Biases and Misuse in an Age of Prejudice: The Case of the Zoroastrians of Iran in the Modern Period

The material includes the slides and text related to a lecture presented on 12 March 2026 at the University of California, Irvine. The talk was part of the conference series Mixed Methods in the Study of Religions, organised by the University of California, Irvine (UCI) during the academic year 2025–2026. As a teaching lecture, this text makes no claim to be an original scholarly contribution: it aims to offer students a reflection on the methodology to be employed in the study of religious minorities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This lecture repeats a previous one presented at the University of Toronto, at the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, for the Zoroastrian Studies Seminar Series on 9 January 2026, titled Journey and Encounters: The History of the Zoroastrians of Iran and Its Challenges (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19337909), with some additions on the misuse of Zoroastrian texts by European intellectuals of the age.