The foreign ministers of Tajikistan, Iran and Afghanistan have gathered in Dushanbe for a two-day meeting to exchange their views on political issues, cultural and scientific cooperation and the ways of widening collaboration in the field of joint projects between the three Persian-speaking countries, news agencies reported. Although some regional variation of the countries’ common language has been officially recognized (Tajiki, Farsi, Dari), still referring to the troika as ‘the Persian-speaking states’ is commonplace. The reason is quite simple: in spite of enormous efforts by certain political movements to divide Persian-speakers into separate linguistic communities the language remains mutually intelligible for all three countries. Unlike at Turkic-speaking gatherings no interpreters are hired for Persian-speaking meetings. The following article explores the reasons of the artificial division between the three dialects of the same language.

As recently as late 1920s the most common language in Transoxania, Afghanistan and Iran had a single official name: Persian (Farsi). Only in 1928 the Soviets renamed it to ‘Tajik’, while in both Iran and Afghanistan it was still recognized as Persian. The Pashtun King Zaher’s Afghanistan followed the Soviet path to distance the language of his country’s lingua franca from Iranian Persian by renaming it to ‘Dari’ in 1964.
 
Disadvantages of Being a Majority

According to Stalin’s definition of the concept of nation, a single nation had to be a polity that enjoys linguistic and territorial unity. But even this concept was based on a more complex political theory. "The potential adversaries were Turkey in the Caucasus, and Iran in relation to Azerbaijan and Tajikistan", explains Olivier Roy. "The Soviets favoured ethnic groups which were in minority situation on the other side of their borders, all the more so since the establishment of the nation-state model of Ataturk in Turkey and the Shah in Iran led to resentment among those who linguistically fell outside the official state language. So the Soviets were to favour Azeri, Turkmen, Kurdish and Laz identities to the detriment of Persian or Turkish ones. Since there were no Azeri, Turkmen or Uzbek states outside the USSR, the development of these national identities would inevitably suit Moscow’s interests." (Oliver Roy, The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations).

Later misfortunes of Central Asian Persians derived from the disadvantage of having a vast majority of siblings on the other side of the Soviet borders. As a result, Tajikistan emerged as an autonomous republic within the Uzbek Soviet Republic in 1924 only to become a Union state in 1929, important parts of Persian-speaking areas were deliberately excluded from the Tajik Soviet Republic and historical centres of Central Asian Persians, namely Samarqand and Bokhara, emerged as parts of Uzbekistan. A single city was not left for the Tajik autonomous republic and its administration was based in the village of Dushanbe. "The isolated capital city of Dushanbe, once the site of a small market, had little attraction for Tajik intellectuals whose absence severely hampered the subsequent development of Tajikistan and contributed to Tajik-Uzbek tension for years to come," says Thomas M. Leonard in his Encyclopaedia of the Developing World.

The very interpretation of the concept of nation contributed to further prosperity of Pan-Turkism that had been imported by Ottomans to Central Asia before the Red Army took over the region. "For example, because the more Persianized Tashkent (or eastern Turkic) dialect was adopted as the standard for the modern Uzbek language over more distant dialects, it was easier for Uzbeks (who had the upper hand anyway) to claim that Bukharan Tajik was really Uzbek (Turkic) with more Persian elements." (David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, Census and Identity).

‘Tajik’ as a Nation

Some scholars believe that the creation of the Tajik Soviet Republic might have been related with bitter struggles for power in Afghanistan between Tajiks and Pashtuns at the time. Bacha-i Saqqao (Habibullah Ghazi), a Tajik, amir of Afghanistan, was overthrown by Pashtuns in 1929 after a brief reign. Perhaps the very event prompted the Soviets to promote Tajikistan to the status of a Union republic in the same year in order to show Afghanistani Tajiks another possibility of having their own state by annexing to the Soviet Union.

After inventing the ‘Uzbek language’ (known as Turki-i Chaghatai before that) the Soviet authorities started manufacturing a ‘new language’ for Tajikistan. Here they faced a crux of their nation interpretation, since the Persian language and culture were not ‘formerly backward’ as the Turkic cultures and languages were described by Russians who believed in their mission to create proper languages for ‘backward tribes’. The Persian language and culture were the most highly developed and ancient in origin in the region. Central Asian Persian intellectuals like Sadriddin Ayni succeeded to promulgate Persian as the official language of the Tajik autonomous republic, but the name did not meet Russians’ intentions and it was renamed ‘Tajiki’ in 1928. A medieval synonym of the word ‘Persian’ was given a titular status according to the Soviet nationality policy.

