“The road ahead”

Isn’t it high time you informed your esteemed readership of the truth that all your correspondents really are I, me and myself rolled into one under different names? I must now own up to being the several ervads, dasturs, popes, mullahs, and the rank and file under whose signatures I have been scribbling.

Ervad Rooyintan Peshotan Peer’s letter ("The road ahead,” Readers’ Forum, Parsiana, March 7, 2009) is a sick joke and reflects no glory whatever on our priestly institution and, I’m sure, sullies his family name. It is disgusting that such khunnas (venom) should make it to your columns. I seem to remember somewhere, sometime, that our priests were generators of good thoughts, words and works, and that they inculcated these in their congregations, audiences and classes. It is with astonishment and a sense of grisly irony that such a disgraceful letter comes under the banner of "The road ahead.” Ahead to where? Low-minded hatred, deceit and destruction?

For your decent-minded readership, may I indicate the high qualities and tough standards demanded of our priests as detailed in the Vendidad/Vidaevodata (includes the shunning of ill-willed priests who learn nothing and teach a foreign religion!)? I stress foreign, for how else have Arabic terms like haqiqat, tariqat, alat, fasli, madressa, and the guff in our later Yashts been allowed into Mazdayasna? I hope our so-called ervads who concoct history on the hoof will not blame Alexander III, the Macedonian, for their mindless lapses!

Our Iranian Zardushti priests had taken the trouble of listing 15 desirable qualities, having expanded on the little treatise Abar panj hem i asronan, in the 16th and 17th century Rivayats in clear answers to questions of proper qualifications posed by our Parsi priests of the times. Are these never taught in our frahangistans/madressas? And why, oh why, are our high priests so quiet over relevant issues, and yet can be extremely vocal against the well-attested socioreligious matters of Zarathushtra’s positive teachings on gender equality and conversion?

Zarathushtra’s system was based on truth — not the devious half-truths that are negotiable or negatable. We, both priests and laity, of the 21st century should take the best of lessons from the past and reject all the hatred with which recent unlearned dhongidox priests have poisoned the pure wellsprings of our beautiful Mazdayasna.

FARROKH VAJIFDAR

London

f.vajifdar@btinternet.com