The National Language and the Programme for Teaching Local Languages

Finally, following consultations about which we know very little, in recent weeks the Ministry of Science and Technology announced a programme for teaching the “Azeri Turkish” language at the universities of the three provinces whose inhabitants speak this language. This programme, as far as I can understand, from the standpoint of the national language and Iranian culture, borders on catastrophe, as I shall explain.

In theoretical terms, the Ministry of Science ought to be the guardian of the preservation and promotion of the language and culture of the country of which that ministry is a part of the government. In this past decade, during which the slogan of the “indigenisation” of science in this land has robbed sleep from the eyes of scholars—many of whom cannot even write the national language correctly—I, as someone interested in this debate, had constantly fixed my gaze on this train, “which politics drives and how empty it travelled,” wondering to which “Turkestan” it was headed; and now, with great astonishment, I hear that, according to the information provided by the Ministry of Science, the train has apparently arrived at the station of “Dede Qorqud” in Kazakhstan! By following the debates on “indigenisation,” and of course its peripheral discussions—a wholly meaningless debate that has turned into a matter of prestige—I had thought that what we lack in this discussion is not writers of articles and essays on “indigenisation,” but rather a compass, so that the custodians of “indigenisation” do not, from the very outset, dispatch the people of three provinces to the “Turkestan” of Kazakhstan, thereby wasting the country’s resources and facilities. That the custodians of the Ministry of Science of a country like Iran do not know that finding one’s way in the sciences and culture requires a compass, lest the path they take end up at the station of “Dede Qorqud,” is itself one of the wonders of this age of hardship in the history of the country’s culture; but that the deputy of that same ministry should announce that “the establishment of these disciplines is in line with the policies of the Government of Prudence and Hope and based on attention to various cultures and ethnic groups,” plunges the reader and hearer of these ingenious pronouncements into “wonder upon wonder.” It does not matter to me that the Government of “Prudence and Hope” is cutting off its own roots with such a programme; what matters to me and to us is why the Government of “Prudence,” in the virtuous act of “attention to cultures and ethnic groups,” is expending the capital of “us,” the people of Azerbaijan!?

I will return to this last point further below, but for the sake of providing information about the degree of fantasy entertained by that respected deputy, I quote the continuation of the statement I cited from him, where he has said: “The groundwork for attracting foreign students interested in studying Azeri language and literature has also been prepared and…” Does that deputy minister of the Ministry of Science of Iran truly imagine that foreign students are lined up behind Iran’s borders, waiting for his respective ministry—which is not even capable of teaching the national language to the country’s university professors—to provide them with a platform for familiarising themselves with “Dede Qorqud” from Kazakhstan, the “Orkhon and Kül Tegin inscriptions” from Mongolia, the “Qutadgu Bilig” masnavi from Kyrgyzstan, and so on? My question is this: if that ministry possesses such capabilities, why has it been so indifferent over the past decades to the closure of chairs of Persian language and literature in advanced countries?

If the esteemed deputy minister would permit me a piece of advice, I suggest that, as a representative of the Ministry of Science, he order a dictation test to be administered to the professors who are supposed to carry out “indigenisation,” so that he may know to what level science has been elevated in the educational and research institutions under that ministry! Moreover, let them hand these very few titles that are to be taught at the universities of the Azerbaijani provinces to a journalist, and ask the ordinary people in the streets and bazaars of the cities of these same provinces to pronounce those titles!

Indeed, with what face does the Government of Prudence and Hope intend to announce to the people of Azerbaijan—who for centuries have listened in their city coffeehouses to the naqqāli recitations of the stories of the Shāhnāmeh—that henceforth the legends of “Dede Qorqud” have taken the place of the tales of Rostam and Sohrāb? If such measures are in line with “returns to self” and “that which one already possessed,” the authorities must know that this compulsion to alter the identity of the people of Azerbaijan is the very essence of alienating them from themselves, for a people who have read the Shāhnāmeh, the Divān of Hāfez, and the Golestān of Sa’di for a thousand years will not easily submit to this fabrication of identity for themselves, and from this ingenious “prudence” of the government, nothing but “hopelessness” regarding its prudence will result! Moreover, if, as some wits hold, the Government of “Prudence and Hope” is seeking to gather votes from the people of these regions, it is gravely mistaken and can be hopeful that, should it be possible to disseminate information about this insult being inflicted upon the people of Azerbaijan through this falsification of history and linguistic heritage, its defeat in these provinces is certain!

