Tag: Iran

Jashan-e-Nouruz celebrated | The Nation

ISLAMABAD – Officials and families of Iran, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan embassies, donned in their traditional, national and cultural dresses, came together to celebrate Jashan-e-Nouruz — the day marks the first day of spring and the beginning of the year in Iranian calendar — jointly in National University of Modern Languages on Thursday.

The beautiful embroidered dresses, delicious traditional cookies, dry fruits, savourous foods, sweets, desserts and rhythmic music from Iran, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan were a treat among treats for the students and faculty members of NUML.

The “Nouroz Day” celebrations were inaugurated by Ambassador of Republic of Tajikistan Zubaydullo N. Zubaydov by cutting of ribbon of traditional food stalls.  Iranian Embassy Charge De Affairs Mr Rawish, Iranian Cultral Counsellor Dr Sadiqi, Deputy Afghan Ambassador  were also present on the occasion. The cultural troupe from Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan presented the soulful tunes and sung some beautiful Iranian cultural songs and mesmerized the audience thronged at IT Auditorium.

Speaking at the occasion, Ambassador Tajikistan Zubaydullo N. Zubaydov said “It was pleasant to see that a joint effort was made to celebrate the “Nouroz Day” to share the cultural and traditional understanding with their Pakistani brothers and sisters. Such cultural exchanges not only help people from different countries get closer to each other but also help them to understand the global cultural environment”, he added.  Speaking at the occasion, Rector NUML Maj Gen (Retd) Masood Hasan said,  “NUML is a place where 26 international languages are taught and the university always appreciates the arrangement of such events that help our students to understand the culture, norms, traditions and society of a particular language they are learning here”.

Head of Russian Department said  “today’s programme is dedicated to the New Day, i.e. the first day of the spring which is rejoicing of life and its harmony with nature. Each country has its own customs and ceremonies but one theme is common in all i.e. the joy, which is expressed through dance and songs and of course through food”.

Embassies of Iran, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan also held different stalls where they exhibit the traditional dresses, decoration pieces, photographs and national foods to present that how Nouroz Day is celebrated in their respective countries. Besides this documentaries of each country were also shown in IT Auditorium.

via Jashan-e-Nouruz celebrated | The Nation.

Danger waters: Top spots of potential conflict in the geo-energy era – and how Tajikistan is involved.

The Caspian Sea Basin

by Michael T. Klare on January 13, 2012

The Caspian Sea is an inland body of water bordered by Russia, Iran, and three former republics of the USSR: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. In the immediate area as well are the former Soviet lands of Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. All of these old SSRs are, to one degree or another, attempting to assert their autonomy from Moscow and establish independent ties with the United States, the European Union, Iran, Turkey, and, increasingly, China. All are wracked by internal schisms and/or involved in border disputes with their neighbors.  The region would be a hotbed of potential conflict even if the Caspian basin did not harbor some of the world’s largest undeveloped reserves of oil and natural gas, which could easily bring it to a boil.

This is not the first time that the Caspian has been viewed as a major source of oil, and so potential conflict. In the late nineteenth century, the region around the city of Baku — then part of the Russian empire, now in Azerbaijan — was a prolific source of petroleum and so a major strategic prize. Future Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin first gained notoriety there as a leader of militant oil workers, and Hitler sought to capture it during his ill-fated 1941 invasion of the USSR. After World War II, however, the region lost its importance as an oil producer when Baku’s onshore fields dried up. Now, fresh discoveries are being made in offshore areas of the Caspian itself and in previously undeveloped areas of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

According to energy giant BP, the Caspian area harbors as much as 48 billion barrels of oil (mostly buried in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan) and 449 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (with the largest supply in Turkmenistan). This puts the region ahead of North and South America in total gas reserves and Asia in oil reserves.  But producing all this energy and delivering it to foreign markets will be a monumental task. The region’s energy infrastructure is woefully inadequate and the Caspian itself provides no maritime outlet to other seas, so all that oil and gas must travel by pipeline or rail.

