6 - From late antiquity to neo-Mazdakism

Summary

dar azal partoveh hossnat ze tajalla dam zad

‘eshq peydah shod o aatash be hameh ’aalam zad

In the beginning a ray of your beauty appeared with a breath

Love was found and set aflame the entire world!

MAZDAK: A MISSING LINK?

Between the eclipse of Mithraism, in the fourth century, until the coming of Islam to Persia, in the seventh, there appears the almost forgotten figure of Mazdak (d. 524/8), a socio-religious revolutionary active in Zoroastrian Sasanian Iran, whose radical re-thinking of religion and state held a short but influential patronage across Iran and into Arabia. The Zoroastrian clergy moved swiftly to end the widespread influence of his teachings, securing his death — as they had Mani's about three centuries before him, but on the whole they failed to eradicate the immortal impress of its ideals. Mazdak taught an unorthodox doctrine which was incredibly misconstrued by the mobeds, a deliberate misunderstanding carried over into the Islamic establishment that adopted a comparable view of Mazdak[ism] as heresy. Since these first accusations Mazdak and his followers have been negatively portrayed as excessively libertine — as sharing women along with their worldly possessions — sadly inflating what should perhaps be considered as probably the first “communistic” society in history.