either not interested in human welfare, so the humanity were on their own and had to take care of themselves by evolving new thoughts and methods. This caused free thinking to flourish and Greeks began to quantify and calculate and theorize about the universe and came up with amazingly modern ideas such as heliocentrism, and the atomic theory.

Thus Eastern skeptics turned inwards and the Western skeptics turned outwards. And both groups came up with revolutionary — and complementary — findings.

Zoroaster’s “Middle” Way.
Iran, where Zoroaster grew up, was located midway between the scientific Greece and introspective East. Don’t know why, but Zoroaster did not evolve anything dramatic. He decided that there were forces of good and evil in the world and we must stand on the side of good, which involved acceptance of other religions and cultures and keeping an open mind. But he said that there was only one God whom he called Azura Mazda. He also suggested that Azura Mazda represented the “good” and would one day revisit the earth to destroy the “bad” and save the “good.” (oops…)

Zoroaster, thy Slip Showeth!
Inadvertently Zoroaster had introduced the worst religious idea ever, that of the “End Times”. But he did not give it much importance, nor did his followers. Resurgent in the new faith, they were ready to build a vast empire which would control the middle east for a thousand years.

(Unfortunately the “End Times” virus did not die. It slept, like a time-bomb, like Sauron’s Ring of Power, patiently waiting before engulfing the Christian Europe in repeated waves of darkness, then Muslims — and then the Christians, Muslims and Jews together (each at all others’ throats), and ending up causing maximum destruction to themselves. This is the problem with “End Times” belief. It destroys its believer. But Zoroastrianism itself remained unaffected by end-time fears. Unaffected by such superstitions, Zoroastrians grew and flourished and helped Iran become a hub of creativity and intellectualism.

1000 Years of Zoroastrian Triumph (600 BCE - 640 AD).
Zoroaster’s new philosophy quickly found political patrons. The first Zoroastrian ruler Cyrus the Great conquered the entire Middle East in a very short period, and actually assisted the newly defeated peoples to continue with their existing belief systems and practices. For the first time in the history of world an emperor allowed religious and ethnic diversity within his Empire, true to his Zoroastrian teachings.

The evidence that Zoroastrian bounty so overwhelmed the newly emancipated Jews is clear. The Jewish Bible names only ONE Messiah: Cyrus the Great — a gentile! The Jews, full of self importance, thought that they were the only people freed by Cyrus. But that was not true. Cyrus Cylinder (above) makes it clear that the Emperor’s generosity extended to all religions and nationalities. And he distributed royal funds to rebuild all temples of all religions in his empire.

So this was the nature of Zoroastrianism. This tolerance continued for almost 1000 years (except during times of war). But they had periodic conflicts with the Eastern Roman Empire, which worsened when Rome embraced Christian monotheism. In return the Zoroastrians hardened their hearts and insisted on a “Zoroastrian monotheism” and began to persecute Christians who lived in the Sassanian Zoroastrian Empire. (The first wave of Christians to Kerala in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD included some of those Christians.)

In the subsequent two centuries (400–600 AD) the Sassanian Emperors (the last Zoroastrian dynasty of Iran) vacillated between tolerance and intolerance. In 6th century AD (before Prophet Muhammad) there emerged a truly enlightened Zoroastrian ruler Khusraw I (praised as Anushawan the Just), who declared as follows:

“We examined the customs of our forebears, but, concerned with the discovery of the truth, we [also] studied the customs and conducts of the Romans and Indians and accepted those among them which seemed reasonable and praiseworthy, not merely likeable. We have not rejected anyone because they belonged to a different religion or people. And having examined “the good customs and laws of our ancestors as well as those of the foreigners, we have not declined to adopt anything which was good nor to avoid anything which was bad. Affection for our forebears did not lead us to accept customs which were not good.”
True his word, Khusraw I let the winds of change blow across this empire. A synthesis of Greek, Persian, Indian, and Armenian learning traditions took place within the Sasanian Empire. One example was bimaristan, the first hospital that introduced a concept of segregating wards according to pathology. Greek pharmacology fused with Iranian and Indian traditions resulted in significant advances in medicine. The center of all these developments was the “Academy of Gondishapur” which attracted physicians, philosophers, and scientists from all over the world.

Too Much Reforms Too Soon. (late 500s AD)
Unfortunately, Khusraw-I was too egalitarian for his times. He initiated a large scale land reform to help the poor and the landless at the expense of the aristocratic land owning families of Iran. These elites silently gritted their teeth and waited for their emperor’s death. Thereafter the suppressed elite anger was unleashed on his son Khusraw II who was a but shadow of his his father. Being hot-headed, he decided to earn the respect of his countrymen by defeating the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) which then controlled most of Eastern Mediterranean region including Egypt. The element of surprise gave spectacular territorial gains to K-II who even managed to conquered Egypt and seiged Constantinople itself. Soon the backlash came. Within ten years of K2’s foolhardy adventurism, Sassanian empire had shrunk to even smaller size than before due to combined attack from Eastern Roman Empire and the Christian Arab nomadic hit and run tactics from the south. Ultimately the backlash from within his own people and that broke the back of Sassanian Empire and it became a pushover.

IMPORTANT:
This animated map how Khusraw II’s “show-off-conquests” triggered massive retaliation from Byzantine Empire. The plague of 638 which affected both the empires. Sassanian Empire thus became a mere shell, and Byzantine Empire, a very exhausted winner.
(I have put the start at The crucial period from 601 AD till the final dissolution of the empire. See Khusraw-II’s sudden expansion which could not be sustained. Watch the whole thing at slow speed using Youtube’s controls, so that you can compare each year with Islamic history, particularly after 622AD/1AH.)

The angry Persian elite captured their warmongering emperor and killed him. That made things worse. Internal conflicts and paranoia set in. Purges of Christians, Manicheans and pagans became routine. In 628 AD a devastating plague killed off one-third of Persian empire, and took the life of the emperor as well. Safe from plague on the other side of Arabian desert the emergent Arab Muslims smelt blood and sharpened their swords.

Islamic conquest.
This was the time when the Islamic army under Umar al-Khattab attacked, and they easily sliced through the half-hearted Persian defense, plundered the dying empire’s riches, razed down libraries, killed scholars, and threw shelves of books into the River Tigris (as Ibn Khaldun angrily recalls in his Muquddumah) because “Quran contained all learning for mankind.” (By the way, Umar’s famous line is the source of the term “Boko Haram.”)

Zoroastrians Escape to India.
Zoroastrians who were not slaughtered became slaves in their own land, dhimmis. The conquering Arabs had no interest in philosophy or art, which were all ruthlessly destroyed. And the best of Zoroastrians escaped their homeland — many migrated east and ultimately ended up in India. They are still here.

That is why India is blessed with a community of brainy and highly disciplined Parsis who have contributed far more than their share to build up their foster motherland, India. Parsis have kept their identity and separateness always. But their greatness is is their gratitude and willingness to give back far more than they take. That is why we have the Tatas, the Godrej, Shapurji Pallonji, and many other industrial families, most of whom participate in Indian economy in a quiet supportive way. Then we have greats like Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, Zubin Mehta, Supreme Court Chief Justice Justice S. H. Kapadia, the Father of Indian Atomic Research Homi Bhabha, and many others.