The Persian Shadow (Part II)
Ritual, Law, and the Visible Zoroastrian Imprint in Islamic Practice Abstract If theological inheritance can be dismissed as abstract or indirect, ritual inheritance cannot. Religious practices encode memory more conservatively than doctrine. This article argues that several of Islam’s most recognizable ritual structures—daily prayer cycles, purification law, angelic mediation, judgment imagery, and eschatology—bear a closer structural resemblance to Zoroastrian religion than to Arabian paganism or early Israelite tradition.
What this resource contributes
Ritual, Law, and the Visible Zoroastrian Imprint in Islamic Practice Abstract If theological inheritance can be dismissed as abstract or indirect, ritual inheritance cannot. Religious practices encode memory more conservatively than doctrine. This article argues that several of Islam’s most recognizable ritual structures—daily prayer cycles, purification law, angelic mediation, judgment imagery, and eschatology—bear a closer structural resemblance to Zoroastrian religion than to Arabian paganism or early Israelite tradition. Through comparative analysis of liturgy, legal-religious practice, and cosmology, the article demonstrates that Islamic orthopraxy preserves a ritual grammar whose deepest origins lie in Iranian religion. 1.
Topics and source signals
Primary sources detected
Avesta · Vendidad · Hebrew Bible
Scholars detected
Mary Boyce · Albert de Jong · Shaul Shaked