Interesting that you call it "Persian." I live in the USA, where there are a great many Iranians. I find that they do not like to use the name Persia or Persian.
They may be generational. There was a time in recent history when foreign students and ex-pats would avoid identifying themselves with the country that was behaving so badly. In those days, as Americans who took notice of such things began to shift from
eye-ran to
ear-ran to
ear-ron and as refugees began to pour in during their deadly war with Saddam Hussein, many of whom were given asylum from atrocities by the mullahs and their
Ko-mi-tehs (brutal enforcers of Shariah law), it was less inconspicuous for them to identify with Persia -- not as likely to get them into trouble. Working in their favor was the general ignorance about that part of the world in the West. Only a fairly well read Westerner would have known that the modern boundaries of that region (and many other places) and the official name of that state as Iran rather than Persia, were done by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at their post-WWII meeting in Tehran (which also justified Russia's creation of the Iron Curtain, and which ended up making Iran a base of US espionage against the Ruskies during the Cold War, leading to the myths that created popular resentment of the US there). In the US all of the Archie Bunker types wallowing in xenophobia had no clue that a Persian was an Iranian, and only an attentive ear could detect
ee-ron-ee as their own admission, among themselves, that they indeed call themselves Iranians. Also interesting is their spelling "Ayran" (symbol for symbol) which I like to remind white supremacists is nothing the same as Northern Europe; those idiots need to research the reason Hitler picked up on the word Aryan in the first place.
They call the country Iran, the people Iranians, and the language Farsi.
I think the designation "Farsi" has local significance in regions of the country where they once mingled with people who spoke neighboring languages such as Urdu or Pashto, and where the smaller populations had their own languages but which have never had a homeland (better known are the Kurds but how many of us have ever heard of the Qashqai?) . As in other places like Belgium where there is ambiguity about the official language, the better educated Iranian views Iran as a sort of melting pot, with up to about 40% of the population identifying with minority ethnic groups, many of whom did not speak Farsi until the recent oppression and ethnic cleansing of the mullahs rooted them out.
Linguists use the name "Persian" for the group of mutually intelligible dialects that includes Farsi, Dari, Tajik, Hazaragi, etc.
It's interesting that Iranians view some of those languages with a kind of affinity, perhaps like many Americans like the lilt of Irish, or Scottish brogue, or perhaps the Jamaican English accent. Some Iranians also feel empathy for their neighbors who have suffered oppression (Armenians, Kurds, etc.) And then there are traditions and culture markers they enjoy (music, food, dancing, traditional ethnic clothing) which seems to be part of the attraction.
Persia was the old country, so it's okay to talk about Persian rugs and Persian cats.
If that's the consensus among modern Iranians and the millions who fled the atrocities there then it may be a sign of some sort of healing, although the homeland will never be cured of its present disease until some future generation throws off the yoke of Islamic Republicanism. In any case you're obviously technically correct.
ontheleft said:
I had a Persian friend in California who owned a store. He had employees from Iran who spoke Arabic. When he spoke to them his tone was the same that whites had when they spoke to blacks in the US.
Presumably you mean white racists since whites and blacks talk normally to each other wherever they are living and working together cooperatively. For the rest -- the remaining racists and xenophobes who would like to lynch about 80% of the world's population based on some infantile sense of racial superiority -- they may be surprised to find that the people they feel superior to contains its own subgroup of racist supremacists. One of the stupidest things about supremacy is that it's obviously relative.
I wasn't sure why the Iranians you mention were speaking Arabic -- that's fairly unusual. Evidently you mean to say that this Iranian employed some minority group of Iranian immigrants, and yet was hostile to them?
Islam made Arabs grubby, dirty parasites
It may come as a surprise to you that Islam is the offspring of Christianity, and its origins go back just a few hundred years after the first Christian Bibles came into existence (meaning the Vulgate). It would be hard for you characterize people of Arabian heritage prior to that time since very little is known about them, so you'd have a hard time telling whether they fared better or worse under Islam. But they made enormous progress under Islam. The 700 years of domination of the Ottoman Empire relied to an extent on Islamic influence. The "supreme whites" of the West simply were no match for them. And they made great strides in all kinds of technological advances on their own, including many we imported from them. They built many great cities and monuments, ruled the land and the sea, and created art, music and poetry. That's a long way from being "dirty" and "grubbing". Just as any religion, if taken as nothing more than advice on how to exist as merely a decent human being, Islam is no worse than any other in trying to help pull people up out of the muck.
But why all the vitriol? Don't you find grubby dirty parasites in every culture? I feel the same way about people who dress well, behave politely and by all appearances are moderate, but who earn their living parasitically (mortgage investment bankers earned this stereotype) or just about any member of the Right Wing that grubs for money from big corporations to undermine the democratic process, esp. in opposing matters of social justice. As for dirty, that would cover just about everything Americans call "standard operating procedure" of any company, big or small, that's competing to make a profit.
who made their once curious and interesting minds slack jawed and religious.
"Slack jawed" and "religious" often go hand in hand, esp. when the follower is practicing fundamentalism. It all depends on the individual. There are many ethnic Arab progressives and scholars who are moderates. But you'd have difficulty tracing the level of curiosity among entire ethnic groups. As for their status today, they have universities which turn out doctors, scientists and engineers who are anything but slack jawed even if they are religious. In the US and around the world many such scholars are represented in the faculties of many fine universities, labs and research sites. You seem to think they were better off in, say, the year 600 CE, which is not likely, although we hardly know who those people were.