Russia, long the dominant power in the region, is pursuing control over the transportation routes by which Caspian oil and gas will reach markets.  It is upgrading Soviet-era pipelines that link the former SSRs to Russia or building new ones and, to achieve a near monopoly over the marketing of all this energy, bringing traditional diplomacy, strong-arm tactics, and outright bribery to bear on regional leaders (many of whom once served in the Soviet bureaucracy) to ship their energy via Russia.  As recounted in my book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, Washington sought to thwart these efforts by sponsoring the construction of alternative pipelines that avoid Russian territory, crossing Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey to the Mediterranean (notably the BTC, or Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline), while Beijing is building its own pipelines linking the Caspian area to western China.

The Farsi-Tajiki or Tajiki language

The Farsi-Tajiki or Tajiki language, the name given to one of the Iranian languages spoken in Central Asia, is also called Persian, Tajik, or Tajik Persian. This variety of names reflects the winding, and complicated history of the language.

Forms of New Persian
Farsi-Tajiki belongs to the Western branch of the Iranian language group (of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family), in which it is usually classified as New Persian. Today there are three standardized forms of New Persian: Farsi-Tajiki, Farsi, and Dari. In their standard forms, these three are to a large extent identical, although there are many regional spoken variants, which may differ consider- ably from the standard forms. Since 1989, Farsi-Tajiki has been the official language of Tajikistan, but it is also spoken in large parts of the neighboring republic of Uzbekistan and in Afghanistan. Farsi is the official language of Iran, and Dari the official language of Afghanistan.

History of Farsi-Tajiki
Farsi means “Persian,” and Tajiki is derived from Tajik, a word with an obscure etymology, once implying “Muslim,” but nowadays referring to the peo- ple of the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan. Farsi-Tajiki evolved from the classical New Persian language that gradually emerged as a new written language, replacing Middle Persian and other Iranian languages in the centuries following the Muslim Arabs’ conquest of Iran and Central Asia in the seventh cen- tury. (Iranian languages had long been spoken in Cen- tral Asia.) Classical New Persian, like the modern New Persian (Farsi) of today, is written in an adaptation of the Arabic script and is characterized by a large num- ber of loanwords from Arabic. Farsi-Tajiki also has a relatively large number of Turkic loanwords. With the coming of the Turkic tribes from the tenth century on, Turkic languages, such as Uzbek, gradually su- perseded the Iranian languages once spoken in the area of Central Asia. More recently, Russian has deeply in- fluenced Farsi-Tajiki.

The term “Tajik” began to be used widely from the sixteenth century onward to refer to speakers of New Persian in the area of the Oxus River (the modern Amu Dar’ya, in central and western Central Asia) basin and present-day northeastern Afghanistan, to distinguish them from speakers of Turkic languages in that area. The expansion of Turkic peoples, mainly Uzbeks and Turkmen, from the north to the south of Central Asia, in combination with the stabilization of national fron- tiers in the sixteenth century, separated the Iranians of the Iranian plateau from the Iranians to the north- east. From then on, the spoken Persian of the north- east developed separately from that of Iran.
However, the written Persian, in use for administrative and literary purposes in India as well as Central Asia, remained the same as the Persian used in Iran un- til the first quarter of the twentieth century. This lan- guage was called Farsi or Parsi (Persian, or more specifically New Persian) in the whole of the Iranian cultural area, which stretched from India to western modern Iran. The term “Farsi-Tajiki” or “Tajiki” came into use under Soviet influence around 1925.