The scant information that has leaked from the Ministry of Science regarding the background of these “policies of the Government of Prudence and Hope based on attention to different cultures and ethnicities” indicates that the original plan was prepared in the early 1380s, at the end of Dr. Mo’in’s tenure as minister in 1382, and its communication to the universities had been postponed due to political considerations. It is said that this time as well, the government, with the same considerations, ordered the Ministry of Science to prepare such a plan, and the Ministry of Science set the same previous plan in motion and, in the words of the president’s special assistant, communicated it to the universities as “a step towards strengthening national unity.” We do not know precisely who—or which persons—drew up that program and why its implementation was forgone over the past thirteen years, but what can be guessed, based on the hasty and unprofessional implementation of a thirteen-year-old program—while, according to one official of the same ministry, any program more than ten years past its approval must be reviewed—is the same view of the wits, who consider the communication of such a program with this urgency to be a propagandistic use of it. If that is the case, I draw the attention of those responsible for this instrumental use to two important points in the “government’s action,” as follows:

Regarding the first point, our statesmen can know nothing of it, and their excuse is valid; but regarding the second point, they cannot be entirely ignorant, even if their understanding does not rise above the low level of instinct. The first point concerns the place of language in the country. From the perspective of the history of language, Iran, unlike many other countries, has a distinct history. The Persian language, as the “national” language of all the people of Greater Iran, has a long history. This language is the most important document of the continuity of Iran’s history and cultural history. Iran is the only major country whose people, by preserving the Persian language, remained Iranian, unlike many other countries that became Arab. This anomalous situation in Iran’s history has important consequences that the planners of the Ministry of Science, Culture, and Education cannot ignore when they “issue” programs for the country’s education and higher education system. New Persian, the language that has been the sole national language of the country for fourteen centuries—like Middle Persian and other ancient languages of Iran—has, since the beginning of the Islamic period, been the sole scientific and standard language of Greater Iran and, until further notice, remains so. This language is also the foundation of the nationality and distinct identity of all Iranians; that is, if the Persian language did not exist, Iran, like countries such as India, present-day Pakistan, Africa, etc., where the common languages of their people could not create a national standard language, would have been forced to speak one of the other standard languages—foremost among which, in the Islamic period, was Arabic. The reason that Iran, in this same Islamic period, despite the many other languages its people spoke in different eras, developed only one national language is none other than that only this language was the language of knowledge and culture and the standard language, and could be such a language. This matter, contrary to the propaganda of the proponents of today’s pan-… ideologies, has nothing to do with domination and colonialism, but rather has a history that their ideologies prevent them from knowing. The Persian language, like all other national languages, in addition to being the language of culture and knowledge, is also the language of political power. From the beginning of the Islamic period, Dari Persian has been the language of the court, the seat of power, and from the time Ya’qub Layth addressed the Arabic-speaking poet, saying: “Why should one say what I do not understand?”, from the Tahirids and Samanids to a Turkic slave like Mahmud of Ghazni, and the Seljuks and Shah Ismail, etc., the Persian language has been the language of political power for preserving Iran’s territorial unity. There is no doubt that Sultan Mahmud was more Turk than many of today’s “Turks,” but he possessed enough statecraft and sagacity to know that his “mother tongue” was insufficient for governance. His court, like many other courts, needed the legend of four hundred gold-belted poets. In other words, he knew that the odes of poets are also weapons of war. His viziers, as well as the viziers of the Seljuks, were all descendants of Iranian dehqans, and it is no wonder that a vizier like Nizam al-Mulk would rebuke Malik-Shah, asking what had happened that in his divan, Turkish was being equated with Tajik? He and Malik-Shah knew that language is the bearer of culture, and they also knew that one cannot rule except with wisdom and culture!

