"Baha'u'llah was the founder of the Baha'i Faith. He was born into a family of the nobility of Iran. His family traced its ancestry back to the original Aryan tribes that settled in Iran and India. It was from these tribes that the Indian
Avatars such as Rama, Krishna and the Buddha as well as the Persian prophet Zoroaster were descended. Many prodigies and wonders are recorded of all of the
Avatars or Manifestations of God. This was also the case with Baha'u'llah."
- From Mujan Momen in "Hinduism and the Baha'i Faith"
Also
A treatise that Gulpaygani wrote on the genealogy of Baha'u'llah was confiscated when he was arrested in Tehran 1882 and thus lost, but years later a Baha'i wrote to `Abdu'l-Baha asking about this question and `Abdu'l-Baha referred him to Gulpaygani, who wrote a second, shorter treatise, tracing
Baha'u'llah's ancestry to the last Sasanian king, Yazdigird III, a document that was of great importance in the conversion of the Zoroastrians (
Rasa'il 41-47).
Source:
Encyclopedia Article: Abu'l-Fadl Gulpaygani
My belief is that this is an area of speculation, but for me Baha'u'llah was of course a Noble Whose family was respected and recognized in Nur around Mazandaran and this area had strong Zoroastrian influence over time.. That Yazdigird III had some holdouts in the area after the Muslim conquest is pretty well acknowledged, thus the possibility that the family of Baha'u'llah was descended from Yazdigird III is very likely.
Also this historic note from the wikipedia is interesting:
Climatic conditions of Mazandaran have prevented the preservation of historical monuments. Thus there are only a few sound vestiges remaining from pre-Islamic periods in the coastal plains of Mazandaran. But the province is known to have been populated from early antiquity, and Mazandaran has changed hands among various dynasties from early in its history. There are several fortresses remaining from
Parthian and
Sassanid times, and many older cemeteries scattered throughout the province.
In
662 CE, ten years after the death of
Yazdegerd III the last Sassanian Emperor, a large Muslim army under the command of Hassan ibn Ali (Imam Hassan, the second Shi'a Imam) invaded Tabarestan (Mazandaran as it was then called) only to be severely beaten, suffering heavy losses to the forces of the Zoroastrian princes of the Dabboyid house. For the next two hundred years, Tabaristan maintained an existence independent of the
Umayyad Caliphate which supplanted the
Persian Empire in the early seventh century, with independent Zoroastrian houses like the
Bavand and Karen fighting an effective guerilla warfare against Islam. A short-lived Alid Shiite state collapsed before the subsequent take-over by the
Ziyarid princes. Mazandaran, unlike much of the rest of the Iranian Plateau maintained a Zoroastrian majority until the 12th century, thanks to its isolation and hardy population which fought against the Caliph's armies for centuries.
See
MÄzandarÄn Province - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
