I was at the Kabul University library today, and its stacks have been partitioned into something like spheres of foreign influence, with the librarians forced to juggle multiple classification systems to find anything. The library was practically empty after a decade of civil war and then Taliban rule, so the US government donated a few thousand books barcoded according to the Library of Congress system. The German government donated a few thousand books classified by International Standard Book Numbers (is that a completely different system?). The Asia Foundation donated a few thousand books and I didn't think to ask which classification system they used. The Iranian government donated a few thousand books classified with its own system (whose name I can't remember... starts with an s...) that was designed to be based in Farsi because with other systems in find Persian books one has to transliterate them into the Latin alphabet and not everyone transliterates the same consistent way.
To one side, the displays of Iranian and American government funded reading rooms face off against one another. The American side has a row of posters on the theme "The Road to Equality: How American Women Won the Vote." The Iranian reading room entrance is flanked by a larger-than-life bust of the Islamic ideologue (and also alleged British intelligence agent and Freemason, though I doubt the Iranian government wanted to highlight that aspect of his life) Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who one librarian told me with annoyance the Iranians claimed was one of their own and not really Afghan (though in this case I think most scholars agree that he was an Iranian Shiite trying to pass himself off as Afghan to appeal to the broader Sunni audience). 180 degree view:
UPDATES: I'm told that in Iran they refer to him as Jamal al-Din Asadabadi (which is in fact the name of the main street and square in my old neighborhood of Youssef Abad in Tehran, but I never bothered looking it up) after his hometown of Asadabad. But in fact now that I actually read the inscription under the bust, I see that it says
The same librarian was keen to differentiate between Iranian Farsi and Afghan Dari, a point that came up when I commented glancing at a newspaper after lunch that in Iran America was spelled differently. This is something like calling American and British English two different languages: they stem from exactly the same origin and the written language is almost completely identical, but branched off with the separation of the populations by political boundaries and now the accent and slang of speakers of the two dialects are quite different (though this gap tends to narrow with education).
50 years ago, he claimed, Dari and Pashto were both their own pure languages, but then much country's population to had fled to Pakistan or Iran during the war and then brought back the vocabularies and expressions of those places with them. Now a Pashto sentence was often two words of Pashto, three of Urdu, and one of Farsi. There has also been deliberate foreign influence, he said, and depending on newspapers' political affiliations and their foreign backers, along with (relatedly) the migration history of their writers, they write in more Farsi vs. Dari styles. Farsi was creeping into Dari in other ways too, he said. Sometimes publishers took Farsi books and just changed the covers and titles and called them Dari, which then contributed to the shift in accepted "standard Dari" to incorporate more Farsi.
Questionable historiography aside, I can sympathize with resistance to the patronizing attitude of the Iranian government and Iranians more generally towards the rest of the Persianate world.
In telling me about how the university library was classifying all the incoming books, the librarian said that they didn't want to just adopt the system that the Iranians had come up with, despite it being better suited to their script that LoC or ISBN, because that would mean changing the Dari language itself to conform to Farsi logic of titles and authors and subjects (I should have asked him for an example--very interesting and Foucauldian in theory but I don't know what that would mean in practice). The librarians here would try to adopt elements of the Iranian system for a Dari-based classification, but that would take years.
By contrast, everybody at the organization where I'm saying calls their language Farsi, though now I'm thinking perhaps for my benefit. The yard keeper, who lived in Iran for 6 years, said he would speak Irani with me so I could better understand him (something like offering to speak Australian).
This was an interesting find (though an inappropriate use of hipstamatic camera mode): a book written by an Afghan named Mohammad Ali in the imperial language about a period of British domination and Afghan resistance that another Afghan had then struggled to read, writing Persian translations in the margins and underlined difficult phrases. The author's narrative is itself an odd mix of nationalism and admiration for the British. Incidentally the afghani-US dollar exchange rate is not too different now than it was when this book came out in (if I remember correctly) 1959. It's 48:1 now and the book's price is 100 afghani or 2 1/2 dollars.
As he drove me back home, I mentioned this to my colleague and he told me that a few months ago there had been a big dustup a few months ago over the very label of the university: instead of the Farsi--sorry, Dari--word daneshgah, a group was pushing for it to be called a po'intun (at least that's what I remember it sounding like), the Pashto word for university, along with changes in the names of departments, etc. In the end no changes had been made. My colleague said that in fact it was only changed to Daneshgah-e Kabul 15 or 20 years ago, I'm guessing when the Panjsheri Tajiks took the city. I should do a little more research to see exactly when and how this happened, and why the Taliban didn't change it back when the university was reopened under their control.
