The Acquaintance of Muslims with Zoroastrian Religious Culture during the Early Centuries of Islam

After the fall of the Sassanid Empire and the conquest of Iran by Muslims; confrontations and communications between the Muslim Arabs and the Zoroastrian Iranians, who still believed in their ancient religion, notably increased. A significant consequence of this situation was a gradually mutual cultural familiarity; which had a vast political, social, cultural, and even scientific influence on the people's ordinary life. There is considerable information, in the Islamic sources, about how several Zoroastrian doctrines found their way into the Islamic texts, indirectly or even directly, as a result of the social relationship between Muslims and Zoroastrians.  In this paper, we survey, based on several Islamic sources, the principal modes of the first acquaintance of Muslims with Zoroastrian doctrine and practice.