The poet Muhammad Iqbal died on this day in 1938. A line from his Persian poem Musafir contains a chronogram for his death year:

صدق و اخلاص و صفا باقی نماند

In Chinese, Allah is rendered as 真主, literally 'the True Master'.

A. Z. Foreman: Serious Philology, Silly Behavior I am consistently surprised by how dominant liberal *anticommunism* is in US academia, including among the younger professoriate that came of age post-1989.

This distinction is also found in Urdu and other Indic languages: pād پاد 'audible fart' (ٽِٽ ṭiṭ in Sindhi) / پھوسی phūsi (silent fart). The latter is also found in the phrase کاناپھوسی( کرنا) kānā-phūsi (karna) 'to whisper' (literally 'to silently blow/fart in someone's ear')

Forget indigeneity. It's a distraction.

Israel has no right to subject Palestinians to occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. These are crimes regardless of whether you think Palestinians or Israelis are indigenous.

Join the Iranian program for an exciting talk with Alexander Jabbari, University of Minnesota.
'The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India'
April 24, 2024@ 12:00
202 Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse
YaleMacMillan Center Alexander Jabbari

I wrote about how many of Morocco's Amazigh Jews once supported Israel as part of 'an anti-Pan-Arabism rivalry,' and how the war in Gaza has led the community to reconsider its faith in Israel.

For New Lines Magazine

newlinesmag.com/reportage/moro…

Wait until you read Çelebi's account of the annual witch fight between the Circassian and Abkhazian vampires:

Evliya Çelebi'nin en çılgın hikâyelerinden birisini Alexander Jabbari paylaşmış. İngilizcesi de çok güzel ve eğlenceli ama orijinal metindeki renkliliği yansıtmaktan bir hayli uzak. Bir Çerkesin Evliya'ya bol bol kasık kılı ihtivâ eden bal yedirmesini Seyâhatnâme'den okuyalım:

#PersianPoem

Muhammed Taghi Bahar’s ode on Pakistan; one of the first Persian poems on the country: ganjoor.net/bahar/ghasideb…

همیشه لطف خدا باد یار پاکستان
به کین مباد فلک با دیار پاکستان

….

Once a week I read in a cafe near campus. It's always buzzing with students chatting with each other, hanging out with their friends, mostly not on their phones. It feels very reassuring and helps temper all the worrisome reports I see about young people not hanging out.

“At this age a child should weigh 8 kilos. They weigh 2 kilos'
To be clear, Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, inviting a response, to move attention away from the fact that they are continuing to starve Palestinian children to death.
theguardian.com/world/2024/apr…

“This is the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history,” a reconstructive surgeon who specializes in pediatric trauma said, of the record number of children who have been injured in the war in Gaza. nyer.cm/oHpyFZz

Persian also makes a distinction between audible and silent farts, though the words it uses are unrelated to the Semitic roots: gūz (audible) / chos (silent fart). Like with the Semitic words, the Persian words are onomatopoeic 🤓

Watched In the Land of Brothers (در سرزمین برادر), a film about Afghan refugees in Iran, at the #MSPIFF today. Well-acted, important topic though a little heavy-handed. Made me cry twice in the cinema. Two out of three sobbing emojis for me 😭😭/😭😭😭

با ترس و تشویش منتظر می‌مانم