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119-517: Construction of Khair Khāna began during the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a plan to expand the city of Kabul. It mostly consists of regular blocks and paved road grids. Many of its residents are ethnic Tajiks from the provinces north of Kabul. Some are Pashtuns who moved into the neighborhood, history of some Pashtuns from Takhar moving in. Khair Khana mostly survived the ordeal of the Afghan Civil War (1992–96) which destroyed most of Kabul, with

238-462: A "Tajik", is typically defined as any primarily Dari -speaking Sunni Muslim who refer to themselves by the region, province, city, town, or village that they are from; such as Badakhshi , Baghlani , Mazari , Panjsheri , Kabuli , Herati , Kohistani , etc. Although in the past, some non- Pashto speaking tribes were identified as Tajik, for example, the Furmuli. By this definition, according to

357-575: A 2009 U.S. State Department release, the population of Tajikistan is 98% Muslim, (approximately 85% Sunni and 5% Shia ). In Afghanistan , the great number of Tajiks adhere to Sunni Islam . A small number of Tajiks may follow Twelver Shia Islam ; the Farsiwan are one such group. The community of Bukharian Jews in Central Asia speak a dialect of Persian. The Bukharian Jewish community in Uzbekistan

476-465: A 2015 study estimates some 2,600 Muslim Tajik converted to Christianity. Tajikistan marked 2009 as the year to commemorate the Tajik Sunni Muslim jurist Abu Hanifa , whose ancestry hailed from Parwan Province of Afghanistan, as the nation hosted an international symposium that drew scientific and religious leaders. The construction of one of the largest mosques in the world, funded by Qatar ,

595-589: A West-Eurasian component (~74%), an East Asian-related component (~18%), and a South Asian component samplified by Great Andamanese (~8%). According to the authors, the South Asian (Great Andamanese) affinity of Tajiks was previously unreported, although evidence for the presence of a deep South Asian ancestry was already found previously in other Central Asian samples (e.g. among modern Turkmens and historical Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex samples). Both historical and more recent geneflow (~1500 years ago) shaped

714-575: A biography of Süleyman the Magnificent . At the end of the 17th century, they gave up Persian as the court and administrative language, using Turkish instead; a decision that shocked the highly Persianized Mughals in India. The Ottoman Sultan Suleyman wrote an entire divan in Persian language. According to Hodgson: The rise of Persian (the language) had more than purely literary consequence: it served to carry

833-702: A counterpoise to the rigidity of formal Islamic theology and law, Islamic mysticism sought to approach the divine through acts of devotion and love rather than through mere rituals and observance. Love of God being the focus of the Sufis' religious sentiments, it was only natural for them to express it in lyrical terms, and Persian Sufis , often of exceptional sensibility and endowed with poetic verve, did not hesitate to do so. The famous 11th-century Sufi, Abu Sa'id of Mehna frequently used his own love quatrains (as well as others) to express his spiritual yearnings, and with mystic poets such as Attar and Iraqi , mysticism became

952-591: A currency as a lingua franca; and at its widest, about the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian Era, its range in this role extended, without a break, across the face of South-Eastern Europe and South-Western Asia from the Ottoman pashalyq of Buda, which had been erected out of the wreckage of the Western Christian Kingdom of Hungary after the Ottoman victory at Mohacz in A.D. 1526, to

1071-409: A great extent. An autographed note of both Jahangir and Shah Jahan on a copy of Sa’di's Gulestān states that it was their most precious possession. A gift of a Gulestān was made by Shah Jahan to Jahanara Begum , an incident which is recorded by her with her signature. Shah Jahan also considered the same work worthy enough to be sent as a gift to the king of England in 1628, which is presently in

1190-459: A historical source on two levels: firstly, for its contribution to the store of basic factual knowledge of a period, and secondly, for the light it sheds, intentionally or otherwise, on contemporary thought and politics. Iranian and Persianate poets received the Shahnameh and modeled themselves after it. Murtazavi formulates three categories of such works too: poets who took up material not covered in

1309-516: A leading historian of Iranian and Central Asian history, the Persian migration to Central Asia may be considered the beginning of the modern Tajik nation, and ethnic Persians, along with some elements of East-Iranian Bactrians and Sogdians, as the main ancestors of modern Tajiks. In later works, Frye expands on the complexity of the historical origins of the Tajiks. In a 1996 publication, Frye explains that many "factors must be taken into account in explaining

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1428-484: A legitimate, even fashionable subject of lyric poems among the Persianate societies. Furthermore, as Sufi orders and centers ( Khaneghah ) spread throughout Persian societies, Persian mystic poetic thought gradually became so much a part of common culture that even poets who did not share Sufi experiences ventured to express mystical ideas and imagery in their work. As the broad cultural region remained politically divided,

