Mirzadeh eshghi biography of barack
Overcoming the Arab-Persian divide: Who owns the Gulf?
As an Ahvazi I am the product of the multicultural fact of that magnificent city, and in fact our province and by extension the entire northern and southern shores of the Gulf are at the crosscurrents of no less than four cultural forces: Iranian from north, Arab from the west, Indian from the east and African from the south. False and falsifying Arab-Persian divide first and foremost has categorically ignored, and dismissed the fact that we have a profound and enduring Indian and African presence in our region.
Construction of the complementary modes of Arab and Persian bourgeois xenophobia has historically banked on manufacturing each other as mere obstacles to their sublime achievement of white-identified, Eurocentric modernity. As such, what they both simultaneously conceal is their mutual fear of the African and the Indian, both of which are conspicuously absent from their identically racist identity politics.
The whole white-washed bourgeois nationalism of both the Arab and Persian vintage is so deeply afraid of being “coloured” by the factual evidence of history that, all its antagonisms notwithstanding, comes together in mutually repressing the African and Indian component of the region.
The Zanj Rebellion of 869-883 AD is among the earliest indications we have of a massive slave revolt in and around Basra at the tip of the Gulf. The origin of my own last name (meaning “bilingual”) is just one small indication of a profound Indian influence in southern Iran, and all the way from the Gulf to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.
How horridly boring would it be if any ethnic nationalism were to triumph. |
Defending the term “the Arab Gulf”, a dear Egyptian friend once told me that a man he knew had done a research and concluded that “all people living on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf spoke Arabic.” To the degree that this might in fact be true, it is balanced by the fact that as m Bayazid Bastami (804-874), also known as Abu Yazid Bistami or Tayfur Abu Yazid al-Bustami, was a Persian Sufi poet born in Bastam. Bayazid’s grandfather was a Zoroastrian who converted to Islam. His grandfather had three sons, Adam, Tayfur and ‘Ali. All of them were ascetics. Abayazid was born to Tayfur. Not much is known of his childhood, but Bayazid spent most of his time in isolation in his house and the mosque. Bayazid led a life of asceticism and renounced all worldly pleasures in order to be one with the Absolute. Bayazid became known as the first “intoxicated” Sufi. According to his peers he was both a devout moslem and a dangerous heretic. His belief in the ancient Persian idea of “unity of existence” angered the Islamic clerics in his town: “Whoever dissolves himself in God and grasps the truth he himself becomes the truth as he will become the representative of God in himself and thus finds himself within himself.” Or, “Moses desired to see God; I do not desire to see God; he desires to see me”. Bayazid is regarded as one of the most influential mystics poets and a leading teacher of Sufism in post-Islamic Iran. Nothing has survived from his written work but references to him and his work exist in many later writings. Sufi poets such as Attar and Shams considered him a great teacher. Mohammad Ghazali (1058-1111), one of the most famous Sufi thinkers, also refers repeatedly to his debt to Bastami. The tomb of Bayazid is in Bastam near Shahroud. Abu Abdollah Jafar ibn Mohammad Rudaki (858 – 941), was a Persian poet, and the first great literary genius of the Modern Persian, who composed poems in the “new” post-Islamic Persian language. Rudaki is thus considered as the founder of Persian classical literature. He is also said to have been the founder of the divan form (the typical form of the complete collection of a poet’s lyrical compositions in an alphabetical order of the rhymes, Something cruel and violent has occurred in the scene in Fig. 1. Seven bodies are strewed across the floor of a disheveled interior. They have all been shot. Amongst the corpses lay various items—books, lumps of sugar and upended furniture. Bloodstains are visible on the victim’s clothes, as well as on the curtain in front of the door to the courtyard. A man with sunglasses leads two people into the room. They are about to take off their blindfolds. Armed soldiers guard the house, while uniformed officers search the premises. Some questions arise: Who are the dead and who murdered them? Who are the officers in the house? When and where did the shooting take place? Fig. 1: Azadeh Akhlaghi, South Mehrabad House, Tehran- Hamid Ashraf / 29 June 1976, 2012, Digital Print on Photo Paper, 110 x 175 cm. The title of the photograph is as follows: South Mehrabad House, Tehran—Hamid Ashraf / 29 June 1976. Hamid Ashraf (1946–1976) was the leader of a leftist underground guerrilla movement that tackled critical political issues, some of which include the absence of freedom of speech, censorship and the growing gap between the rich and the poor in 1970s Iran. By executing assaults the group’s aim was to initiate a revolution in order to overthrow the then-ruling Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (r. 1941–1979). The government responded with a relentless hunt of the guerrilla members. In one targeted attack, Ashraf and his comrades—as seen in Fig. 1—were shot by the Shah’s intelligence service during a conspiratorial meeting in a house in Tehran. The day after the assassinations, governmental officials investigated the scene and identified the victims by taking imprisoned members of Ashraf´s group to the bloody scene.[2] The caption also states the year of origin: 2012. Fig.1 is thus the image of a historical event that originally occurred in 1970’s Iran that is then City in Hamadan province, Iran "Hamedan" redirects here. For other uses, see Hamedan (disambiguation). For the administrative division of Hamadan province, see Hamadan County. For the administrative division of Iran, see Hamadan province. City in Iran Hamadan (HAM-ə-DAN;Persian: همدان, pronounced[hæmeˈdɒːn]) is a city in western Iran. It is located in the Central District of Hamadan County in Hamadan province, serving as the capital of the province, county, and district. As of the 2016 Iranian census, it had a population of 554,406 people in 174,731 households. Hamadan is believed to be among the oldest Iranian cities. It was referred to in classical sources as Ecbatana (Old PersianHamgmatāna). It is possible that it was occupied by the Assyrians in 1100 BCE; the Ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, states that it was the capital of the Medes, around 700 BCE. Hamadan is situated in a green mountainous area in the foothills of the 3,574-meter Alvand Mountain, in midwestern Iran. The city is 1,850 meters above sea level. It is located approximately 360 kilometres (220 miles) southwest of Tehran. The old city and its historic sites attract tourists during the summer. The major sights of this city are the Ganj Nameh inscription, the Avicenna monument and the Baba Taher monument. The main language in the city is Persian. Further information: Ecbatana and Timeline of Hamadan According to Clifford Edmund Bosworth, "Hamedan is a very old city. It may conceivably, but improbably, be mentioned in cuneiform texts from ca. 1100 BC, the time of Assyrian King Tiglath-pilesar I, but is certainly mentioned by Herodotus who says that the king of Media Diokes built the city of Agbatana or Ekbatana in the 7th century BC." Hamadan was established by the Medes. It then became one of several capital cities of the Achaemen How Azadeh Akhlaghi Attempts to Cure Historical Trauma by Re-Staging Forgotten Deaths of Iran’s History
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