Persian Lesson of the Day: Love.
عشق eshgh, popularly used for describing “love” in Persian, actually refers to an obsessive, all-consuming love.
The original root ع ش ق in Arabic refers to vines (عشقة) that climb up a tree and kill it by covering the trunk from all sides.
There other words for love in Persian, including دوستى doosti, which doubles up as “friendship” as well.
SANCTIONS ON IRAN:
Let’s make a list of all the things sanctions are affecting—let me know what I’m missing:
1) Medicine shortages http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/14/sanctions-stop-medicines-reaching-sick-iranians …
2) Increased smog and pollution in Iran (and thus, a spike in deaths) http://ajammc.com/2013/01/24/seeing-through-the-haze-the-politics-of-reporting-sanctions-and-smog-in-tehran/ …
3) Cancellation of a number of flights from Europe to Iran http://www.usatoday.com/story/todayinthesky/2013/01/14/iran-airline-flights-sanctions-europe/1833757/ …
4) Iranian students’ bank accounts abroad closed downhttp://www. tcdailyplanet.net/news/2013/01/24/professors-protest-closings-iranian-students-tcf-accounts-week …
5) Denial of admissions to Iranian students at European institutions http://iranianalliances.org/latestnews/368-czech …
6) Iranians denied the ability to buy an iPad after speaking Persian in an Apple Store in the US http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/22/12344611-iran-trade-sanctions-get-personal-in-apple-stores?lite …
7) MASSIVE INFLATION IN IRAN http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/23/sanctions-are-causing-inflation-in-iran-and-harmimg-its-economy.html …
8) Starving artists, literally. The price of paper has multiplied 5x since sanctions first started. http://www.fairobserver.com/article/impact-sanctions-iranian-society-and-artists?page=2 …
Looking for images or depictions of Haji Firuz from during the Pahlavi era. If you know of any references (or have some family treasure or something), please let me know.
In the meantime, this: Haji Firuz entertaining the royal family at a Nowruz party in the 1960s.
Lately, a lot of people have been asking me about the Ajam Media Collective and my involvement in it. Ajam is an online space that deals with all things “Ajam”—sure, it’s main focus is Iran, but we push borders beyond the typical Persianate world. But really, you could read just the “about us” and “why ajam?” pages on the website.
My involvement, however, isn’t really discussed on the Ajam page. People keep asking me if I helped found it. I didn’t. I’m not one of the co-founders. I knew about the idea from the get-go, and I was even asked to be involved at the beginning. But I didn’t join.
After years of putting my energy into different orgs, I’ve become selfish with my time. I won’t participate in an org or even an event unless I feel like it’s truly worth it. So I waited to see what Ajam would come up with. The site was up and running for six months before I submitted my first article to the editors. After that, it still took me a couple months before I decided I wanted a greater role in it. Since then, Ajam’s become one of my favorite things to work on.
As an Iranian-American and a graduate student, I feel like I come from a place of privilege, and working with Ajam has become my way of addressing that. Part of this privilege is intuitively knowing a little bit more about the region and having to answer questions about it. Non-Iranians (and perhaps, non-Middle Easterners) don’t understand how many banal questions we get on the regular.
“Does everyone get an arranged marriage?” “Women can’t go to school in Iran, right?” ”Do they have cell phones over there??????”
Answering these questions and dispelling stereotypes has become the birthright of those born to immigrant families.
As a graduate student, I recognize that I have access to more information than the average civilian. With Ajam, I feel like I can apply my resources to address these questions and help people think beyond these cliche questions and broaden their idea of what the world of Ajam consists of. That’s why I work with Ajam. It’s about the transmission of information between a collective and community of people who are interested in this oft-misunderstood part of the world. It’s about educating and questioning—not these inane questions, but deeper ones, ones that get at the critical questions about social, cultural, and political issues.
Anyway, if you managed to read through this, you owe it to yourself to check out Ajam’s latest photo essay here.
Maryam Firouz, a Qajar princess, established the women’s section to the Tudeh party, Iran’s communist organization during the Pahlavi period.
(girl power to the people)
Album of photographic prints documenting ʻAli Khan Vali, his family, and the people, places, events, and activities associated with his life and career as a Qajar grandee and provincial governor in northwest Iran. It contains many portraits and group portraits of people from virtually all levels of Persian society, including orphans and other children, women, families, students, cadets, military officers, nobility, government officials, clerics, and others. The full album is at the Harvard Library. For our archives, we have selected images related to the lives of women. The album measures 30x45 cm, has 448 pages, and contains 1,412 prints. For full Album viewing, see Full Album
Check out those mustaches.
From Rami B. Regavim’s “the Most Sovereign of Masters: the History of Opium in Modern Iran, 1850-1955”
One of my friends was nice enough to scan me some documents from the British Archives.
This is a statement made by Shanbeh, a 14 year old slave, to the British commission in Southern Iran, where he had gone to receive a manumission certificate in 1929.
Currently reading “Forced Migration in Iran during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” by John R. Perry.
For his discussion, Perry divided up Greater Iran into six sections: Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Central Iran, Fars, Khurasan, and Afghanistan. He gives four motives for forced migration:
- removal of potentially disloyal population
- exile and fragmentation of a refractory tribe
- resettlement on vulnerable frontier zone to repel/absorb raids*
- relocation of a useful population in a favored region
*not sure what it means to “absorb a raid” yet.
Coffee was first introduced by Sufis, who relied on the potent drink to stay up at night for their intense dhikr sessions. It either originated in Yemen or Ethiopia, and although the origins of it are unclear, the caffeinated beverage quickly spread through the Middle East and beyond.
Even the word coffee comes from the Arabic qahwa. Before the popularization of coffee, qahwa was often used to refer to wine, as the root means “lessening one’s desire for something.” Wine was thought to lessen one’s desire for food. Likewise, coffee lessens one’s desire for sleep. And hence, the name stuck.
The rest, as you all know, is history.
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Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East by Ralph Hattox.
