In this presentation, I argue that the modern notion of Iranian culture as employed in the public discourses of Iranian Zoroastrians allows them to tackle the dilemma of Shiʿi dominated Iranianness without provoking Shiʿi authorities. I will share an analysis of speech acts documented in Zoroastrian ritual spaces, addressed by mobeds (priests) to the community. The detailed ethnographic data illustrate how Zoroastrians, who consider themselves the authentic Iranians, invoke and enact ties to Zoroaster’s teachings and Iranian heroes to construct ritual performances of origin, superiority, and distinction. By addressing the history of the Arab conquest of Persia, they moreover challenge the Iranian Shiʿi hegemonic norms of Iranian culture that have become the de facto representative of Iranianness. I argue that the Zoroastrian configuration of Iranian culture encodes and evokes pre-Islamic historical tropes and modern nationalist sentiments, constantly maneuvering around national, religious, and ethnic categories to carve out a space for their superior oppositional identity. For them, Iranian culture has become a system for arranging the past, depending upon specific assumptions, narratives, and voices that continue to have powerful platforms in Iranian nationalist imagination.