It is so unfortunate. I am from Iran and I much prefer the current name. It's an ancient name that includes not only Persians, but also Medians, Partians, etc. Iran has been multi cultural since old times and it's nice to have an inclusive name. I believe after we throw the occupiers (mullahs) out, we have a lot of work to do.
The only weird thing with the name Iran, is that it literally means "The Land of Aryans" which got a bad rep after Nazis (rightfully so).
Yes the country is for ever Iran, for all iranians of different ethnicities. The connotation in tourists's mind about "Iran" has to change, were the country to be called Persia today, it would have the same negative sound to it like Iran (arguably) does for some today. Also, most people would be able to distinguish a nazi use of the term Aryan and it's original meaning so that's really not a problem with the name Iran
I know that you're not confusing this but as some others might: Persian language is of the Persian people (although there are many non-persian L2 speakers), it should rightfully still called that and should not be confused with the (settled at this point) debate about the name of the country as a whole
Maybe a bit off topic but it's always strange when someone says "Islamic Golden Age" when talking about Iran. Nothing against a specific religion. It's like saying Newton's work came during Christian Golden Age in Europe. The religion had nothing to do with it. In fact, there is a book [1] (in Persian) title "Two Centuries of Silence" that talks about the significant blow to Iran's culture, literature and science after Arab invasion [2] that it took two hundred years to somehow get back on track.
[2] Since I've mentioned this, I need to add that the focus of my statement is the nature of such "invasion" and not a certain ethnicity. No malicious intent here. If you are an Arab and reading this, hello neighbors! with love from Iran :)
Applying labels is always fraught and involves compromises. "Islamic World" is well-established and generally recognised. It's also more nuanced than hot takes suggest.
Peter Adamson, host of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast and author of the book series from the same project, devotes roughlythe first 20 minutes of his Google Talk about Islamic Philosophy to the matter of why "Islamic World" is in fact the most useful term to use, in contrast to alternatives such as "Arabic" (obviously inapplicable to Persia), "Islam" (fails to acknowledge the role of non-muslim religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc.).
As Adamson notes, it would be more accurate to call mediaeval European philosophy "Christian Philosophy" than to call the philosophical tradition of south-Western and south-Central Asia "Islamic Philosophy", as effectively all mediaeval European philosophers were Christian. Adamson also notes that philosophy of the Islamic World draws heavily on Greek and Roman philosophy (largely via the Byzantine empire) as well as Indian and African philosophical traditions.
"Islamic" refers to not merely the religious foundation, but the greater cultural, political, legal (Islamic jurisprudence is a major factor and influence), etc., etc. As with many other contexts, "dominant influence" does not mean "exlusive" or even "majority", but "that which has the greatest overall impact in a specific area". (Cue numerous tedious HN discussions over questions of "monopoly" or geographic applicability of toponyms such as "Silicon Valley" (contrast "Hollywood" or "Bollywood").
Thanks for the link. I watched the first 20 minutes and will watch the rest now. It's very interesting.
A small note, popularity (being generally recognized) is not a good indicator of the validity of any view point and it certainly does not mean we cannot challenge them.
> It's also more nuanced than hot takes suggest.
I believe as an Iranian and a history enthusiast, what I expressed was one of those these nuances which is presumably being labeled as hot take, or am I mistaken and you referring to something from somewhere else?
Adamson's work generally is excellent. I've been following the podcast for about 4--5 years now, and have worked through the entire mainline backlog (I'm now revisiting parts), though I'm still catching up on the Indian and Africana Philosophy track. Very highly recommended.
"Islamic World" replaces several earlier-prevalent terms. Again, Adamson makes the case against several proposed alternatives.
While his reasoning about his world view and consequently the name of the book is sound, he is not establishing a causal relationship between religion and anything outside the realm of philosophy. He argues that this is the best common trait for philosophical work of those people in that era in the region. It's also natural that he sees everything through a philosophical lens.
> "Islamic World" replaces several earlier-prevalent terms. Again, Adamson makes the case against several proposed alternatives.