Since the language of the Turks and Turkmens could not create a standard language, it was not the language of culture and knowledge, and in the historical evolution of their countless dialects, they neither managed to create a standard language nor did they become the language of science and culture. The most important reason for this claim is the evolution of the Ottoman Turkish language until the forced reforms following the abolition of the Caliphate in Turkey. That language was predominantly Persian and also—via Persian—Arabic, and any Persian speaker who knew a little Azeri Turkish could read its most important texts: for example, one can refer to Sudi’s commentaries on Hafez and Sa’di, and Anqaravi’s commentary on the Masnavi. The current Turkish language in the Republic of Turkey was a weapon that its founder consciously employed to create a “nation” from a community that defined itself as an “ummah.” Atatürk, who knew he was not so much an Ata-“Türk,” explicitly stated this point in a confession to Mohammad-Ali Foroughi. I quote this important point from Atatürk himself—in accordance with the principle of ‘the confession of the wise is against themselves’—so that the contemporary pseudo-scholars who have learned something of new terminologies, but from whom many things have been lost, do not claim that the speaker is exaggerating and supposedly “insulting the Turkic people.”

Habib Yaghmaei recounts the content of one of his conversations with Mohammad-Ali Foroughi as follows: Foroughi “on another occasion, while discussing ‘nationality,’ said that Atatürk told me: ‘You Iranians do not appreciate your nationality and do not understand its meaning, and you do not know what a great blessing it is to have roots, and to have the right of soil and water in a part of the earth. And nationality finds its true instance when that nation has a long-standing legacy of great figures in literature, wisdom, and politics, and in human knowledge and civilization. You do not appreciate the worth and value of your great figures and do not grasp the grandeur of the Shahnameh, which is the deed of your ownership and nationality and your identity document. And I am compelled to cobble together such a legacy for the Turkish nation.’”[1]

Atatürk, before he became Ata‘türk,’ knew that the Turks, in order to become a nation, had to have a ‘national’ language and culture, and of course, it was shrewder of him not to know that Iranians have had a language and culture since ancient times. Therefore, Atatürk was compelled, in order to create a new nation, to ‘cobble together a legacy,’ that is, to sever the connection of the Turkish language with the language and culture of Iran. The new Turkish language, in the Republic of Turkey, begins with a rupture that was consciously created from an important part of Iranian culture. The founder of the Republic of Turkey knew that as long as the ties between the Persian and Turkish languages remained, the Shahnameh would prevail over the Kyrgyz ‘Kutadgu Bilig’ masnavi. Of course, he was also aware that with Kyrgyz poetry, Mongolian inscriptions, and Kazakh epics, one cannot ‘cobble together a legacy’ for a nation that has no history.

The linguistic reforms in Ottoman Turkish were carried out with such an aim, and it is obvious that the new Turkish literature gradually created a literary ‘legacy’ for the Turkish nation, but with this legacy of a few decades, ‘cobbling together a legacy’ for a nation that defines itself according to European definitions was not possible. Therefore, the Turks, despite the rupture with Persian literature that had occurred since Atatürk’s time, were compelled to replace the Kyrgyz Turkish ‘Kutadgu Bilig’ masnavi with Jalal al-Din’s Persian Masnavi, in order to ‘cobble together’ a historical cultural tradition for themselves by linking themselves to it.