The term ‘Tajik’ is not well defined even now as ‘Tajiks’ possess all cultural and ethnic features of other Persian-speakers in Iran and Afghanistan. Only recently some Russian and Western scholars suggested constructing Tajik identity based on a combination of language and religion. This concept defines any Sunni Muslim Persian-speaker as Tajik.

But even this concept fails to pose a clear and cohesive definition of Tajik ethnic identity as not all Tajiks’ native language is Persian and some of them are neither Sunni nor Muslim. On the other hand, not all Sunni Persians identify themselves as ‘Tajik’.

"Generally, the difficulty of establishing a Tajik identity is the principal obstacle to developing a strong sense of Tajik nationalism among Tajikistan’s population. In many respects, this also explains the persistence of a strong regional loyalty that has bedevilled the nation-building process in post-Soviet Tajikistan." (Thomas M. Leonard, Encyclopaedia of the Developing World).

The enigma was born of the Soviet artificial nation-building that had chosen a synonym of ‘Iranian’ or ‘Persian’ as the name of a ‘new nation’ of Central Asian Persians.

The Birth of ‘Tajik’ Alphabets

In order to deepen ‘Tajik’s distinction’ from other Persian-speakers beyond the Soviet borders, a year later (1929) Moscow changed also the Perso-Arabic alphabet of the language.

"They first changed it to Latin," writes Mehdi Marashi, the author of Persian Studies in North America. "By discontinuing education in Perso-Arabic alphabet they effectively restricted access to materials printed in Persian outside the Soviet territory. This change also broke the most basic connection with the Islamic world by separating general literacy from the text of the Koran. Later, in 1940, the alphabet was changed to a modified Cyrillic, thus reinforcing the political relationship with Russia and the other Soviet republics".

The prominent French orientalist Oliver Roy states that engineering a separation between ‘Tajik’ and Persian is the most notorious case of the Soviet language policy. "The Tajiks used literary Persian as their written language – and still today there is perfect comprehensibility between the literary languages current in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan", he says. "Needless to say, in their daily lives the Persian-speakers of Central Asia use dialects which vary considerably: those of Ferghana are very Uzbekized, not only in their vocabulary which contains a higher proportion of Turkish words than one finds in Iran, but also as regards identifiable influences on grammar (postposition instead of preposition, as in shahr-ba instead of ba shahr, ‘towards the city).

"As for the pronunciations, it is very close to that of classical Persian", continues Roy, "which is very different from Iranian Persian (Tajik maintains the distinction between the long ‘e’ and the long ‘i’, between ‘q’ and ‘gh’ etc). The relationship between Iranian and Tajik Persian is akin to the relationship between Parisian French and Quebecois. Russian linguists were required to formalize and fix differences and to invent a ‘modern literary Tajik language’ known as ‘Tajik’. Instead of taking as their standard one of the existing Tajik dialects, an artificial language was manufactured combining characteristics from different regions: they kept the phonological system of Old Persian, but adopted grammatical variations which heightened the difference with Iran." (Oliver Roy, The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations).

These grammatical variations were borrowed from Russian to a large extent.
And most of the agents of ‘Tajikisation’ of the Persian were non-‘Tajik’. Sadriddin Ayni who is considered as the founder of the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet never used it and the originals of all his poems and novels were written in Perso-Arabic script.

For drawing a distinctive line between ‘Tajik’ and Persian the Soviet language-makers fabricated the history of the language as well. A myth was created about the divergence of ‘Tajik’ and Persian in the sixteenth century and all Persian authors from Rudaki to Sa’adi went under the rubric of ‘Farsi-Tajiki’. "As a result of this operation, all the Persian-speakers of Central Asia, past or present, thus found themselves defined as members of a ‘Tajik ethnic group", concludes Roy.

While there is no evidence that any Central Asian Persian-speaker had referred to his mother tongue as ‘Tajiki’ before the Soviet invasion.

(to be continued)