We don't have to cover it under the same _umbrella_ term. In the clip (around 11:07) he shows the slide again and says "As an American, I am a born marketer". Imagine if we were to apply the same argument with a comparable time frame (important distinction) and call him a Christian European. Maybe being good at marketing does was not one of their traits. This is the missing nuance.
"Near East" is not used in academia as simply a geographic classification. It is used among historians as a standard term for a cultural realm and a specific time frame. "Middle East" is another standard term for a more expanded realm and a different time frame. By analogy, "the West" does not connote a precise geographic territory.
So far as I'm aware and some quick online checks suggest likewise[1], it largely came into widespread usage in the 20th century and tends to refer to either the Olttoman Empire or the post-WWI nation-states of the roughly from present day Turkey to Egypt to Iran. Wikipedia gives origin of the term to roughly 1855, at which point it would have referred to the Ottoman Empire, as opposed to India, China, the East Indies, and Indochina).
"Near East" has since largely been replace by "Middle East", though that term largely refers to the post World War Two states in the same region. The Wikipedia article noted here gives criticisms of the term largely along the lines I've suggested.
And I'm not aware of either term ("Near..." or "Middle...") being used to apply to the period from the 8th - 13th centuries, a/k/a the Islamic Golden Age.[2]
> And I'm not aware of either term...being used to apply to the period from the 8th - 13th centuries
The Journal of Near Eastern Studies (https://www.jstor.org/journal/jneareaststud) is typical in defining its scope as the Near East, from the ancient times to pre-modern Near East. As I said, "Near East" is the standard term for referring to the history/archaeology of this cultural region in pre-modern times.
The Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History seeks to encourage and stimulate the study of the history of the ancient Near East, which is broadly defined to include areas from Iran to the western Anatolian coast and the Black Sea to Southern Arabia from its prehistoric foundations to the Late Antique period.
The Late Antique period is very roughly the 3rd-7th centuries.
> "dominant influence" does not mean "exlusive" or even "majority", but "that which has the greatest overall impact in a specific area"
The burden of proof for "high impact" is heavy. I recommend reading some of the articles by the Inarah Institute <http://inarah.net/publications> on how shaky the dominant Islamic history narrative is.
To clarify: It is unclear what the direction of the influence is. Was it Islam that impacted/influenced what happened in Persia, or was it the Persian/Syriac/Nestorian culture that created something called "Islam."
You can make the same argument about Middle Ages Western Christian philosophy for what it's worth. While it originated in the erstwhile Roman Empire, the cultural and religious norms at the time were very much attuned to the various Germanic norms of the peoples that dominated the formerly Western Roman Empire rather than the joint Roman and Greek culture that constituted the Roman Empire during the founding of Christianity. Eastern Roman Empire viz Byzantine norms were codified in the Orthodox Church canon and philosophy in the region had a much larger overlap with "Islamic" and Greek cultures of the time.
The discovery and dating of Sana’a manuscripts to 630-650AD have debunked much of the “historical critical “ theories of Islam wrt origins of the Quran. It turns out the the traditional narratives seem to be lining up with historical evidence.
Persian influence was incredibly important, in fact the Islamic Golden Age is marked by Persian customs being absorbed into daily living with the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate.
So if you're feeling like it's taking value away from Persian history, instead, try to see it from the perspective that Persians are a large part of the reason why the Golden Age is even a thing :)
The other day I was watching Neil deGrasse Tyson on Joe Rogan show and he was talking about Islamic Science and how Algebra, Astronomy, etc. come from Islam. I was baffled as an Iranian. I get that there is this anti muslim rhetoric lurking around and these people are trying to fight it. I assume they are well intentioned but in doing so they are doing the same thing that they advocate against.
Seems like a lot of reknowned arab thinkers were from the most eastern parts of the arab empire (aka persia). Al Kwarhizmi was born near what is current uzbekistan IIRC.
