In 1920, Muslims and Zoroastrians allied themselves with local Parsis in debating Baha’is.

By the 1920s, the itinerant Baha’i teacher, Mirza Munir Nabilzadah, was at the centre of a number of Iranian propagation efforts in India. As if directly responding to ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s call for the prioritization of oral engagement over the mere textual circulation of scripture, Nabilzadah’s publications were usually the direct outcome of face-to-face encounters. Sometime in the mid-1920s, he published an advertisement in three Bombay newspapers inviting people to a dialogue on the Baha’i Faith. Local journalists covered the ensuing debate between Nabilzadah and his Shi‘i and Zoroastrian interlocutors.

In response, an Iranian Muslim ‘Abd al-Husayn Sipanta and an Iranain Zoroastrian Shah Bahram [Shahrukh], allied themselves with local Parsis in debating Baha’is. They organized a conference at the Zoroastrian Fire Temple (atashkadah) in Bombay aimed at refuting Baha’i messianic claims to being the fulfillment of the Zoroastrian tradition. They enlisted the expertise of the famous Iranian Muslim Iranologist and scholar of Zoroastrianism, Ibrahim Purdavud. A series of articles questioning the validity of the Baha’i claim that Baha’u’llah was the promised Zoroastrian messiah Sayoshant were published in the Indian newspaper Jam. Nabilzadah described his response to these articles as “teeth-shattering” (dandan-shikan) and as leaving his opponents silenced.

(Farzin Vejdani, Transnational Baha’i Print Culture: Community Formation and Religious Authority, 1890–1921, Journal of Religious History, Vol. 36, No. 4, December 2012)