This is a picture of Hormuzd Rassam, an Assyrian/Ottoman subject who received British citizenship later in his life. He was a pretty successful archaeologist who unearthed the Cyrus Cylinder in Babylon (present-day Iraq). Interestingly, the Qajars probably didn’t know or care about it, since the artifact was found in a neighboring territory and was written in Akkadian (not Old Persian) cunieform. And yet, this piece of pottery—the Cyrus Cylinder—would define Iranian nationalism during the 20th century.
Anyway, Hormuzd was pretty special for getting his own picture in 1854. Very elite.
Read more about it in my article for the Ajam Media Collective. And of course, follow Ajam on their own tumblr here.
More Qajar-themed posters for Ajam’s Call for Editors.
Sattar Khan was one of the leaders of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11 and lead the rebels in the fight against royalist forces, allowing for the implementation of Iran’s first constitution.
He’s a bit of a hero, you know.
Speaking of Fat’h ‘Ali Shah, do YOU Ajam?
My Valentine’s day gift to you, tumblr.
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.
A map of Tehran that shows the relative distribution of Christians across the city. Most Tehrani Christians are Armenians, though many other Churches exist as well (such as Assyrian, Chaldean, and others).
For more on Armenians in Iran, check out our latest article.
This is such a useful map. Did you have any idea there were that many Christians in Tehran??
Such is the life/inbox of an Ajam editor (but we all love it).
While we deal with all the behind-the-scenes stuff, check out the site at ajammc.com.
kthnx bye
Ajam is part of the reason why I won’t be online as much, but I’ll still be updating the Ajam tumblr—follow it, if you haven’t already?
On the Sanctions Against Iran: Reflections from a Child of the Iran-Iraq War
(via sokoot)
READ IT. It made me cry.
(via zanjir)
In honor of the 50,000 view mark, check out some of our most popular articles:
The Afro-Iranian Community unity: Beyond Haji Firuz Blackface, the Slave Trade, & Bandari Music
A “Persian” Iran?: Challenging the Aryan Myth and Persian Ethnocentrism
Overland from Yerevan to Kabul: Trekking the Villages and Valleys of the Wakhan Corridor
A Young Diaspora Raises its Voice: Creating Iranian Alliances Across Borders
Misreading Feminism & Women’s Rights in Tehran: Beyond Chadors, Ninjabis, & Secular Fantasies
good. stuff. and more good stuff to come.
Why Ajam?
“Ajam” refers to a geographic space, a liminal zone between Persianate and Arabic cultural spheres that has existed for nearly a millenium and a half. Historically, it is a zone of contestation- the battles and representations of Karbala, the clashes over Shatt al Arab- and the demarcation of “`Eraq-e `Ajam” and “`Eraq-e `Arab.” Concurrently, “Ajam” offers glimpses of fluidity, of shared symbolic universes; it is a powerful reminder of both the human penchant for the other and of the universal desire for “tawhid,” or oneness.“Ajam” has meant something distinctively “other” for as long as etymologists can remember. In Yathrib, it meant the peoples beyond the Peninsula; in al-Andalus, those north of Poitiers; and in Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo it denoted the lands we identify today as “Iran-zamin,” the Persian-speaking lands spreading East from Mesopotamia.
The same history that marginalized the Persian-speaking cultures of the region after the Islamic Conquests has tried to reduce “Ajam” into something negative, to ensure that the other is not only foreign but also strange (“غريب”).
By adopting the term “Ajam,” we acknowledge this history while at the same time advocating and advancing the possibilities that “Ajam” represents- the reclaiming of the cultural mosaic that is the heritage of all of our many peoples. The cultural subjugation of the other that “Ajam” has at times implied has been overthrown by the sheer weight and force of cultural production that the lands of “Ajam” have given birth to in the intervening centuries.
Ajam Media Collective documents and engages with the cultures of the lands of “Ajam,” in both contemporary and historical periods. We reclaim and reinvigorate the worlds of liminality that are being erased by notions of monolithic cultures and politics, in the process reframing the notion of what Ajam means by stripping it of its pejorative historical meaning by exploring the social complexity of the region and by highlighting the myriad cultural contributions the region has made over centuries and into the present
And here’s the Ajam Media Collective’s reasoning for using Ajam. In my opinion, if Ferdosi used it, why can’t we?
