Monica Ringer's Pious Citizens draws the history of 19th- and 20th-century Zoroastrian religious reform into conversation with the global history of modernity. Ringer argues forcefully that questions of religion are central to the emergence of modernity in the Middle East and India—indeed, that religious reform is “generative in and of itself of modernity” (p. 209). For Ringer, this modernity is characterized through a radical break with “tradition.” This decoupling is facilitated through a new historical awareness, in which tradition ceases to maintain its status as static truth but rather comes to be understood as socially and historically conditioned.

Pious Citizens consists of eight chapters that trace ideas of “true” and “rational” religion in Western India and Iran between the years 1830 and 1940. Her story begins in the city of Bombay, where in the early 19th century traditional networks of Parsi authority were disrupted by the rise of merchant capital in the metropole and emigration away from older centers of communal hierarchy. This forms the backdrop for the beginning of the Zoroastrian reform movement, in which religious and social reform were linked. In Chapter 2, Ringer traces Protestant missionary activity in the city of Bombay targeting Zoroastrians. Based on Protestant notions of scripturalism, missionaries critiqued the Zoroastrian clergy for their “ignorance” and “vain repetition” of meaningless ritual, while enjoining Zoroastrians to embrace an internalized, ethical religion associated with moral progress and “civilization.”

In Chapter 3, Ringer traces the emergence of the Parsi reform movement, in which reformers dedicated to the notion of “progress” determined to separate the essential characteristics of original Zoroastrianism—which reformists argued on the basis of recent European linguistic discoveries could be found in oldest portion of Avestan texts—from supposedly superstitious accretions. Meanwhile the self-identified “Orthodox” segment of the community argued to retain the textual and ritual traditions that had been transmitted over the course of centuries. Chapter 4 traces ideas of historicism and evolutionism that circulated throughout the European and American study of religion during this period, ideas which would form the backdrop of the next generation of Zoroastrian reformers. Chapter 5 looks at the second generation of Parsi reformers, culminating in the career of the reformist High Priest of Karachi, Maneckji Nusserwanji Dhalla. For Dhalla, historicism was the key to identifying and recuperating true Zoroastrianism—that associated with Zarathustra himself—from the tradition that accreted around it after his death.

The last third of Ringer's book contributes important perspectives on the transnational connections of modernity. Chapter 6 begins to shift focus to Iran, looking at inversions in the relationship between Indian Parsis and Iranian Zoroastrians as Parsis began to support religious and social reform enterprises in Iran. Simultaneously, as Parsis grew more invested in their historicist project, they began to rediscover the ancient Iranian past through antiquarian activities in Iran, transforming their relation to the Iranian homeland. Chapter 7 looks at religious reform within the Iranian Zoroastrian community, as an increasingly mobile mercantile community came to participate in national politics. Ringer here also discusses the ways in which Zoroastrian identity becomes linked with Iranian nationalism under Reza Pahlavi Shah, leading the American chargé d’affaires in Tehran to give credence to a (false) rumor that the shah was planning to lead a national conversion of sorts back to Zoroastrianism (p. 181). Finally, in Chapter 8, Ringer looks at the life of the political figure Kaykhosrow Shahrokh, a man who thought about the role rational religion might play in creating “pious citizens” through a shared Iranian national identity, religious pluralism, and equality of citizenship.

Pious Citizens raises a number of questions to which a work of its size can only hint at the answers. Ringer does little to contextualize Zoroastrian reform in the precolonial intellectual history of the Zoroastrian communities. She relies on European descriptions of Zoroastrians in Iran and India to review the history of the community prior to the 19th century, but it would have been fruitful to discuss earlier works of Zoroastrian theology as well. At several points in her narrative, she seems to accept the missionary and reformist critique of “ignorance” of the priesthood without attempting to recuperate what Zoroastrian learning consisted of prior to the reformist intervention. In fact, the Zoroastrian priesthood of the 17th and 18th centuries was quite literate as scores of scholarly works composed in Persian and Gujarati during this period attest. Ringer writes that the Zoroastrian priesthood “required the memorization of large quantities of Avestan language liturgies that were often poorly understood” (p. 36), yet as she herself notes, “the Orthodox position required a sophisticated understanding of traditional texts and commentaries, as well as mastery of the Avestan language” (p. 85). What is striking here is the totality of the replacement of traditional Persianate learning by English education, so much so that even the Orthodox, madrasa-trained priests of the late 19th century had to interact with tradition in terms of European learning.

A second point is that Ringer's treatment of Parsi reform relies entirely upon English-language sources and the very few Gujarati-language sources, which exist in English translation. Using these sources to tell the story of Parsi reform presents difficulties, as several of the sources that Ringer relies upon, such as Dosabhai Framji's The Parsees, printed in London in 1858, were intended for European audiences and paint a more unified picture of the Zoroastrian reform movement than contemporary Parsi Gujarati literature. As a result, Ringer's categories of “reformist” and “orthodox” come across as flat and undifferentiated—yet, issues of reform and orthodoxy were hotly debated in the hundreds of Gujarati-language religious newspapers, books, and pamphlets that were printed in Bombay in the mid-19th century. Curiously several of the most prominent 19th-century religious reformers are entirely absent (Navroji Fardunji, Sohrabji Shapurji Bengali, K. N. Kabraji) or mentioned only in passing (K. R. Cama, Dadabhai Naoroji)—likely because, with the exception of Dadabhai Naoroji, they wrote their major works in Gujarati. Ringer's treatment of Iranian reform is on firmer ground since she makes use of Persian-language sources.

A few minor errors were noted throughout the book. The Sasanian Empire commenced its rule of Iran in 224 ad, not bc (p. 15). The sack of the city of Sanjan and the moving of the sacred Zoroastrian Ātash Bahrām is traditionally dated to the conquest of Gujarat by the Delhi Sultanate (1297 ce), not the conquest of the Deccan by the Mughals (1685–1689 ce, p. 28). The caption to figure 11 on p. 103 refers to a “lithograph by Grandan, 1784” when in fact the word “Grandan” printed on the engraving refers to the grantha script pictured next to the Avestan script. The Avestan-Pahlavi text Nirangestan, the most important ritual manual of the classical period, is dismissed without further explanation as a text of “uncertain, possibly even Muslim, authorship” (p. 237, n. 2). While most pre-Islamic Zoroastrian literature is of uncertain authorship, the attribution of this highly technical ritual text to a Muslim author is impossible. A few typos, such as “Christian Oriental Spectator” for “Oriental Christian Spectator” (p. 66) and “Zarthoshti Din-ni Karnari Mandli” for “Zarthoshti Din-ni Khol Karnari Mandali” (pp. 112, 116) occur in what is otherwise a well-edited book.

In sum, Ringer has produced an important work not just for scholars of Zoroastrian religious history, but for those interested in the global history of modernity. One of the most enticing aspects of Ringer's book is the comparative potential of understanding religious reform as a “shared phenomenon across religions in Middle Eastern scholarship” (p. 209). Ringer's study yields valuable insights into the process by which religious reform creates moral subjects who come to participate in the apparatus of the state, and as such, it has implications for the study of related phenomena, such as Islamic modernism and Hindu nationalism.