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Ata Golparvar

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Strange Lands and Friendly People

by William O. Douglas

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Ata Golparvar said: " Fascinating work should be read by lovers of the middle east or any European who wants to understand the "orient better."

Of course, the text is full of debatable topics and raises many challenges to be discussed. One of them, in the Azerbaijan sectio Fascinating work should be read by lovers of the middle east or any European who wants to understand the "orient better."

Of course, the text is full of debatable topics and raises many challenges to be discussed. One of them, in the Azerbaijan section, is how these people are being introduced. After the part about indigenous inhabitants of this land (Persian-state narration of it), the writer is suggesting that Arabs came (and it seems took the land) in 7th century, and then passes on to the coming of Moungules in the mid-13th century and finally the arrival of the Turk only after them.

The challenges here are first ignoring the region's defense against Arabs; unlike most regions in the Sasanian empire, Azarabadeghan did not become under Arab rule and muslime until after the 9th century; the Khorramdin movement is famous in this sense. On the other hand, the arrival of the Turks is far postponed, in the text, to later than the 13th century. This is nothing but state propaganda of the time. As a fact, Turks arrived in Asia minor in 11th centers; they cannot skip Azerbaijan to enter Anatolia. Thus they settled in Azerbaijan around the 10th-11th century, way before the arrival of Moungules. The state suggests Azerbaijan became Turk only in the 15th century when the ottomans partially invaded Azerbaijan. Still, it is not feasible to change the culture, language, and costume of a population and make them go under "Turkification" in just 30 years. Ottomans couldn't accomplish the Turkification of the Balkans in so many years, but somehow pan-Iranist movement concluded, at the time, that Ottomans made Azerbaijanians Turk-speaking people. Of course, historically, this Aryanistic claim is not accurate.

Another issue is that writer introduces Azerbaijanian as "still Persian, but different from the rest" with "speaking Turkish dialect with many Persian absorbed words." The issue here is if some ethnicity is different than the rest of that ethnic group, don't we call them "other ethnicity"? Isn't this how we distinguish one ethnic group from others?! You cannot be Persian but different from the rest of Persians; the text itself is ambiguous and vague in this sense. Also, even today, Azerbaijanians don't have "many" Persian words in their everyday speech, let alone 70-80 years ago, which centralized education wasn't a thing in the region at that time... Probably at the time, ottoman had more Persian words than Azerbaijanis actually (since both Persians and Ottoman Turks inherited Arabic words more than Azerbaijanians).

All and all, if the first issue is a historical inaccuracy, the second one is a naive belief in propaganda. But why an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States makes such a massive mistake? Because as he is clearly stating in his introduction, an Iranian official from Shah's darbar, that is shah's palace, was assigned to him as a guild. No doubt poor Douglas was fed nonsense by this so-called guild. On the other hand, on the subjects that he was seeing in the field and observing himself in firsthand, not the ones which were communicated to him by the state propaganda, he is extremely accurate in reporting them, especially about the activities, relations, and all about the 1945-1946 Azerbaijan People's Government. This book, of course, is extra popular in Azerbaijan because of this accurate and rare reporting of what was going on at that decade (murders and rapes of Iran military (II Pahlavi) in Azerbaijan after invading the land and also the cruelty of feudalistic governing system of Pahlavis)

I am still reading the book and will further improve my comment here shortly. ...more "

Sep 11, 2021 03:28PM · see review