Emergence of Farsi-Tajiki
The development of standard Farsi-Tajiki was in- stigated by the poet and novelist Sadriddin Aini (1878– 1954), considered the founder of modern Tajik litera- ture. He was trained in the medieval cloisters of a Bukharan madrasah (Muslim religious school), but he used his talents in the service of reform and revolution.
When Soviet rule was established in Central Asia in the 1920s, it was decided that the region should be di- vided into national republics. The republics were named after their dominant ethnic groups, whose lan- guages had to be developed as tools for educating the proletariat. This division into national republics was artificial, not only since there were many more ethnic groups than national republics, but also because different ethnic groups had been living together in the same areas for centuries. A seemingly neat division was nevertheless carried through, and the newly appointed national languages were turned into modern Soviet-era languages by introducing elements from the vernacu- lar to replace classical expressions. Sadriddin Aini was among the intellectuals who created the reformed Per- sian, which was called Tajiki. Aini apparently invented the term “Farsi-Tajiki,” to mark the language’s close relationship with the classical Persian heritage and with the Persian spoken in Iran and Afghanistan. Although this language was based on the spoken forms of Per- sian around Bukhara and Samarqand in present-day Uzbekistan, it was imposed as a new literary language on the inhabitants of the newly founded republic of Tajikistan, which was situated farther east and did not include Bukhara and Samarqand, the Tajik centers of old. Until then the area of Tajikistan had been only sparsely populated, and those who lived there mainly spoke different forms of Tadjiki or other Iranian languages, although Uzbek and Kirghiz were also spoken in western and northern present-day Tajikistan.
One of the first steps in transforming the allegedly old-fashioned and feudal image of the Persian lan- guage used in Central Asia was the adoption of a new alphabet. First, around 1930, the Latin alphabet was adopted. In 1940 the introduction of a modified Cyril- lic alphabet facilitated the adoption of many Russian loan words, and the Russian language gradually gained importance in Tajikistan, marginalizing and Russian- izing Farsi-Tajiki. This process ended in the late 1980s under the influence of glasnost and perestroika.
Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the people of Tajikistan have tried to reintro- duce the Arabo-Persian script and to decrease the use of Russian and Russian loan words in Tajiki. However, so far the poor economic situation prohibits an effec- tive reintroduction.
In short, Farsi-Tajiki in its present form is a relatively new language, but it has a long history. Its direct ancestor is classical New Persian, which had been spoken in Central Asia since the emergence of Islam. Whereas the Soviets increasingly tended to isolate Farsi-Tajiki from the Persian (Farsi) of Iran and Afghanistan, since independence Tajiks have tried to emphasize Farsi-Tajiki’s similarity to Farsi and Dari. Both Farsi-Tajiki and Farsi have a common heritage, although political and historical circumstances through the centuries have resulted in considerable differences in grammar and vocabulary, particularly in colloquial language.

Gabrielle Van den Berg,
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MODERN ASIA
367

Further Reading:
Lazard, Gilbert. (1970) “Persian and Tajik.” In Current Trends in Linguistics, 6, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok. The Hague, Netherlands, and Paris: Mouton, 64–96.
———. (1975) “The Rise of the New Persian Language.” In The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 4, edited by R. N. Frye. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 595–633.
Perry, John R., and Rachel Lehr. (1998) The Sands of the Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda.
Rastorgueva, Vera Sergeevna. (1963) A Short Sketch of Tajik Grammar. Trans. by Herbert Paper. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Center for Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics.
Rzehak, Lutz. (1999) Tadschikische Studiengrammatik. Wies- baden, Germany: Reichert Verlag.
Schmitt, Rüdiger. (1989) Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum (Iranian Language Compendium). Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert Verlag.

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Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, Volume 2: China-India Relations to Hyogo: A Berkshire Reference Work, David Levinson • Karen Christensen, Editors

ECO members intend to establish a single market for goods and services, much like the European Union.

The Conference on Logistics and Transit Development in the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) region was launched on Monday in Bandar Abbas, Southern Iran.
Iranian Roads and Urban Development Minister, Ali Nikzad, announced in the conference that Iran aims to increase its annual transit capacity to 30 million tons in coming years, from current 12 million tons.  Continue reading ECO members intend to establish a single market for goods and services, much like the European Union.