<b>Iranian Identity Under Fire: An Argument Against the Use of the Word âFarsiâ for the Persian Language</b>
Shapour Suren-Pahlav
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Frances Pritchett, Professor of Modern Indic Languages at Columbia University in the US believes that the use of the word âFarsiâ was further propagated by Urdu-speakers living in West[57]:
âAll my Urdu-speaking friends refer to Persian as âFarsiâ, which is its Urdu name; they tend to transfer that name into English quite naturally. I picked up the habit directly from themâ.
Now the habit is becoming institutionalised at the highest levels. The Guidelines for UK Government websites[58] as well the British Embassy in Tehran[59] currently describe Persian as âFarsiâ.
The BBC, with its long-established âBBC Persianâ radio service, is launching a range of TV channels for the Middle East in 2008. This includes a Persian language service which is to be called âFarsi TVâ. Interestingly, the Arabic counterpart is named as Arabic TV â rather than âal-Arabiat TVâ.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Since the coming of theocratic regime to power in Iran, the regime leaders have dedicated significant resources to restructuring Iranian culture and values. Iranians are now vigorously-encouraged to choose Arabic/Islamic names for their children[72], and a large number of Iranian names have been outlawed[73]. Many pre-Islamic historical and archaeological sites have been devastated under the cover of development projects: destroyed as part of highway[74] and railway track construction[75]; contaminated irreparably by chemical factories[76]; undermined by nearby hotels[77]; obliterated as part of mining[78]; or submerged beneath dam reservoirs[79]. There have even been threats to bulldoze Persepolis[80]. In general, pre-Islamic Iranian heritage has been downplayed and undermined in favour of the promotion of Islamic culture[81], the Islamic way of life, and above all the Arabic language. There have even been systematic attempts to change to âFarsiâ the name used in the international community for the Persian language â as a political statement[82].
Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic regime, publicly made no secret of his contempt for pre-Islamic Iranian culture â deriding everything Iranian from Noruz to the Persian language. According to Roya Hakakian[83]:
â. . [Khomeini] made no secret of his contempt for the non-Muslim dimensions of Iranian life. He injected Persian with so many Arabic words that it confounded the ordinary listener, something for which he compensated by repetitiveness.â
This attitude was mirrored in the views of many other prominent members of the Islamic regime. Although the Friday Sermons organised by the Islamic Republic say little about the Persian language â indicating its perceived relative lack of importance â a detailed and explicit statement was made in 1981 by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in his role as the Islamic Republicâs Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council. On that occasion, he linked the fate of the Persian language directly to that of Persian nationality: in his view of the future, both shall vanish[84]:
â. . we believe that the future [is] Arabic, not Persian . . on the day the united Islamic government is established, certainly its language cannot be anything but Arabicâ.
Some senior regime members are less negative â at least in their words, if not in their actions. Ali Khamenei, then the state President and the current Spiritual Leader of the Islamic Republic, emphasised the importance of the Persian language in 1988 in a speech entitled âThe Greatness of the Persian Language and the Necessity of Protecting itâ [85]. He spoke about:
â[the] revolutionary duty to promote the national language, and [how] that national language constitutes the most important and original determinant of cultural identity for any nationâ.
He then asserted the past and present international importance of the Persian language in the Islamic world, and especially in India and Central Asia, concluding that:
â[Today,] Persian is the language of true . . and revolutionary Islamâ.
More recently, various Islamic commentators have been somewhat less committed to the Persian language. For example, in 2003, Naser Pourpirar[86] demanded that the national language of Iran should be replaced with Arabic[87]:
âIt is very unfortunate that we cannot put the Persian language aside and replace it with the language of Qurâan. However the future of Iran is at the hand of Islamic Unity. Spreading the Arabic language among Iranian youths and incorporating it more seriously into the education system . . can make a foundation for such Islamic Unity.âÂ
Pourpirar has a startling range of views â including that the Parthian and the Sasanid dynasties are baseless fabrications by Jewish-Orientalists and that the indigenous peoples of Iran were wiped out by the âsavage Slavic Achaemenidsâ so that Iran was then free of human settlement until the Muslim Arabs arrived. He is however recognised as a scholar by the Islamic regime, who quote extensively from his written work.
