 I would like to invite you all to join me in launching a book, and we actually have a slide of it. The roots of this book go back a very long way, and you will see the reason why we have Professor Crainbrooke speaking tonight as a particularly suitable speaker to launch this book, because Sarah worked with Professor Crainbrooke in India when Professor Crainbrooke was conducting his research on the Zoroastrian traditions in Mumbai, and she has then applied this methodology to the Zoroastrians in Iran. Her work was conducted in the 1990s, 2000s, over a period of about 10 years, with support from the British Academy and various other foundations, and it has now seen the light of the world, and indeed this is only the first of two volumes. It is entitled Voices from Zoroastrian Iran, Oral Texts and Testimonies, and this is the first volume, and it presents the voices from urban centres, and the next volume will be more on the centres in the countryside, but Dr Stuart herself will talk to us and tell us a little bit more about her book, which is now out. Thank you, Almut, for your kind words. I'd like to thank Professor Crainbrooke for his fascinating lecture, a penetrating exploration of what Orality means in the Zoroastrian context, so I'm going to be very short, I don't want to keep you from the reception. But I'd like to say particularly, I'm very grateful to Professor Crainbrooke, as the series editor for her publishes, for his encouragement and support for the book that I'm introducing. It's a great pity that my collaborator, researcher and former student at Zoroast, Mandana Mawavenat, can't be here with us tonight, where it not for her and her family, particularly her father, her husband Bahman Maradian, the project in Iran that led to this publication would never have been possible. I owe a debt of gratitude to all those first and foremost who gave their time to discuss their religion and life in Iran, and also to Ms Shahnaw Shahsadi, who was primarily responsible for conducting the interviews that took place over a period of three or four years. And she put together a team of mainly young people in Yazd, who undertook the translations from Dari to Persian, so I'm grateful to all of them for their work, and also to those who helped with translations from Persian to English, in particular Ms Maryam Mami, the former secretary of the British Institute of Persian Studies. Finally, I'd like to thank the British Academy for supporting the project and, of course, the publisher, Harasiewicz, for the production of the book. Now, throughout the past weeks, culminating on Sunday, marking the anniversary of the end of World War I, our media channels have produced a stream of information about the conflict, focusing especially on the personal accounts of ordinary folk in the form of letters and poems, photographs and memorabilia. What makes these accounts compelling is difficult precisely to pinpoint, but compelling they often are. They allow us to imagine what it might have been like to be there and reflect on aspects we may not have previously considered. Whether or not we agree with the opinions, thoughts and actions of those concerned, their voices are genuine, their accounts first hand. And it's primary material of this kind that's the basis for my book. Over 300 interviews conducted with Zoroastrians in Iran. The aim of collecting this data was to look at what has happened to Zoroastrianism, both in terms of the religion and society since the revolution of 1979. Earlier studies focused on specific locations and thereafter, primarily on Tehran. Whereas this study maps the remaining population where ever there to be found in Iran today. So it's just a map. It's an estimated population based on various statistics last year. So once we've gathered this kind of raw data, the primary source, the question arises how to interpret it in a way as to inform our research without distorting or manipulating what we understand our interviewees to have expressed. Since the main interview was herself Zoroastrian, thus providing an authentic insider or emic account, we listen, we find ourselves listening quite literally to our upon our of what is often a private conversation. So we need to decide what to extract, how to distill and most importantly what account of the religion to use as a benchmark by which to measure what people are saying. Whilst academic studies predominantly in the west have provided us with what is commonly referred to as the classical account of the religion, Iranians Zoroastrianism is informed somewhat differently. And for this reason I've attempted to contextualise our interviews drawing on the translations and interpretations of religious texts by priests and scholars in Iran to explain the various attitudes, beliefs and customs, as Professor Crenbroch has said inductive. A chapter on society that charts the changes in the constitution, the civil and penal codes of the Islamic Republic, as well as the internal governance of Zoroastrians give some insight into interviews, interviewees views on topics such as marriage, conversion, education and emigration outside leaving Iran. Now the previous study that Professor Hintzer referred to, Professor Crenbroch's Living Zoroastrianism in India brings to the fore the many and varied differences between the two communities. So this has been a very good comparator and I have no time to give more than one example which is that both Parsis and Iranians Zoroastrians have moved towards a monotheistic view of the religion. But their prospective trajectories have been markedly different. The Parsis were exposed to predominantly Christian ideas beginning with the missionary zeal of the 19th century in India. Zoroastrianism in Iran, Zoroastrians in Iran have been exposed predominantly and persistently to Islam for over a thousand years. We find in modern Iran Muslim scholars who are deeply committed to their Iranian ethnicity have had to address the issue of how their Zoroastrian religious cultural roots relate to the notion of the inherent superiority of Islam. A common approach to this problem is the belief held by some Muslims and indeed some Zoroastrians alike that the original monotheism of Zarathustra, as they see it, was compromised during the Sasanian era by a powerful and corrupt priesthood supported by the monarchy. So you can see the direction that this has been going in. Zoroastrians helped to shape the new literary milieu that introduced perts and writers who were only several generations away from being Zoroastrian themselves, one assumes way back at the time of the Arab conquests. While we do not know precisely how and when Persian literature came to be a key part of Zoroastrian self definition, it is clear from our interviews that it is indeed a means by which their religion is perceived and understood today in Iran. A legacy of this project derives from the fact that the Zoroastrian Dari dialects are dying out. The Karamani form is spoken by only a handful of people in that city. The Dari of Yazd and its dialectical variations are still spoken in the villages of the Yazdi plain, but these villages are gradually being abandoned for the cities and a new generation is using more Persian words, especially in digital communication. So these interviews provide a rich linguistic archive for future research. You don't need to read this. It's just a website because thanks to the support of the patrons fund, all these interviews are being digitised in the Endangered Languages Archive at the Zoroast Library. And I'm grateful to the head of the archive, Dr. Mandana Sepidini-Paw, for her advice and support for the project and Dr. Sophie Salfner, the digital archivist, as well as Bill Parker and Stephanie Pettit for their work in making the collection available online. All the interviews, or at least all the urban interviews are now available. So I'll end here just with a reflection that sadly it's once again difficult to undertake research in Iran, especially on religious minorities, and of course especially if you have a British passport. But we mustn't give up. With much of the world turning its back on Iran today, Iranian studies is as important now as it ever has been. Thank you.