Iranische Religion: Zoroastrismus, Yezidentum, Baha'itum.

• Author: Rezania, Kianoosh

Iranische Religion: Zoroastrismus, Yezidentum, Baha'itum. By MANFRED HUTTER. Berlin: W. DE GRUYTER, 2019. Pp. vii + 233. [euro]24.95 (paper).

In this new work, Manfred Hutter introduces three "Iranian" religions: Zoroastrianism, Yezidism, and the Baha'i faith, to students and interested specialists. The book aims to provide material for the comparative study of religion from the field of Iranian religions in an innovative way. The author organizes his representation of these three religions in a parallel structure, divided into three chapters, one for each major tradition. Each religion is analyzed in three major sections: history of the religion as provider and interpreter of identity, worldview in theory and practice, and its religious community in social contexts. These sections correspond to three main components of religion, according to flutter's definition (p. 4). The first section addresses the religion's founder(s), textual tradition, and intra- and interreligious boundaries (identity markers). The second comprises cosmogony and cosmology, the main phases of human life and their corresponding rites de passage, ethics, and finally rituals and feasts of the religion (called here "religion in time and space"). The final section incorporates three topics: forms of organization (laity, specialists, and their hierarchies), changes and challenges in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and religious life in diaspora with a special focus on German-speaking countries.

With this parallel structuring, the author successfully encourages readers to apply a comparative study of these religions. In doing so, he provides different ways for reading his book. To concentrate on comparison of a topic, a reader can read only the corresponding sections of the three main chapters. Or one could read the chronologically sequenced chapters on Zoroastrianism, Yezidism, and the Baha'i faith in reverse order, which would frame the historical possibilities in older periods through the lens of more recent and better-known religious events.

Each of the three chapters begins with an introduction to the history of academic study of the religion. The author deliberately chooses religions that emerged in three different historical periods (at the end of the second millennium BCE, in the twelfth, and in the nineteenth century CE, respectively). In doing so, he aims to facilitate the comparison of related as well as independent religious processes and phenomena. Beside Yezidism, with its center in contemporary...