Way Persians view Arabs
Other Voices
Writer Hamad Al-Hamad wrote an article on his blog under the title ‘The image of Arabs in Persian literature’. He said he ‘borrowed’ the text from a book ‘Isfahan Nesfe Jahan’ which literally translated means ‘Isfahan is half of the world’.
The book was written by pessimist Sadiq Hidayat, who committed suicide in Paris in 1951. Professor Zubaydah Ashkanani translated his famous story the ‘Blind Owl’ into Arabic.
Al-Hamad said: “I am a fan of travel literature. I enjoyed reading this book published by the Masarat publishing house and I found lot of fun in its description to the writer’s journey from Tehran to Isfahan, which Hidayat did not know after he resigned from work.
The narration shows that Hidayat had a negative view of the Arabs, the Shiite clerics in general, and the Jews because of his ‘Aryan’ tendencies.
It is not difficult to note when someone surfs through the book because this view is highlighted in several paragraphs and even in the introduction of the book the writer has a clear nationalist tendency manifested in his admiration of Persian art, while using words and sentences here and there criticizing everything that is Arabic, but recommends learning Arabic.
“When I saw a lizard on the road, I saw something that may be dabb, jerboa, salamander or chameleon,” “Here I got the idea that the attack on Iran by the Arabs was because of the greed of these reptiles”, Hidayat said.
In another section, he says that the reason for naming a famous area close to Isfahan as ‘Morche Khourt’ is due to a popular myth, which he does not believe in when the Army of Islam reached it; ants were ordered to eat the hooves of their horses.
In another section, the writer ridicules the Arabic love story ‘Layla and Majnun’, and gives bad descriptions related to the years of drought, directly abusing everything that is not Persian.
He says all the arts such as Hindi, Mogul and Arabic, known to the Europeans, are only Iranian creations, and that the Arabs, with their bare feet, were running behind lizards or illusions, don’t have a mind for architecture and all their known contributions are in fact creations of other nations.
He added the Arab architecture is only a bad example of Iranian architecture. All of this shows the hostility of the author to the Arabs who occupied his country and changed its identity.
“We need, from time to time, to know views of others about us, even if they are negative and unacceptable”, Al-Hamad concluded his article.
But the fact that almost all the peoples of the earth have positions towards each other and reject the customs, traditions and lifestyles of others, even if they are of the same religion, doctrine and nationality, the examples are countless and therefore we should not be angry at what Hidayat has mentioned in his book.
Almost all our views and attitudes are negative towards the Iranians and the rest of other humans. Even in Kuwait, we ridicule each other and other Arabs, sometimes in a way that is free of racism and arrogance.
This is due to the weakness of the culture in society, but it is advisable to address the issue by raising the level of the individual and to fight intolerance within the curricula of education.