Iranian diaspora
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The Diaspora Saved The Mullahs. Pahlavi Helped.
X.T.M reports a BP live call with an Iranian guest, Farhad, who argues Reza Pahlavi’s 2022 intervention saved the Islamic Republic. The post says it does not endorse this and…
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Why Indian English Loves Long Sentences
X.T.M argues that Indian English favours long, ornate sentences as an echo of Persian’s former prestige role, and that it borrows surface complexity without the deep roots of Persian, Arabic…
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Open Thread: From Flattery to Fatigue — What the Iranian Diaspora Can’t Admit
Open thread on the Iranian diaspora: X.T.M links his Ta’arof post to Sharghzadeh’s ‘Iranian Diaspora Fatigue’ video, arguing the diaspora performs flattery toward whiteness, and asks whether it preserves Persian…
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Ta’arof & The Art of Flattery
X.T.M argues that Ta’arof, the Persian art of ritualised courtesy, is misread in the West as ‘saying no three times’, and is better understood as high-context negotiation, like Korean nunchi,…
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Are You Sri Lankan?
Recounts being asked by a Persian friend whether he was Sri Lankan, and coins the “Azizam Effect” for a longing among light-skinned, Westernised Middle Easterners to distance themselves from darker…
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April 21st: Flowers, Flags, and the Fight for Names
X.T.M reads the coincidence of Riḍván, Saadi Day, Easter Vigil and Ed Sheeran’s Persian-titled song Azizam as a story about naming, memory and cultural survival, touching on Persian identity, the…
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The bisexual & the Baha’i Twins + why do Pakistanis fake it?
Three items: speculation about the religious ancestry of an Iranian-American actress and her lookalike, a complaint that a Pakistani restaurant gamed TripAdvisor, and a tribute to Karachi, his favourite city,…
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You don’t sound American
X.T.M comments on a clip of the Iranian-American blogger Hoda Katebi being told she does not sound American, and finds it jarring that she defines herself as a Muslim Iranian,…
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Why language families matter (in an Iranian context)
X.T.M notes that many Iranian surnames cluster by religion and ethnicity, unlike Turkey’s deliberately neutral ones, and that several ‘Persian’ friends turn out to have Kurdish, Bakhtiari or other Iranian…
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Shithole countries
Asks how wrong Trump was to call some countries ‘shitholes’, conceding as a half-Pakistani, half-Iranian writer that a large diaspora usually signals something wrong at home, though the remark is…
