MAZDAKISM is a socioreligious movement that flared up in the reign of the Sasanian king Kavād (488–531 CE) under the leadership of Mazdak, son of Bāmdād. Its genesis, however, seems to go back to an earlier period, possibly the fourth century, when Zarādusht, a Zoroastrian priest, attempted through new interpretations of the Zoroastrian scriptures, to purify the faith.

A populist and egalitarian movement, Mazdakism socially preached in its acute form what modern scholars have called a communistic agenda, advocating an equitable distribution of property and breaking of the barriers which placed the concentration of wealth and women into the hands of the privileged classes. In terms of religious doctrine it exhibited some Gnostic features and apparently entertained a qabbalistic notion of the significance of numbers and the letters of the alphabet. The followers of the sect called themselves Derest-dēnān (of the right faith...