[Slonopotam845]

Why Pakistanis are more Muslim than thou

The contradictions of Persians in relation to Islam and Arabs have always perplexed me, and my Persian American friends have never been able to unpack the sentiments coherently. On the one hand Persians are resolutely Muslim, have been by and large for over 1,000 years. Their script is derived from Arabic, Farsi has been strongly influenced by Arabic, and many Persians have names of Arabic provenance. Muhammad, Ali and Husayn were Arabs. On the other hand, Persians are often racist against Arabs, something which takes concrete form against Iranian Arabs. As far back as Ferdowsi's Shahnameh you see Muslim Persians looking back to a glorious past, and bemoaning their cultural enslavement by barbaric bedouins


When it comes to the Islamic regime's ambivalence, and on occasion outright hostility, toward the glories of pre-Islamic Iran, the authorities need to tread a fine line. The Persians may be Muslims, and have synthesized their culture with Islam so that the religion is part & parcel of a modern Persian identity, but they also retain their ethnic-national identity as distinct from the Arabs, and later Turks, who ruled them. The customs, traditions and physical monuments from pre-Islamic Iran are witness to the concrete aspects of Persian identity which are prior, or independent of, Islam. Read on....