Škand Gumānīg Wizār (The Doubt-Breaking Explanation) is the only surviving Zoroastrian polemical treatise. It was written in Middle Persian in the 9th or 10th century AD, under the Abbasid dynasty, in Iran. While the original has been lost, a Pāzand (Middle Persian in Avestan characters) version has been preserved.

One of the workshop’s main objectives is to provide an update on the sources used by the author of the treatise, based on the current state of research. To this end, the workshop will bring together scholars of Zoroastrianism and related fields, including Islamology, Oriental Christianity, Judaism, and Mani­chaeism—the primary religions targeted by the treatise.

Another aim is to expand knowledge of the historical context of this polemical work, and the intellectual networks that developed within the Iranian world following the Arab conquest and the events that had already taken place by the end of the Sasanian period. In this respect, other contributions play a significant role in the programme. They are dealing with tools of argumentation in jurisprudence, the theological technical vocabulary, and the historical and sociological framework of the polemical encounters.

The workshop is primarily funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and forms part of the research programme of the DFG project “Polemical Tools in the Zoroastrian Polemical Treatise Škand Gumānīg Wizār” (https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/iranistik/mitarbeiter/drittmittel/timus/index.html).

Mihaela Timuş (mihaela.timus@fu-berlin.de)