The reason behind drawing such a distinction may be more telling, as there is a larger push in some groups to draw this distinction for the sake of harkening back to pre-Islamic Persia. But of course, modern Persia and Islam are intertwined, so usually those who wish to draw a distinction do so for political or religious bias reasons.
That's a pretty big assumption. It's natural to like your heritage and it's fine doing so while being respectful of other people's culture and heritage. I like other people to know about my culture for what it really was, what it went through and what it is right now. This is in contrast with how western media has tried to depict Iran as their political foe. Interestingly, Modern Persia and Islam (more with Islamic rulers) are at odds right now, evidenced by recent social movement and political unrest.
You want to separate the scholarship. The problem is there really isn't enough historiographical work done here to meaningfully tease out the differences. Surviving primary sources often ended up in the hands of colonial governments which are loathe to open up access today or in the hands of estates of former colonial figures where they rot in a dark room somewhere.
Another large historiographic gap in the Islamic world around this time was the lifestyle of peasants. We have records of kings and lords because of the widespread practice of autobiographies. We also know the thoughts of philosophers based on their texts. But we lack a lot of knowledge about how peasants and other commoners lived around the time. If you think about it, that's the majority of the people living at any time.
100%. As I said in another thread, it took many centuries for the majority of the Persians to convert to Islam. Most of the population were not even Muslim during the "Islamic Golden Age."
A good parallel is the Mughal Empire in India. The rulers where Muslim but the population was not.
Imagine if, Islam was opposing to the idea of science, as the largest religion of that area (which not only included Iran, but many others), what would happen? Science would have been abolished, stopped immediately. Instead, Islam encouraged people to learn more science, even greek philosophers work was translated by hiring Christian people.
On the other hand, economic and political prosperity after conquering many places helped people to calm down and focus on science, helping other people, coming up with solutions for different issues.
I think Islam had direct impact to the science of that era.
> Imagine if, Islam was opposing to the idea of science, as the largest religion of that area (which not only included Iran, but many others), what would happen?
We don't have to imagine. A shunning of empiricism and natural philosophy is one of the reasons the Islamic Golden Age came to an end. Islam as a religion was never a monolith, and like in Christianity some movements embrace science more than others, and their rise and fall in prominence is reflected in the society.
Traditionally the age is considered to have come to an end with the Mongol Siege of Baghdad, wherein the invaders sacked the city. Baghdad was the center of learning, and the fact that scholars from all around the empire (including non-Arab, and even non-Muslim) were able to travel to and, more importantly, find institutional support in Baghdad was one of the main drivers behind the age.
But institutional support had already begun to wane as a consequence of a theological shift in Arabic Islam from Mu'tazilism to Ash'arism. Ash'arism is often described as pro-rationalism, but compared to Mu'tazilism it was a significant regression, especially in terms of the motivation for official, institutional support for the study of natural philosophy. Despite the sacking, Baghdad recovered relatively quickly, but institutional support for natural philosophy never did recover.
Work in mathematics, medicine, and natural philosophy in the Islamic world didn't end. But it found much less support, and often came from the periphery, further away from the now more theologically conservative Arab world, and fragmented. Proximity is everything, especially before the age of telecommunications. There were no fewer geniuses in the Islamic world, but now they were cut off from each other. It's much like the Dark Ages in Europe--there was no shortage of smart people doing smart things, but they lost networking benefits and enjoyed less patronage.
> Imagine if, Islam was opposing to the idea of science
Are you suggesting the biggest contribution was not getting in the way? I wouldn't call it a contribution.
> economic and political prosperity after conquering many places
That happened despite the invasion, not because of it. Iran was well prosperous before that and the fall of Persian empires eventually cleared the way for a destructive Mongol invasion which Iranians had held back for a long time before.
> Science would have been abolished, stopped immediately
Most invaders in history did not violently impose their own philosphies and idealogies on day 1. Generally you let the conquered people keep their philosophy and religions to a big extent until the population has adopted it naturally through softer means, Islam specifically has a few verses around tolerance for "people of the book". Islam for example puts higher taxes on the non-muslims and people will then naturally gravitate towards Islam. Once the population has islamized to a higher percentage the islamic ideology will be implemented more deeply.
