Previous research has exaggerated the scale and significance of fire temple desecration in early Islamic Iran. There were only half a dozen or so well-substantiated instances of fire temple desecration between the seventh and twelfth centuries C.E. Nevertheless, tales of fire temple desecration pervade both the Zoroastrians’ lachrymose narrative of their history and modern scholars’ explanations for the slow decline of Zoroastrianism as a world religion since the Islamic conquest of Iran in the seventh century. As a result, it is an enduring theme in studies of Muslim-Zoroastrian relations. Scholars have inflated the scale of fire temple desecration by uncritically accepting the unsubstantiated claims of Muslim sources that a particular mosque was built on the site of a fire temple. At the same time, historians have misinterpreted the significance of even well-documented instances of desecration by considering them out of context. Yet Iran, of all places in the early Islamic world, is relatively well endowed with local histories, meaning that the context of individual instances of fire temple desecration is quite apparent in sources like Tarikh-i Bukhara, Tarikh-i Qumm, Tarikh-i Kirman, and Kitab-i Ahval-i Nishapur. The desecration of Zoroastrian fire temples in these regions usually occurred within a century of the Muslims’ arrival, often in the course of the conquest or during the construction of the community’s first mosque. While some instances of fire temple desecration were intended to demonstrate the Muslims’ superior standing in the social hierarchy or the supersession of Islam over Zoroastrianism, others were a consequence of intra-Muslim affairs that had little to do with Zoroastrians. Moreover, local Zoroastrians successfully petitioned the Muslim authorities on several occasions to spare their fire temples or to compensate for the destruction of them. When considered in context, the Muslim accounts of fire temple desecration do not seem to match the Zoroastrian lament. In sum, scholars have exaggerated the scale and significance of fire temple desecration in early Islamic Iran by reading the sources naively and taking individual episodes out of context. It seems that to some extent the whole notion of fire temple desecration--as a phenomenon, as a category of religious violence, or even as an object of study--has been invented by those who study it, as they consciously or unconsciously adopt the Zoroastrians’ lachrymose narrative of history in an attempt to explain the relative decline of Zoroastrianism in the modern world.