It is astonishing that at the time of drafting a program for teaching the Azerbaijani Turkish language, no one at the Ministry of Science knew that Kyrgyz poetry, Mongolian inscriptions, and Kazakh epics have never had any connection to the language spoken by the people of Azerbaijan. The Ministry of Science cannot, in ignorance of Atatürk’s confession about the lack of ‘the great blessing of having the right of soil and water in a part of the earth’ and his emphasis on ‘the grandeur of the Shahnameh as the deed of ownership and nationality and the identity document’ of us Iranians, write a program for the Turkification of Iranians! While Atatürk’s action in severing the linguistic ties of the Turks with Iranian culture was aimed at creating a nation-state, the meaning of the action of the Ministry of Science and the Iranian government can be nothing other than that, knowingly or unknowingly, with such an ill-considered program, it is severing the ties of large groups of the Iranian people from the nation. The person –– or persons –– who wrote such a program have consciously and maliciously pursued a path whose result can be nothing but the opposite of Atatürk’s action in Turkey. They have tried to separate large groups of the Iranian people from the body of the Iranian nation to pave the way for the disintegration of the country. What will result from this program, whose main aim is to return the people of Azerbaijan, who have recently been renamed ‘Azerbaijan Turks’[2], to their ‘Turkish’ selves under the pretext of a return to roots, with a program entirely fabricated and alien to Iranians, but to strike an axe at the root of the country and its nation? The author –– or authors –– who ‘came with a lantern’ knew something that the Ministry of Science and some in the government of ‘Prudence and Hope’ did not know, and that is that language is a terrifying weapon and can be used against Iran’s national unity, and fairness must be given that they have used it very well, and in the vast apparatus of the Ministry of Science and Technology, no one has been alerted that a mortar has been handed to them to fire at their own feet.

As I mentioned, countries whose languages lacked the capacity to create a standard language have been forced to speak a borrowed tongue. I referred to the case of India and Pakistan, which, despite their fundamental differences, are compelled to bear the yoke of the English language; the African continent is another interesting case, speaking the two colonial languages of English and French. This strategic position of language in the creation of nation-states is also well known in the history of modern Europe. In regions of France, before the creation of the centralized nation-state, many languages other than French were spoken, but the exigencies of nation-building forced the kings and political figures of that country before the Revolution of 1789 to "impose" a single language as the national language in all the provinces of that country, a policy that continued especially after the Great Revolution, and local languages were consigned to oblivion, just as the languages of the two great colonial powers, France and England, became the standard language of all sub-Saharan African countries. The current slogans drawing attention to the importance of declining local languages pertain to such countries. In France, all local languages have been more or less forgotten, and apart from a small number of the country's inhabitants –– mostly the elderly –– no one is familiar with them. These local languages are part of every country's cultural heritage and should not be entirely ignored. The relationship between the national language in Iran and Iran's local languages, like many phenomena in this country's history, has consistently been different. Iran, unlike the case of the Indian subcontinent, has always had a standard national language, but this national language, unlike the case of France, was not the imposition of one of the languages spoken by the common people. The French language, originally, compared to Latin, which was the language of science and religion in all the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, was, like English and German, a vulgar tongue and, as a courtly language, became the language of the common people, for people follow the religion and language of their kings!

Persian, in all three stages of its historical transformation, has been the "national" language of Iranians, but this language has never become the national language at the expense of other local languages, just as, for example, we have both the Kurdish Shahnameh and Shahriar's Heydar Babaya Salam. In Iran, throughout all its historical periods, only one language has been able to become the standard scientific and cultural language, but all other languages, according to their capacities, have created a kind of literature of their own. All these languages and their literatures are forms of the languages and cultures of Greater Iran, and it is obvious that efforts must be made to preserve them, but one should not weave myths and fantasies about them. The national language must remain the language of science and culture of this country. In Iran, other local languages and their literatures are not comprehensible except within the national language and literature, and one should not fabricate a history and origin for them. The Kurdish Shahnameh, in the Kurdish language, is as much a part of Iranian literature as the Divan of Shah Ismail Khatai. Reading this latter work is as possible for Persian speakers as it is impossible for a Turkish speaker who knows only Turkish! If the people who speak the Azerbaijani Turkish language are to become acquainted with the literary works of their language, there is absolutely no need to import its sources from countries that have no relation to the tradition of the Azerbaijani people. Despite the poisonous and utterly false propaganda that is deafening, the publication of the Book of Dede Korkut was never banned in Azerbaijan, and I myself saw copies of it in Tabriz bookstores from the second half of the 1330s SH. The free sale of the few hundred copies of this "national epic of the Turks" printed in Tabriz would take years, and of course, no one except curious people would buy a copy, and if they did, they often did not read it! The claim of "imposing" the Persian language on the people of Azerbaijan is a justification for the gradual "imposition" of the "Turkish" language of Dede Korkut on a people who, in recent years, have discovered their new "Turkish identity in renaissance." The Ministry of Science must know that the author –– or authors –– of the program now communicated to the universities of the Azerbaijani provinces had goals other than language instruction!