True. During the Golden Age, most Persian scholars and scientists had to write their books in Arabic to preserve them in libraries. Most Persians had to choose Arabic names. That's why when people see a Persian mathematician like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi, they might think he was Arab.
Fun fact: The word "Algorithm" comes from this guy's name!
He wasn’t Persian. This is a daylight robbery from the people of Central Asia. Look at his last name. Khwarazm is in Central Asia and it has no ethnic Persians(ethnic Tajiks don’t count).
It's going off on a tangent, but Isaac Newton was quite intertwined with Christian religion:
> In 1667, Newton became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,[11] making necessary his commitment to taking Holy Orders within seven years of completing his MA, which he did the following year. He was also required to take a vow of celibacy and recognize the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.
Well, think of it as a term of art and less a description of the ground truth. We can bike shed whether it's the best description, but it's what we have.
Indeed, there are plenty of examples of similarly reductionist terms used throughout history.
For example, until recently the western world marks the era of history in which we live as existing within the reign of our Lord, Jesus Christ [0]. We have now invented a backronym to work around this unpleasant detail, but we couldn't even get so far as to switch out the letters (so as to avoid upsetting people who we know are going to keep thinking in terms of "anno domini" regardless).
There's also the related "Christendom" [1] term which was in broad usage.
I find it strange when people deny basic well known history regarding this. In fact, post Islam, Persia was at the forefront in what is known as the "Islamic Golden Age".
Iran isn’t Persian only and that distinction needs to be always made.
Persian as a language has been used by various people to do science and literature in, and same goes for Arabic, but they were majority neither Arabs nor Persian by ethnicity.
this is a quite Eurocentric take. In the Islamic world, the distinction was not initially science vs religion but the encroachment of philosophical rationalism on religious interpretation which was famously articulated by the Islamic scholar Al-Ghazali in his refutation of the Falasifa (called philosophers of that time but they differ from modern philosophers we mean today).
The reason it is called the Islamic golden age is because of the Islamic empire that connected the innovations of the east to the west. Muslims themselves didn't directly have any contributions other than their philosophy and attitude unleashed from a reformed Arabian expansionism. The places they touched and the bridges they made changed everyone and all of history.
The Renaissance of Europe is directly a result of the Islamic golden age. The vikings who conquered Italy sought to learn both Sicilian Arabic, and Italian causing a bridge between Europe and the middle east of North Africa.
Is it really a choice when you are talking about religion? I am from Iran. In the school they teach (scare) children that if you don’t wear hijab, you will be hanged from your hair and burned on a stick till eternity in hell after you die. By the way that subject is not elective. You have to pass it. What kind of choice is this?
Update (context): I am not talking about the people in west who want to (not)wear hijab. I understand the premise of that choice. But this word (choice) is used daily in government propaganda. Maybe its analogous to talking about the choice of working in a cotton field to a slave. It’s a whole different environment/context. Hence my negative reaction to this word. It’s a matter of feeling which I just expressed. Nothing against someone who has a real choice, without religious stigma.
Yes. Compare the commercial secular Christmas to the mainstream Christian versions to the biblical literalists version. People in different parts of the world treat their religion and culture with different levels of severity and it's possible for an item associated with an oppressive interpretation in one part of the world to be a cultural pride item in another.
Obviously that's the reason why people in (say) France are arguing to be allowed to wear it and people in Iran are arguing to be allowed to not wear it.
It's the same argument: don't make me do something I don't want to do.
Many years ago I had a colleague who was a pretty good engineer from Morocco, also a very nice guy. He left his country and was almost disowned by his own family for being an atheist, a condition which over there I imagine is quite rare and dangerous even nowadays, although we have a good set of examples of discrimination in the west too.
He probably had to leave his country to live a reasonable lifestyle. Some countries like Malaysia will not let you leave Islam if your ethnic Malay, and due to your race you are presumed to be Islamic by law.
