Hints and tips:
...Which brand of beer was co-founded by Karan Bilimoria — later the first Zoroastrian Parsi to sit in the House of Lords? Which TV character was variously a lord, a butler and a soldier?...
...Anthony Grafton’s intriguing new book introduces us to the polymaths who modelled themselves on the Persian magi (originally a Zoroastrian word for “priests”), and the Christian gatekeepers — Nicholas of...
...I should note that the Zoroastrian religion’s name for the cult of charisma is, rather delightfully, Maga. jemima.kelly@ft.com...
...A cricket club they established in 1850, the Young Zoroastrians, is still in existence....
...But she “fell in love” with an art form venerated since pre-Islamic Zoroastrian times, practising six hours a day to attain the top diploma from the Society of Iranian Calligraphists in 1996....
...Arabesques radiate around repeating polygons and Zoroastrian stars; others are dominated by calligraphic and vegetal scrolls. Matkarimov smiles apologetically, and ducks back out into the courtyard....
...Take vultures, which once had a symbiotic relationship with Mumbai’s Parsees, an ancient Zoroastrian religious community....
...Members of India’s ancient Parsi minority — Zoroastrians who migrated from Persia a thousand years ago — families like the Tatas prospered during British rule thanks in part to their liminal place in the...
...The Poonawallas who come from India’s tiny Parsee community — descendants of Persian Zoroastrians who migrated to the subcontinent between the eighth and 10th centuries — are based in the western city of...
...It is sunset and I am standing on the top of one of the Towers of Silence — a massive rock citadel where the Zoroastrians once laid out their dead for the vultures, to avoid contaminating the air with cremation...
...The Irani followed in the footsteps of India’s Zoroastrian Parsis, whose eastward move from Iran preceded them by about a millennium....
...Our first home was one of four houses in a compound, with us, South Indian Tamils, a Zoroastrian family, a Kerala Christian family and one from Uttar Pradesh . . ....
...In Uzbekistan, it is a magical journey into the silk road’s pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian past....
...The Muslim practice of veiling women copied the (Christian) Byzantines, who probably borrowed it from the (Zoroastrian) Persian culture of hiding upper-class women from all men but their own....
...Just as early mosques were built on sacred sites, much was inherited from classical Rome, Byzantium and the Zoroastrian Sasanian empire....
...In the next episode, “Fire and State”, MacGregor visits a Zoroastrian sacred flame in India, and discusses Vestal Virgins with Mary Beard; then for “Water of Life and Death”, it’s back to India, where bathing...
...centuries of intellectual and technological development, and pragmatic Abbasid caliphs, mindful of their imperial Persian heritage, thought it better to spare the lives of conquered Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians...
...The five-judge bench consists only of men, all from different faiths: a Hindu, a Muslim, a Sikh, a Christian and a Zoroastrian....
...You don’t have to push a bishop very hard to discover they all share the Queen’s conviction that the C of E’s core purpose is to protect the right to belief per se — whether Christian, Sikh, Muslim or Zoroastrian...
...Parsees, a religious minority descended from Zoroastrian refugees from Persia, are seen as eccentric, with an unusually high proportion of unmarried men....
...It serves small plates of Indian classics in an atmosphere designed to recapture the spirited mood of the cafés founded by Zoroastrian immigrants in Mumbai in the 1960s....
...Born a Zoroastrian and, now, very much a believer only in the natural laws, contrary to what Mr Coombs thinks I do not feel patronised by the prime minister’s declaration....
...Zipping weekly between Dubai and Zurich, Mr Karkaria, who is also a Zoroastrian priest, describes his life now as a kind of rat race....
...In a ritual similar to the “sky burials” of Tibetans to the north, the Zoroastrian Parsees of Mumbai used to expose their dead on so-called “towers of silence” to be devoured and recycled by vultures....
...Like the Tatas, his family traces its presence in India to an ancient exodus of Zoroastrian refugees from Persia....
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