Balkh

It’s Illegal to Speak Farsi in a Farsi Spoken City


Karem Khoram, the Minister of Culture and Youth affairs, fired a reporter and sued two other staff from Balkh TV for using pure Persian words while broadcasting the news.

The official letter that was sent to Balkh province stated that Baser Babay, the news reporter, has been discharged from Balkh TV. The letter also mentioned that Dr. Zabiullah Fetrat, head of Balkh TV, and Dawood Ahmadi, the head of the information department were both being sued for using Persian words instead of Pashtu.

The punishment caused a lot of damage to Baser Babay's 20 year career of broadcasting. Babay used the Persian word for University "Danishgah" instead of the Pashtu "Pahantaon"; along with "Danishjo" instead of "Masilin". Baser had received many warnings from the Ministry of Culture to stop using these words. "I did not commit any crime or break any laws,” said Baser Babay. " I only spoke in my mother tongue"

"This kind of action did by the ministry shows that they do not want the citizens to speak in their mother tongues" said Babay in his interview with BBC Persian.

He called his dismissal a joke and not being able to speak in his own mother tongue ridiculous, where the language of the vast majority is Persian in Balkh Province.

Farhad Azemi, a teacher at the Balkh University and the chief of the Balkh Provincial Council rejected the punishment for using Persian words; calling it illegal.

Karem Khoram is an ethnic Pashtun and a former Hzib-Islami, the anti western party of Gulboddin Hekmatyar. Khoram is known to be a narrow-minded person who is always trying to replace the Persian language with Pashtu while the majority speaks Persian in Afghanistan.

The question is, if the Persian spoken in Iran and the Persian spoken in Afghanistan two different languages or two different dialects? The suffix "Gah" is actually an original Persian word, which means, place. Though the Afghan government keeps rejecting it by saying it is an Iranian word.

‘’We have dozens of terms in the Persian spoken in Afghanistan that are ended with the suffix "Gah", we even have a district in the southern province of Helmand called LashkarGah. If the suffix (Gah) is Iranian, then should we give this district to Iran because the word is Iranian?’’ Asked Ali Maisam Nazary, a student at University of California, Los Angeles.

Afghanistan did not exist 256 years ago. It was called Khorasan, which was part of Greater Iran, and the Franca lingua of Khorasan was Persian. The language is known as "Parsi" by the native speakers and in the west as Persian. When the Afghans came into power, establishing a new country in the middle of Khorasan, they named it Afghanistan after their Afghan tribe.


Till this time, they are not tolerating other cultures and languages spoken inside Afghanistan. Balkh is the birthplace of Modern Persian; but now with this western backed government, the people of Balkh are damned if speak their language.

On July 17, 1973, Mohammed Daoud Khan took power from his cousin Zahir Shah and became the first president of Afghanistan. Shortly after, he planned an education system that stopped using "Parsi" and replacing it with "Dari", an adjective which has always been used to describe the Persian language in literature.

Non-Pashtun politicians believed that Daoud was an ethno fascist, he wanted to support his own Pashtu language and disallow Farsi, and he misrepresented the language to keep it from other Farsi speaking countries. This was the first time Dari as the name of the language became official.

"There is no difference between our dialects" said Arash Balkhi, another student from University of California, Los Angeles. "The Persian poet Saadi Shirazi was born in 1184 in Shiraz, which is now a city of Iran, called his language " Dari’’

Mr. Balkhi added ‘‘Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi (Rumi) was born in the city of Balkh in 1207 CE. He called his language "Parsi" throughout his Masnavi and Divan e Shams. So If Iran's language is "Parsi" then why did Saadi call it Dari as a resident of that country and why did Balkhi-Rumi call his language "Parsi"?