2021-03-29
In “The Burden of Baggage”, Roy Oksnevad, a church pastor, writer and missionary conducted surveys among different Iranian churches outside of Iran. He presents an insightful look inside the community of first-generation converts. He shows how Iranian culture carries over into the church and impacts both its strengths and vulnerabilities. Roy Oksnevad (PhD Intercultural Studies) was the director of the Muslim Ministry Program at the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism and started a coalition of ministry to Muslims in North America. His missionary work has been to Muslims, especially among first-generation Iranian Christians. The number of Christians in Iran is “without a doubt in the order of magnitude of several […]
2021-11-24
A Social History of the Zoroastrians of Yazd was written by Dr. Ali Tashakori, a historian and history professor at the History Department of Yazd University (Yazd, Iran), and published by Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies in February 2020 in the USA. The three-volume book published in Persian discusses the treatment and lives of Zoroastrians from “the arrival of Islam” to “the Islamic revolution.” The first volume covers “the arrival of Islam in Iran to the establishment of the Nasseri Anjoman.” The second volume discusses “from the Nasseri Anjoman to the Fall of the Qajar.” The last volume focuses on the Zoroastrians’ situation from the rise of Reza Shah […]
2021-03-28
The contents of Sufis and Their Opponents in the Persianate World, published in 2020, is based on the conference ‘Sufis and Mullahs: Sufis and Their Opponents in the Persianate World’, organized in 2016 by Leonard Lewison and Reza Tabandeh at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS) at the University of Exeter, which brought together scholars on Sufism from around the world. The book contains about 600 pages covering various aspects of “the Sufi/anti-Sufi opposition in a large historical timeframe and vast geographical expanse”. The book’s contents are divided into five main sections including Medieval Persia and early modern central Iran, Anatolia, Mongol, Timurid, and Safavid Persia, Qajar Persia […]
2020-09-28
The Yarsan faith, also known as Ahl-e Haqq (People of the Truth) is estimated to have about two million followers in Iran, most of whom live in the western, predominantly Kurdish provinces and especially in Kermanshah. This religion also has some followers in Turkey and Iraq. This religious minority is not recognized by the Iranian Constitution, and the members of this community have faced continuous discrimination and persecution in the country to such an extent that many have been forced to deny their faith in public. The members of traditional Yarsan communities are becoming more visible in the Western countries, such as Sweden, both as diaspora groups and in academia. […]