Ajam zinde kardam
Bedin Farsi
He had laboured thirty years to revive the Persian language.
Inja zi, wa jame behesht mi saz
Live here, and make heaven's wine, wrote Omar Khayyam. I listen to Persian songs too. My favourite is Zemestoon by Sheila. Persian songs are mostly the product of Iranian exiles living in the United States.The culture is life-affirming, not life-denying.
The people of Iran are ruled by fundamentalists, but they are secular. Most Iranian women don't wear strict hijab anymore. And they have plenty of premarital sex. Homosexuality is rampant. The have revolted in private. The mullahs have failed.
Indeed, the appeal of fundamentalists is that fundamentalism is unhistorical, ignoring the 1.400 years of Muslim civilisation. The Ummayad dynasty, for instance, was secular and this-worldly. In Bangladesh (as in the whole of India) the religious strand of Islam known as Sufism flourished since the thirteenth century. Fundamentalists have almost no place for Sufi shrines. Since 2013, 14 Sufi saints have been killed by militants. The phenomenon of the pir, or Islamic holy man, has been attacked by fundamentalists. Former president, General Ershad, used to be a murid (loosely translated as follower) of the Atroshi pir.
It may be alleged that I do not love my country. I love my country enough to live here when all my peers are living abroad. I may not love the language, but that is something entirely different. My love of my country can best be expressed, not by me, but by a great writer. George Orwell wrote these lines while in Burma. He was describing an Englishman who had gone to Burma as a young man and had returned after a brief stint in England.
"Something turned over in Flory's heart. It was one of those moments when one becomes
conscious of a vast change and deterioration in one's life. For he had realized, suddenly,
that in his heart he was glad to be coming back. This country which he hated was now his
native country, his home. He had lived here ten years, and every particle of his body was
compounded of Burmese soil. Scenes like these--the sallow evening light, the old Indian
cropping grass, the creak of the cartwheels, the streaming egrets--were more native to
him than England. He had sent deep roots, perhaps his deepest, into a foreign country."
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