The second point concerns the position of the state and government in the country’s social system. The state comprises the institutions that oversee the sphere of a nation’s public interests and secure those interests. The principle is that the constitution embodies these public interests, although in understanding and interpreting constitutional principles one cannot rely solely on their literal wording, and in every case natural rights and human rights must be introduced as fundamental criteria. The government is the set of institutions responsible for implementing the constitution, and its head is the guarantor of securing the people’s fundamental rights and the supreme interests of a nation. The most important criterion in understanding, interpreting, and implementing the constitution is the preservation of national unity and the country’s territorial integrity. Any measure issued by any institution that runs counter to national unity and territorial integrity is null and void and stripped of validity, for it is obvious that no nation possessed of sound reason, like any rational individual, commits suicide, nor does it permit any institution to bring about its destruction. The national state and government, in accordance with the contract established between the state and the nation, are responsible and obligated before the entire nation, and, by this token, have no right to adopt measures that pave the way for the destruction of national unity. In this respect, for the government and governmental institutions to be able to perform their duties properly, merely referring to the constitution in every instance to give something a legal veneer is not sufficient; rather, in cases where a measure could impair national unity, the understanding and interpretation of the constitution must be carried out with regard to the criterion of supreme interests. In such cases, governmental institutions cannot take their own understanding and interpretation—or that of their employees and administrative apparatus—of constitutional principles as the criterion. Of course, appealing to individuals whose anti-national stance, like “Saʿdi’s tale of love,” is “a story told on every street corner,” is another matter.

At any rate, as far as I can say, based on the scant information that has leaked out from the Ministry of Science regarding the nature of the “Azeri Turkish” language teaching program, the Ministry of Science, in formulating the program that has now been communicated to three universities in the provinces of Azerbaijan for implementation, has not properly fulfilled its duty and has hastily drawn up a program whose implementation will yield nothing but loss for the country. The government’s order to formulate such a program indicates the government’s capitulation to the rabble-rousing of political activists who, under the guise of identity-seeking and cultural demands, are resolutely determined to strike at the root of Iranian nationhood and territorial unity. The best thing the Ministry of Science can do is to refer this program for renewed expert review. This program, in its current form, is an insult to the people of Azerbaijan and, from the perspective of Iran’s national interests, is replete with flaws whose resolution is impossible without fundamental expert scrutiny. More than ten years have passed since the program’s approval, and even at that time it was formulated with specific objectives. Even if such a program had been implemented at the time of its formulation, according to the Ministry of Science’s regulations, it would now need to be revised. Given the long passage of time, the Ministry of Science can issue an order to halt its implementation and send it for expert review. I had said five years ago that teaching Azeri Turkish literature is necessary, but such a program cannot exceed two course credits in a single year. This clumsy program design is a counterpart to that earlier proposal. Just as teaching Azerbaijani literature is essential for all those interested, purging its program of all non-Iranian and non-national elements, which can only serve to fuel the separatists’ cause, is a national duty.

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Footnotes

[1] Habib Yaghmāʾi, “Notes on the Life and Qualities of Forūghī,” Forūghī’s Articles, Tehran, Tūs, 1387 [2008/2009], vol. 1, p. 19.

[2] The scholars of the Turk nation have explained that “Azerbaijan” is composed of three words in “Ancient Turkish” and means “the dwelling place of the mighty Az people.” Of course, this narrative has been fabricated for the “Turk people” in Iran; otherwise, the Republic of Azerbaijan, in order to attract tourists from Europe, officially translates the name of its country as “Land of Fire” by displaying a fire temple in Baku.

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The National Language and the Programme for Teaching Local Languages

Author: Javad Tabatabai

Source: Third issue of the quarterly Iranshahr-e Emrooz, No. 3, p. 5 ff., Shahrivar and Mehr 1395

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