Irani Zoroastrians affirm the preservation of the Iranian Zoroastrian tradition, the continuity of the faith among those who remained in Iran, its ancient homeland, after the coming of Islam. Enduring centuries as a minority, often under hardship, especially in the Yazd and Kerman regions, they maintained the rituals, calendar, and communal life of Zoroastrianism in the land of its origin. Their identity is tied to that unbroken presence in Iran and to the guardianship of practices and traditions rooted directly in the historic Zoroastrian heartland. Zoroastrians remaining in Iran paid the jizya, a poll tax levied on non-Muslim subjects under Islamic rule, for over a millennium, a burden that, along with social and legal disadvantages, drove centuries of gradual conversion to Islam and reduced a once-dominant Sasanian imperial religion to a small minority, today numbering only in the tens of thousands, concentrated still in Yazd, Kerman, and Tehran.
Iran's 1979 constitution, despite establishing an Islamic Republic, formally recognises Zoroastrians, alongside Jews and Christians, as a protected religious minority guaranteed a reserved seat in the national parliament (Majles), a legal status that has allowed institutional continuity even as the community remains subject to restrictions, including on proselytising and on marriage with Muslims, that do not apply to the Muslim majority.