On My Language and Its Many Names

 In these years of living abroad, I’ve often been asked: Is your language “Farsi” or “Persian”? Which word is correct?

This question usually comes from Americans who, thankfully, know that Iran is not an Arabic-speaking country, and who realize that even though “Iran” and “Iraq” look similar in English, they are not the same place. But even this simple choice between “Farsi” and “Persian” reopens the old chest of pain I inherited from my father — an old wound that ties the name of my language, and my identity, to history and politics.

How can one speak of the language of Iran without naming Khorasan?

How can we call Khorasan the heart of Iran, yet say nothing of Balkh, Khujand, Bukhara, and Tus? Each of these cities has a brilliant place in the history of our literature, but today only Tous remains within the political borders of modern Iran.

Balkh is in Afghanistan (separated from the Iranian cultural sphere in 1857 with the Treaty of Paris), Khujand is in Tajikistan (which, in 1868, came under the control of the Russian Empire), and Bukhara is in Uzbekistan (also annexed by Russia in 1868).

A friend’s simple question about the correct name for my unfamiliar language pours salt on a centuries-old wound — a reminder of how people of the same culture and language were split apart, each placed under the flag of a new country where schoolchildren are taught that their ancestral language is “foreign” and that Iran is an outsider.

I’ve often tried to show people a map, to rush my words forward in hopes of finding someone who shares this old pain. But so far, not one person — Iranian or non-Iranian — has cared about the Stalinist and British scribbles that carved up the map of Asia. Iranians still call Afghans “foreigners,” and in Afghanistan one still hears the slogan “Death to Iran.” When I meet an Uzbek man named Rostam, he often has no idea about the Shahnameh or the origin of his own name.

Since childhood, the borders of “Greater Khorasan” have been much larger in my mind than those of Iran and its neighbors. Ancient books found in all these lands are written in Persian (or Farsi, or Dari, or Tajik).

Take Nizami Ganjavi, one of the towering pillars of our culture and language: we learn his poetry in school, yet when we locate his home on today’s map, we must accept that modern Azerbaijan is a Turkic-speaking country and no longer part of Iran. Or consider Hafez, who in a love poem offers “Samarkand and Bukhara” for the mole on his beloved’s cheek — an image showing that a poet in southern Iran saw his homeland stretching deep into Central Asia. Today, that land is called Uzbekistan, and I’ve heard that in Samarkand, Persian is now spoken in only a few homes.

The people of these broken-apart countries are scattered and focused on survival; few still worry about their language or history. Tajikistan, locked among mountains, has been bound by the 1989 Soviet law that made the Cyrillic alphabet mandatory, weakening its link to the classical Persian texts. Afghanistan has burned in decades of civil war, while Pashtun politicians — whether calling the language Persian or Dari — have worked to limit or erase it. Uzbekistan, under the banner of development, quietly erases the Persian-speaking past.

In this essay, I mainly want to ask: should my language be called “Farsi” or “Persian”?

The answer is not simple — it depends on where you’re from and how you read history. First of all, Persian is originally the language of the people of Khorasan. That may surprise an Iranian reader, since today Khorasan is just a border region in eastern Iran. But to me, Khorasan has always been the beating heart of this culture.

Look at a map of modern Iran: Isfahan and Yazd lie almost in the center of the country. If Persian truly belonged only to “Iranians” — or to what separatists call the “Fars ethnic group” — then the villages and small towns in this central heart should speak standard Persian. But they don’t. Visit the towns around Isfahan, or even my grandfather’s birthplace, Naein, and you’ll find that neither locals nor government clerks speak modern standard Persian. Understanding a single sentence in the Na’ini dialect — likely a relic of an older, now-forgotten language — is almost impossible for someone like me, who learned only Iran’s official standard language.

By contrast, in old villages of Khorasan, the people speak exactly that standard Persian. This shows that the Persian we know today developed somewhere in Central Asia — a place that is no longer even politically part of Iran — and moved westward, becoming the official and literary language.

Today, an Iranian can claim ownership of this language no more than someone from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan can. But as I said earlier, in the last century most of these countries have chosen not the highway of shared language and culture, but a different, narrow road — one where new nation-states grow apart, perhaps for more control, perhaps following the old rule: “Divide and rule.”

If someone in Afghanistan or Uzbekistan says this language should not be called “Persian,” and accuses Iran of “rewriting” its history and literature, such a statement only makes sense if we accept the modern borders of the last century as eternal truth. Otherwise, the history of the language is far older — and far wider — than these borders.

So let us, for a moment, forget the names of these countries and look at Greater Khorasan as a single cultural region — the birthplace of a language that we, from Tehran to Dushanbe, from Herat to Samarkand, have all inherited. But should we call it “Persian”? “Pars” is the name of a province in Iran, and yet my father, grandfather, and I have always called our language “Parsi” or “Farsi.” In Afghanistan, it is called “Dari,” and in Tajikistan “Tajik.” All three names point to the same root, even if each carries its own political and historical weight.

Perhaps we can say that Persian — or Dari — today is a shared creation of the eastern and western halves of the Iranian cultural world, and it belongs to no single country, because its influence on the history and lives of all those who have forgotten it — or wish to forget it — still remains.

Long before today’s political borders, this language traveled freely between the Ghaznavid and Seljuk courts in the east and the poets of Fars and Isfahan in the west. That an Iranian, Afghan, Tajik, or even Uzbek might see it as part of their identity is a historical fact — just as forgetting it anywhere is a shared loss for all of us.