UPDATES: I'm told that in Iran they refer to him as Jamal al-Din Asadabadi (which is in fact the name of the main street and square in my old neighborhood of Youssef Abad in Tehran, but I never bothered looking it up) after his hometown of Asadabad. But in fact now that I actually read the inscription under the bust, I see that it says
بسی رنج بردم در این سال سی
عجم زنده کردم بدین پارسی
I took many pains over these thirty years
I brought life to Achaemenid [civilization] with this Parsi (as Farsi was referred to back in the day and still is when Iranians want to remind you that they're heirs to thousands of years of civilization)
Those lines are the (rather pompous) wrap-up of the Shahnameh, meaning that bust is of the poet Ferdowsi (a much less surprising choice for the Iranian government to place outside its reading room). Very interesting that a senior librarian told me it was Afghani/Asadabadi...
The same librarian was keen to differentiate between Iranian Farsi and Afghan Dari, a point that came up when I commented glancing at a newspaper after lunch that in Iran America was spelled differently. This is something like calling American and British English two different languages: they stem from exactly the same origin and the written language is almost completely identical, but branched off with the separation of the populations by political boundaries and now the accent and slang of speakers of the two dialects are quite different (though this gap tends to narrow with education).
50 years ago, he claimed, Dari and Pashto were both their own pure languages, but then much country's population to had fled to Pakistan or Iran during the war and then brought back the vocabularies and expressions of those places with them. Now a Pashto sentence was often two words of Pashto, three of Urdu, and one of Farsi. There has also been deliberate foreign influence, he said, and depending on newspapers' political affiliations and their foreign backers, along with (relatedly) the migration history of their writers, they write in more Farsi vs. Dari styles. Farsi was creeping into Dari in other ways too, he said. Sometimes publishers took Farsi books and just changed the covers and titles and called them Dari, which then contributed to the shift in accepted "standard Dari" to incorporate more Farsi.
Questionable historiography aside, I can sympathize with resistance to the patronizing attitude of the Iranian government and Iranians more generally towards the rest of the Persianate world.
In telling me about how the university library was classifying all the incoming books, the librarian said that they didn't want to just adopt the system that the Iranians had come up with, despite it being better suited to their script that LoC or ISBN, because that would mean changing the Dari language itself to conform to Farsi logic of titles and authors and subjects (I should have asked him for an example--very interesting and Foucauldian in theory but I don't know what that would mean in practice). The librarians here would try to adopt elements of the Iranian system for a Dari-based classification, but that would take years.
By contrast, everybody at the organization where I'm saying calls their language Farsi, though now I'm thinking perhaps for my benefit. The yard keeper, who lived in Iran for 6 years, said he would speak Irani with me so I could better understand him (something like offering to speak Australian).
This was an interesting find (though an inappropriate use of hipstamatic camera mode): a book written by an Afghan named Mohammad Ali in the imperial language about a period of British domination and Afghan resistance that another Afghan had then struggled to read, writing Persian translations in the margins and underlined difficult phrases. The author's narrative is itself an odd mix of nationalism and admiration for the British. Incidentally the afghani-US dollar exchange rate is not too different now than it was when this book came out in (if I remember correctly) 1959. It's 48:1 now and the book's price is 100 afghani or 2 1/2 dollars.
As he drove me back home, I mentioned this to my colleague and he told me that a few months ago there had been a big dustup a few months ago over the very label of the university: instead of the Farsi--sorry, Dari--word daneshgah, a group was pushing for it to be called a po'intun (at least that's what I remember it sounding like), the Pashto word for university, along with changes in the names of departments, etc. In the end no changes had been made. My colleague said that in fact it was only changed to Daneshgah-e Kabul 15 or 20 years ago, I'm guessing when the Panjsheri Tajiks took the city. I should do a little more research to see exactly when and how this happened, and why the Taliban didn't change it back when the university was reopened under their control.
I read this twice--interesting, very telling details. Further to paragraph 1, you should try to track down the full details of the ways the library is juggling/making decisions about classification in context of history/politics--would be a great article.
ReplyDeleteA very illuminating blog entry on Iranian vs Afghan Persian and Pashto: The Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN)
ReplyDeleteAnd one from the same author on the pohantun vs daneshgah debate: How to Name Universities
ReplyDelete