The Joyous Religion

The Joyous Religion: Bābak Khorramdin and the War for the Iranian Soul

In 816 CE, a young man of humble origins climbed to a volcanic fortress in the mountains of Azerbaijan and began a rebellion that would last twenty years and shake the Abbasid caliphate to its foundations. His name was Bābak Khorramdin. His followers called themselves the Khorram-Dinan - the People of the Joyous Religion. They believed the divine Light was present in the world, that hierarchy was an offence against the divine principle, and that the community organized around the Light's social implications was worth defending against the most powerful state in the Islamic world.

The Joyous Religion is the full narrative history of that rebellion and of the extraordinary man who led it. Drawing on the Arabic and Persian chronicle tradition, the Islamic heresiographical literature, and the long subsequent history of the rebellion's contested memory, this book traces Bābak's rise from estate manager to spirit-bearer, the twenty years of asymmetric military genius that defied every caliphal suppression campaign, the fall of the Badhdh fortress, the betrayal, the execution in Samarra, and the blood gesture that the hostile chronicle tradition could not suppress because too many people had witnessed it. It follows the rebellion's memory across twelve centuries of appropriation, suppression, and passionate reclamation - through medieval Persian silence, Pahlavi nationalist rehabilitation, Soviet Azerbaijani historiography, and the contested politics of the Islamic Republic - and asks what it means that a ninth-century peasant rebellion continues to generate controversy, passion, and competing claims of ownership in the twenty-first century.

This is the story of a fire that does not go out.