In 1851, the Parsi (Zoroastrian) community of Mumbai published an ahd nameh, or charter, that was supposedly issued by the Prophet Muhammad to the family of Salman al-Farisi in the seventh century C.E. Salman had been an early, prominent convert to Islam from Zoroastrianism. The ahd nameh, written in Arabic, granted Salman’s Zoroastrian descendants autonomy in their religious affairs. It also freed them from certain disabilities imposed on dhimmis under Islamic law. Although the Parsis insist on the ahd nameh’s authenticity, Western scholars have dismissed it as a later Indian forgery. Yet I have discovered copies of the ahd nameh in Persian histories from Iran as early as the twelfth century. My research indicates that the Indian ahd nameh is in fact an earlier Iranian document taken out of context. There are at least four extant versions of the ahd nameh, two from Iran and India, respectively. However, there are substantial differences between the Iranian versions of the text found in Mujmal al-Tawarikh (520 A.H./1128 C.E.) and Tarikh-i Guzideh (730/1330), and the Indian versions found in Persian MS #2556 (1064/1654) of the British Library and Tuqviuti-Din-i-Mazdiasna (1851). It is primarily a lack of context that distinguishes the Indian versions of the ahd nameh from the Iranian ones. The Iranian versions begin with Salman asking Muhammad for advice about how to treat Zoroastrians. It seems, therefore, that the Iranian versions of the ahd nameh belong to a genre of early Muslim literature that sought to clarify the Zoroastrians’ ambiguous legal status by dictating their proper treatment under Muslim rule. These dictates were often attributed to either Muhammad or Salman (or, in this case, both) to make them authoritative. The Indian versions of the ahd nameh offer no such context, meaning that somewhere between Iran and India this document lost its preface; that is, the ahd nameh was literally and figuratively taken out of context. The text also underwent other changes. The Indian versions dropped phrases that offered economic privileges to the Zoroastrians and added phrases that emancipated the Zoroastrians from later legal restrictions placed on dhimmis. The latter led scholars to assume that the Indian ahd nameh was a forgery. However, these studies did not take into account the Iranian versions of the text. Thus, scholars prematurely dismissed the content of the Indian ahd nameh without appreciating its original, Iranian context.