Persian
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The Hindufication of the Indian Bahá’í Community
X.T.M notes that a Bahá’í prayer performed in Mumbai for the 2017 bicentenary was in Shuddh Hindi, and wonders whether that translation came from Urdu, Perso-Arabic sources or English, since…
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Macaulay, Macaulayputras, and their discontents
Omar Ali pastes an X exchange on Thomas Macaulay with Sadanand Dhume and other users. He argues that schooling in Indian languages would have served India better than English-medium education,…
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Ghalib for Gen Z
A young reader’s review of “Thinking with Ghalib” by Anjum Altaf and Amit Basole, praising its transcreations and its epistemological reading of Ghalib’s poetry as a way into a poet…
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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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Why Pakistan Won’t Go the Way of Iran
X.T.M argues that Pakistan will not follow Iran’s path of secularisation because Pakistani Islam is inherited bottom-up and fuelled by Partition’s trauma, whereas Iran’s was imposed in 1979 and so…
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Reading the Reader: On Ammar Ali Qureshi’s Views and Reviews
Furqan Ali reviews Ammar Ali Qureshi’s Views and Reviews, a collection of essays on Punjab’s history, Pakistan, Iran and Iqbal’s love of Persia, praising its range and its melancholy portrait…
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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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Pakistaniat & Urdu from Qasim to Quaid
X.T.M reflects on Urdu as a language between Persian and Arabic, shares a Bahá’í prayer in Urdu, and suggests Pakistan is a project rooted in sentiment rather than soil, in…
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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,…