It can be very isolating and sometimes dangerous to be the outsider in an area with uniform religious and cultural beliefs.
I think it’s a complex topic that involves religion, society and culture. In this case it’s important to know if they are singling out hijab or also other religious symbols? For instance France banned full face covers and burkas which are not even mandated by the religion if I am not mistaken.
I believe banning a piece of clothing is not reasonable, like banning jeans or headscarves. On the other hand there is a lot of stigma around hijab if you choose not to wear it among some muslim families so much so that it’s not a real choice anymore and it’s not a simple piece of cloth. So I think it’s not bad to have some legal ways to protect you against your over zealous family/community but this kind of lawmaking is very prone to other issues too. Furthermore, banning and enforcing are two sides of the same authoritarian coin which is ultimately the root of the problem. It’s very complicated. I wish I had a straightforward answer.
School girls poisoned in many cities in concert using similar method and government officials claimed it’s nothing but hysteria and the “supreme” leader finally condemns it after a lot of bad press outside of Iran. They install cameras to find one unveiled woman but have trouble to identify who is poisoning school girls nationwide. His condemnation is there to be sold to BBC. Nobody in Iran believes him.
I didn't want to claim I believed him, just that this was the last thing I heard. So it seemed the poisonings actually stopped. But as spywaregorilla pointed out, there are very recent reports of new poisonings: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-ap...
The govt of Iran has savvy foreign policy, and it's remarkable that it had stayed afloat despite being targeted by monstrous crimes like Stuxnet and assassinations.
> The Shah also wasn't installed by the U.S., he had been in power since Russia and the U.K. removed his father during WWII.
It's Disingenuous to frame it this way! He wasn't, but his father was installed and removed when needed so the son could take his place.
For the readers of this thread, if you are interested in how this went down, you can read this article [1] from "The National Security Archive" of GW University. There are references to the actual CIA documents that were declassified under "Freedom of Information Act".
This letter is from the people in charge of the coup. The same people wanted this information to remain hidden until they were forced to release it by law.
Also, this letter conveniently leaves out the part about the methods used by US-backed actors to 'persuade' those votes against Mossadegh in Majlis (Congress). The votes might not have been very "organic," as this declassified document [2] suggests.
IMO they don't in the big picture. I agree with the points made in the adjacent comment (reality), but if you look at the frequency in which these protests happen, it's increasing and with each occurrence they are gaining wider support. Not only that, but in the recent protests, even smaller cities with more conservative population are now joining the fight. They wanted reform initially, now they have become more radical in nature. It's only a matter of time.
Or, I don't know, maybe it's because of the numerous memory safety issues we encounter. Perhaps we should use a borrow checker in our revolution compiler ;)
> Yeah the Shahs rule was a paradise for regular people...
No it's not. That's a tactic the regime used to silence any opposition for a long time after the revolution. I can't tell you how many times I have turned on the TV and heard something along these lines. Nowadays, however, they have new favorite bogeymen.
Shah was a garden variety dictator backed by the United States. You can find the likes of him in today's Saudi Arabia, for example. It certainly was not paradise for regular people.
But Islamic Republic on the other hand is a theocratic dictatorship. It's like an octopus that wants to wrap its tentacles around every matter of people's personal lives. From their bedroom to the women's bodies to the clothes they wear. Ironic for them, as a result, the current generation who were born after the revolution are more pro-US than ever and unfortunately are even more sympathetic to Shah than one might expect; which is not surprising.
So Shah's misdeeds are no excuse for the demons who have forced themselves upon the country right now.
Context: I was born and used to lived in Iran in a non-Musilm family whose members were in opposition to both Shah and the new regime alike.
>"Shah was a garden variety dictator backed by the United States."
The support of the Shah was very much an Anglo-American concern. The coup to oust Mosaddegh was much the US as it was the the UK, Churchill and Eisenhower, MI6 and CIA.
The only weird thing with the name Iran, is that it literally means "The Land of Aryans" which got a bad rep after Nazis (rightfully so).