4 Rajab, 1430,A.H (June 26. 2009) Vol.3: No 74

Welcome to The Pointer Express, The Views Expressed in this newspaper are not necesserily the official view of the Islamic movement in Nigeria.

The Challenges Facing The Study Of Persian Language In Nigeria And what are the solutions?

A paper presented by Ibrahim Musa, Editor of ALMIZAN newspaper, Kaduna, Nigeria.

VENUE: University of Lagos

DATE: 20 May, 2009

INTRODUCTION

Ladies and gentlemen good morning, or “Assalamu alaikum.” And since we are in the third month of the Iranian New Year, I will emulate President Obama by saying “Eid-eh Shoma Mobarak,” as the Persian people will say. I feel highly honored to be invited to speak to this august gathering and deeply humbled to do justice to the topic before me. What is the topic? It is THE CHALLENGES FACING THE STUDY OF PERSIAN LANGUAGE IN NIGERIA, AND THE SOLUTIONS. Meaning that I should voice out my thoughts on why Nigerians should study Persian language, its prospects in the country, and the hurdles before such a study and suggest ways on how it can be incorporated into the educational system of Nigeria. Though I can not claim to be an authority on this subject, but as the founding Editor of ALMIZAN, a weekly Hausa newspaper for the past 17 years, which made me to be interacting with three languages almost on a daily basis - Hausa, Arabic and English, I will try my possible best to show the socio-economic benefit of studying Persian in Nigeria and how fertile the ground is for such an endeavor.

PERSIAN OR FARSI?

But let me first start by expatiating further about two words in the topic, namely Persian and Nigeria. Though for the latter I don't have much to say about, since we are all good citizens of Nigeria, but for the former, I think some explanation is needed. Though I must acknowledge that for any English reader he must be conversant with the word Persian. Who among us here will claim ignorant of the famous Persian carpets? I myself have heard of many Yoruba women merchants who go to Iran to import good quality Persian carpets. So also are words like Persian Empire, Persian Art, Persian Poetry and even Persepolis very familiar to any English-speaking student.

However when we talk of Persian, it is an Indo-Iranian language belonging to the Indo-European language family. It is the officially spoken language in Iran, Afghanistan (Here it is also called DARI which is little different), and Tajikistan. It also uses the Arabic script, but it has another pronunciation and more letters, with 72 million native speakers, 62 million second language speakers, making a sum total of 134 million active users worldwide.

Though it is not easy to characterize a language in a few lines, but in the case of Persian, the gardener's technique of 'grafting' offers a helpful analogy. The Indo-European grammar and basic vocabulary of Old and Middle Persian that held sway until the Islamic conquest were like the 'rootstock'. The coming of Islam was like the start of a lengthy grafting process that gradually brought numerous Arabic words and expressions, poetic forms and even some grammatical usages into the language that has, over the centuries, evolved into modern Persian. After a rose or fruit tree has been grafted, the two parts merge and develop together as a new entity. In the same way, Persian has not merely borrowed superficially from Arabic, but has absorbed and adapted these borrowings in such a way as to make them indispensable. A parallel can be drawn with the English language, from which it would be unthinkable to root out the words that at one time or another have been imported from Latin and Greek.

At this juncture let's pause for the following questions: Do Iranians speak Farsi or Persian? Well they are both the same. So which is correct? And where does Persian come from anyway? And the script is Arabic, but does that mean it's from Arabia? As for the first question, in my research towards writing this paper I came across a lot of articles debating on the right usage of Persian and or Farsi. One writer deduced that the word Farsi entered the English vocabulary when in 1935 the Iranian government requested those countries which it had diplomatic relations with, to call Persia "Iran," which is the name of the country in Persian. He summed up his disgust for such a move by saying that, “days would not be far away if we persist in using Farsi for Persian, when people would think that Ferdowsi, Molana, and Hafez wrote in a dead language called Persian, hardly anyone realizing that Farsi is the same language in which one of the most exquisite literature of the world is written. Had Persia remained the sole name of the country in the English language, no one would have found it necessary to import the unfamiliar and pretentious term Farsi for Persian in order to show his ignorant pride in the knowledge of the Persian word for Persian.|”

He added that, “this language has long been legitimately known as Persian the same language in which Khayyam wrote his quatrains and which was for several centuries the chief literary language of the Indian subcontinent indeed the main literary and administrative language of all the eastern lands of the Muslim world. In the meantime, all those who study Persian language, history and literature and who write about them, whether they are American, British, or Persian, will do well to call the country solely Persia and its language Persian in English. To do otherwise is a disservice to the countries image and to its rich cultural heritage.”

