Great question! Persians do not consider themselves to be Arabs.
Indeed, several Iranian friends of mine who proudly call themselves
Persians become quite irate when they are called Arabs (and I would
not be surprised if a person who identified himself as an Arab would
be similarly incensed at being called a Persian). There are many
cultural, historical, ethnic and linguistic distinctions between
Persians and Arabs. I've gathered some material from the Web that
should be helpful.
"Iranian-Americans have had a difficult time being recognized as a
distinct community by the public, the mass media, even the government,
all of which tend to confuse them with Arab-Americans.
'We?re not Arabs!'
But as any Iranian-American will tell you, Persians are not Arabs, any
more than Koreans are Japanese.
'Meaning no disrespect to Arab-Americans,' they tell everyone who will
listen. 'We are very proud of our own culture, our own language,
cuisine and history.'
In fact, relations between Iran, or Persia, as the country was
traditionally called, and the Arab world have been tense for many
centuries."
ISCA - Iranian Students Cultural Association: Forums
http://iraniansca.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=posting&mode=reply&t=137&sid=fc110822536d3bf32fd85091eff9ecaa
"Persians are not Arabs. The original Persians who settled into the
region now known as Iran were known as Aryans. The people of ancient
Persia developed a culture, language, religion (Zoroastrian) wholly
separate from the Arabs. Long story short, some years later the Arabs
invaded Iran, and brought Islam with them... Arabs and Persians are
not one people; their language, culture, religion (to an extent) have
clashed in the past and still clash today."
TWoP Forums: My Super Sweet 16
http://forums.televisionwithoutpity.com/index.php?showtopic=3122215&st=270
"Arab and Persian are ethnicities... Iran was called Persia not long
before, hence the word Persian can be legally used for nationality,
meaning Iranian. Persian could also refer to the language spoken
mainly in parts of Iran/Tajikstan/Afghanistan -- and each variant of
Persian can be called Farsi/Tajiki/Dari -- And, the same word could be
used to refer people to speak the language... the distinction between
Arab and Persian... usually refers to language/rituals/ancestry."
Free Thoughts on Iran: Comments on "I'm Persian!"
http://freethoughts.org/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=121
"Many Americans seem to entertain the illusion that Iranians are
Arabs. This may be due to the fact that many people in both
communities practise Islam, which I'll mention below. Another
coincidence that may have contributed to this confusion is the
apparent similarity of the names Iran and Iraq. It is true that the
Persian language and the Arabic share the same alphabet, namely the
Arabic alphabet, which was imposed upon the Iranians centuries ago.
But originally Persian had its own alphabet. Anyway, in Arabic script
the names of the countries are entirely different, 'Iraq' beginning
with the letter 'ain' and 'Iran' beginning with the letter 'alif'. The
words 'Iranian' and 'Persian' are virtually synonymous, the former
being the preferred term nowadays... The word 'Iran' is cognate with
the English word 'Aryan', as the Iranians are Aryan, that is,
Indo-European, while the Arabs, as is well known, are Semitic, so
ethnologically there's a definite disjunction. The Indo-European
languages, which probably coincide in fair measure with ethnicity, are
divided into Centum and Satem groups. Centum languages further divide
into Germanic, Italic, Celtic and Greek, while Satem languages divide
into Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Albanian and Armenian. Thus we find
among Indo-European languages such widely divergent specimens as
English, German, Spanish, French, Greek, Russian, Persian (Farsi),
Hindi and many others. There are a great number of Arabic loan words
in Persian, just as there are a great number of Latin loan words in
English, but no one classifies English as an Italic language, nor
should anyone classify Persian as a Semitic language. There are
Persian loan words in Arabic too, but etymological dictionaries of the
Arabic language are scarce, if they exist at all, and one is often
left guessing which words might be from Persian."
Free Republic:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1338091/posts
"Persian has undergone many changes in the past two millennia, the
most significant of which has most certainly been the influence of
Arabic since the Islamic conquest of Persia in the year 650. Over the
years, Persian has borrowed up to half of its vocabulary from Arabic
as well as certain grammatical elements. This impact of Arabic is
profound not only because of its magnitude but because the sounds and
syntax of Arabic, a Semitic language, are so different than those of
Persian. Since the Middle Ages, Persian has been written in a modified
form of the Arabic alphabet, although in pre-Islamic times it was
written in an older alphabet known as Pahlavi...
The Persian Sassanid dynasty that had been a dominant empire in the
Middle East was defeated by the Muslim Arabs in the seventh century
and Iranians enthusiastically embraced Islam. Persian language and
culture went into a decline for several hundred years. During this
time, Arabic was the language of study for both religious and secular
purposes. Persian remained a spoken language only and even so was
greatly influenced by Arabic. The earlier Persian writing system was
forgotten as was much of the pre-Islamic religion and folklore. Only
in the tenth century did a number of Persian poets and intellectuals
begin to use the Arabic writing system to write Persian."
Brigham Young University: What Is Persian?
http://nmelrc.byu.edu/handbooks/persian2.php
My Google search strategy:
Google Web Search: "persians are not arabs"
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22persians+are+not+arabs
Google Web Search: "distinction OR difference between persians and arabs"
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22distinction+OR+difference+between+persians+and+arabs
I hope this helps! If anything is unclear or incomplete, please
request clarification; I'll be glad to offer further assistance before
you rate my answer.
Best regards,
pinkfreud |
