Mazdakism

Mazdak is known only through his enemies. Every account of him, in Middle Persian, Arabic, Syriac, Greek and Persian, was written by those who opposed him or by later authors drawing on them, so the details of his teaching are uncertain. What is clear is that in the late fifth century, in the reign of the Sasanian king Kavad I, a reforming movement led by Mazdak, son of Bamdad, gained a wide following and, for a time, the king’s support.

Mazdak seems to have built on the ideas of an earlier teacher, Zaradusht of Fasa. His followers held that the world was made by a good principle and that envy, anger and greed came from the dark one. Because inequality bred these evils, goods should be shared. The hostile sources add that wives were to be shared too, a charge historians treat with caution, since it was a common accusation against radicals. The Mazdakites are also said to have practised non-violence and avoided eating meat.

Fall and memory

Famine and unrest in Kavad’s reign may explain why the king leaned towards Mazdak. Kavad was deposed in 496 and restored in about 498 or 499. Late in his reign the court turned against the movement, and his son, the future Khosrow I Anushirvan, oversaw the killing of Mazdak and many of his followers, usually dated to the late 520s. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh tells the story in grim detail and presents Khosrow as the restorer of order. Later writers such as Nizam al-Mulk, in his Siyasatnama, used Mazdak as a warning against heresy.

The ideas did not vanish. Persian and Arabic writers linked Mazdak to the Khorramdin movements of the eighth and ninth centuries, among them the long rising of Babak Khorramdin in Azerbaijan. In the twentieth century some Iranian intellectuals rediscovered Mazdak as an early voice for social justice, while others saw his movement as a destructive episode. Both readings are part of the story of an idea that has survived fifteen centuries mostly in the words of its opponents.