Though the proponents of the use of the word Farsi, argue that Persian is the conglomerate of its various versions, the Cultural Heritage News Agency of Iran explains why the versions of Persian have at least a strong a claim as those of Arabic to be considered as one language: “Some mistakenly believe that, in English, the official language of Iran should be called Farsi, while the language spoken in Tajikistan and Afghanistan should be called Dari, and Persian should be utilised to refer to all of them. However, the difference between the Persian spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, or Tajikistan is not significant or substantial enough to warrant such a distinction and classification. Consider the following case: An Egyptian and a Qatari engage in conversation in Arabic. They will encounter a great deal of difficulty in comprehending each other. Despite this fact, the language used in their conversation is referred to as Arabic. On the other hand, Iranians, Tajiks and Afghans can converse in Persian and easily understand each other. Why then, should their dialects be classified separately and referred to by different names?”

Also Professor Michael Hillman from the University of Texas, for example, whilst lecturing at the 'Fifth Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies', assumed that 'Farsi' and Tajiki are dialects of Persian; while undergraduates at Emory College in US are taught 'Farsi' as one variety of Persian. Even the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University, who have been teaching Persian since the seventeenth century and who therefore really should know better, now describe Tajik as one of the 'branches' of Persian.

And Professor Geoffrey Lewis, from Oxford University, was outraged in 1984 by the inappropriate use of the word 'Farsi' “It may still not be too late to put an end to the grotesque affectation of applying the name 'Farsi' to the language which for more than five hundred years has been known to English-speakers as Persian. In conclusion, using the word 'Farsi' for Persian in any Western language, and in particular English, is a linguistic nonsense. Additionally, it undermines all the positive cultural connotations of the word 'Persian' for modern Iran and adds to the recent media portrayal of Iran as a strange and distant society.”

Joseph Bell, Professor of Arabic and Middle-Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Bergen in Norway is stronger in his condemnation: “No one would seriously consider substituting Deutschland for Germany, or Deutsch/Deutscher for German in English. 'Deutschland' exists, of course, in English, but with connotations for which a high price was paid But to use the word [Farsi] as the normal term for the national language of Iran has to be classified as one of the greatest affronts to great cultures in our time.”

He goes on to examine the negative cultural implications of the usage of this term: “Saying Farsi instead of Persian robs the language and the culture of all the sense of splendor the name Persian has taken on in western languages through two and a half millennia of war, trade, religious and cultural influence, and other forms of confrontation or subtle interaction”.

Lest I be accused of delving too much on this debate about the usage of Persian or Farsi, I would have quoted in toto one writer by the name Karimi. However for the sake of this paper I agree with his two way solution to the impasse: “One solution is to employ Persian for Farsi, and call the other two variants Tajiki-Persian and Dari-Persian. This type of labeling clearly shows the relationship between the three variants, given the fact that all three variants are derived from Middle Persian or Farsi-ye Miyane.

“A second solution is to follow the existing tradition used for other languages: the two major variants of Portuguese, for example, are called European Portuguese versus

Brazilian Portuguese. British English versus Standard American English is another example. Given this analogy, we will arrive at Iranian Persian (for Farsi), Tajiki Persian, and Dari (Afghani) Persian.

“However, there is a simpler solution. Namely, we call the language simply Persian in our every day practices, referring to all three variants. When there is a need to specify which variant we are referring to, as it is definitely the case in linguistic analyses, we specify them as Farsi, Tajiki, and Dari, still under the cover term Persian. In other words, Persian is used as a cover term in every day language, while Farsi is used in specialized academic/linguistic analyses. This is how I have employed these terms over.” And I agree no more than this.

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