Posted by Rough Rider on November 9, 2006, 3:14 am "In the mid nineteenth century disaster overtook Turkabad, in the shape of what was perhaps the last forcible conversion in Iran... one autumn day when dye-madder--then one of the chief local crops--was being lifted. All the able-bodied men were at work in teams in the fields when a body of Moslems swooped on the village and seized them. They were threatened, not only with death for themselves, but also with the horrors that would befall their women and children, who were being terrorized at the sametime in their homes; and by the end of the day of violence most of the village had accepted Islam... Its fire-temple razed to the ground, and only a rough, empty enclosure remained where it once stood." Furthermore she writes: "...boys fought, and gangs of youth waylaid and bullied individual Zoroastrians. They also diverted themselves by climbing into the local tower of silence and desecrating it, and they might even break into the fire temple and seek to pollute or extinguish the sacred flame." [Boyce's footnote: The last Zoroastrian family left Abshahi in 1961, after the rape and subsequent suicide of one of their daughters.]
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Mary Boyce, Professor of Iranian studies at the University of London writes:
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