RESOURCESIslamic history. There are, however, separate bodies of literature on
specific religious communities which often contain implicit if not ex-
plicit explanations of the formation, structure, and function of such
communities without attempting much comparative analysis. One of
the most useful and suggestive theoretical statements about ascriptive
social groups is in the introduction (pp. 9-38) of F. Barth, ed., Ethnic
Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Differ-
ence (Bergen-Oslo, London, 1969, 1970). R. Bulliet identifies a set of
features for religious communities specifically for Late Antiquity and
as precedents for Islamic society in Conversion to Islam in the Medieval
Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).
The new kind of religious leadership around which such communities
coalesced is discussed by P. Brown in "The Rise and Function of the
Holy Man in Late Antiquity," Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971):
80-101, while the importance of ritual for establishing boundaries in
a close, authoritarian, conformist community is treated in a theoretical
way by M. Douglas in Natural Symbols (London, 1970).
Non-Muslim populations are almost always treated in terms of
"status" compared to Muslims and· in terms of their treatment by
Muslim rulers. Two of the most useful studies from this point of view
are S. D. Goitein's "Minority Selfrule and Government Control in
Islam," SI 31 (1970): 101-116, and T. Nagel et aI., Studien zum
Minterheiten-Problem im Islam (Bonn, 1973).
Magians are almost always treated in terms of a fairly uniform set
of religious beliefs and practices, partly because their literature has
been widely used for comparative religion, which seems to need static
models. The result has been to minimize historical change among them,
and this has been used in applying the information from later Magian
literature to the reconstruction of Sas ani an conditions. L. C. Casartelli
made fairly judicious use of this literature for a schematic presentation
of Mazdaean doctrine in La philosophie religieuse du Mazdaisme sous
les Sassanides (Paris, 1884), which was translated into English by F. J.
Jamasp Asa as The Philosophy of the Mazdayasnian Religion under
the Sassanids (Bombay, 1889). A. Christensen's Etudes sur le Zo-
roastrisme de la Perse antique (Copenhagen, 1928) attempts to come
to terms with some of these problems, but M. Mole dealt with them
more effectively in Culte myth£! et cosmologie dans l'Iran ancien: Le
problem zoroastrien et la tradition mazdeenne (Paris, 1963). The best
surveys of Magianism under the Sasanians are those by J. Duchesne-
Guillemin in his La religion de l'Iran ancien (Paris, 1962); "The Re-