Ghahreman Safavi is another of the Islamic Regimeâs new breed of scholars. He is based in the UK and presented a paper on âIranian identityâ in 2004 at SOAS. He consistently used the word âFarsiâ â although unfortunately always inaccurately[88]:
âOld Farsi is a branch of [the] Avestan language . . [and the] Avesta has been written in Iranian language (Ancient Farsi) . . [while] New Farsi, which is Dari Farsi . .â.
The Iranian diaspora
Perhaps most worrying, however, is the use of the word âFarsiâ by some Iranians, especially in the diaspora. It is difficult to understand why they might, however inadvertently, allow themselves to contribute in this way to the denigration of Iranian cultural achievements.
Professor Yarshater writes about[89]:
â. . the Iranians living in the USA, when they answer questions about languages that they know in their application forms for jobs or university courses. I suspect that they even feel gratified to think that âthe known word of Farsiâ can now be used in the English language. If only they knew that by using the word âFarsiâ . . they find themselves damaging irreparably the fame and cultural status of Iran.â
A number of Iranian academics now use the word âFarsiâ to refer to Persian in their English publications[90]. For example, Dr Mohammed Chaichian, Professor of Sociology at Mount Mercy College, discusses the question of cultural identity in first generation Iranians â always using âFarsiâ, and thereby himself diminishing that identity[91].
Professor Franklin Lewis reflects on the snowball effect that this has when the media get involved[92]:
âThe media has accelerated and canonized [this] process with the spread of the Iranian diaspora around the English-speaking world, especially, perhaps in North Americaâ.
For those Iranians in French-speaking countries, the use of the word âFarsiâ for the Persian language is incidentally doubly incongruous since it sounds indistinguishable from the word âfarciâ, or âstuffedâ[93].
Some diaspora Iranians have, however, at last woken up to the problem and are now proposing action. A contributor to Persian Gulf Online comments that[94]:
âThe significant point which unfortunately seems very difficult to get through to the Iranian Diaspora, specially those residing in the United States â by far the biggest and potentially most influential group of Iranian émigré community â is that by keeping the term 'Persian', we help preserve a 'CONTINUITY' which is an important cultural necessity.â
He suggests that:
âWe cannot preserve the best in our culture unless we are prepared to take care of it. I believe we Iranians have succeeded in confusing everyone about our identity and culture, ourselves included. We have diluted our identity by overeducating foreigners. We are so eager to defend the Iranian image outside of Iran that we have created confusion about the name of our country, the name of our people, the name of our seas and the name of our language.â
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IN Conclusion
Dr John Perry, Professor of Persian Language at the University of Chicago, emphasises the importance of language for a nation[95]:
âOf all man's cultural badges, that of language is perhaps the most intimately felt and tenaciously defendedâ.
Sadly, it seems that sizeable numbers of Iranians are not yet defending their cultural heritage stalwartly enough.
Of course, it may still not be too late â even though warnings were being issued over twenty years ago. Professor Geoffrey Lewis, from Oxford University, was outraged in 1984 by the inappropriate use of the word âFarsiâ[96]:
âIt may still not be too late to put an end to the grotesque affectation of applying the name âFarsiâ to the language which for more than five hundred years has been known to English-speakers as Persian.â
Yarshater adds his full intellectual weight:
âWe should, in order to protect our literature and ancient cultural credibility in the West, strictly avoid using the word âFarsiâ and instead use the same old and well-known word of âPersianâ. We should realise that the usage of the word âFarsiâ instead of âPersianâ acts against our national interestsâ.Â
In conclusion, using the word âFarsiâ for Persian in any Western language, and in particular English, is a linguistic nonsense. Additionally, it undermines all the positive cultural connotations of the word âPersianâ for modern Iran and adds to the recent media portrayal of Iran as a strange and distant society[97].
To use the word âFarsiâ instead of âPersianâ is an insult to the Iranian peoples and their culture and âone might even venture to say uneducatedâ[98]. It is âone of the greatest affronts to great cultures in our timeâ [99].<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
http://www.cais-soas.com/CAIS/Languages/pe...n_not_farsi.htm
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