1547-573: A library of 3,000 volumes), and patronized "Men of the Pen" The Safavids introduced Shiism into Persia to distinguish Persian society from the Ottomans , their Sunni archrivals to the west. At the beginning of the 14th century, the Ottomans rose to predominance in Asia Minor. The Ottomans patronized Persian literature for five and a half centuries and attracted great numbers of writers and artists, especially in

1666-476: A new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom. Henceforth while Arabic held its own as the primary language of the religious disciplines and even, largely, of natural science and philosophy, Persian became, in an increasingly part of Islamdom, the language of polite culture; it even invaded the realm of scholarship with increasing effects. It was to form the chief model of the rise of still other languages. Gradually

1785-615: A prime example). One may call these traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, ‘Persianate’ by extension. This seems to be the origin of the term Persianate . The Iranian dynasty of the Samanids began recording its court affairs in Persian as well as Arabic, and the earliest great poetry in New Persian was written for the Samanid court. The Samanids encouraged translation of religious works from Arabic into Persian. In addition,

1904-652: A profusion of mosques , palaces, and tombs unmatched in any other Islamic country. The speculative thought of the times at the Mughal court, as in other Persianate courts, leaned towards the eclectic gnostic dimension of Sufi Islam, having similarities with Hindu Vedantism , indigenous Bhakti and popular theosophy . The Mughals , who were of Turco-Mongol descent, strengthened the Indo-Persian culture , in South Asia. For centuries, Iranian scholar-officials had immigrated to

2023-583: A reference to Persians. The Tajiks are the principal ethnic group in most of Tajikistan , as well as in northern and western Afghanistan , though there are more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan. Tajiks are a substantial minority in Uzbekistan , as well as in overseas communities. Historically, the ancestors of the Tajiks lived in a larger territory in Central Asia than now. Tajiks make up around 84.3% of

2142-523: A result of the Western impact. According to Gibb in the introduction (Volume I): the Turks very early appropriated the entire Persian literary system down to its minute detail, and that in the same unquestioning and wholehearted fashion in which they had already accepted Islam. The Saljuqs had, in the words of the same author: attained a very considerable degree of culture, thanks entirely to Persian tutorage. About

2261-523: A similar Sufi spirit, thus following the norms of any Persianate court. The tendency towards Sufi mysticism through Persianate culture in Mughal court circles is also testified by the inventory of books that were kept in Akbar's library, and are especially mentioned by his historian, Abu'l Fazl , in the Ā’in-ī Akbarī . Some of the books that were read out continually to the emperor include the masnavis of Nizami,

2380-552: A synthesis of Sufism and Sharia , which became the basis for a richer Islamic theology. Formulating the Sunni concept of division between temporal and religious authorities, he provided a theological basis for the existence of the Sultanate , a temporal office alongside the Caliphate , which at that time was merely a religious office. The main institutional means of establishing a consensus of

2499-450: A third "classical" tongue emerged, Turkish, whose literature was based on Persian tradition. Toynbee's assessment of the role of the Persian language is worth quoting in more detail, from A Study of History : In the Iranian world, before it began to succumb to the process of Westernization, the New Persian language, which had been fashioned into literary form in mighty works of art...gained

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2618-450: A way, along with investing the notion of heteroglossia , Persianate culture embodies the Iranian past and ways in which this past blended with the Islamic present or became transmuted. The historical change was largely on the basis of a binary model: a struggle between the religious landscapes of late Iranian antiquity and a monotheist paradigm provided by the new religion, Islam. This duality

2737-512: A wider sense "settled" in contrast to "nomadic" and was later used to describe a class of land-owning magnates as " Persian of noble blood" in contrast to Arabs , Turks and Romans during the Sassanid and early Islamic period. The Tajiks have a mixed origin, and are primarily descended from Bactrians , Sogdians , Scythians , but also Persians , Greeks and various Turkic peoples of Central Asia, all of whom are known to have inhabited

2856-453: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Tajiks Tajiks ( Persian : تاجيک، تاجک , romanized :  Tājīk, Tājek ; Tajik : Тоҷик , romanized :  Tojik ) are a Persian -speaking Iranian ethnic group native to Central Asia , living primarily in Afghanistan , Tajikistan , and Uzbekistan . Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan, and

2975-564: Is a society that is based on or strongly influenced by the Persian language , culture , literature , art and/or identity. The term "Persianate" is a neologism credited to Marshall Hodgson . In his 1974 book, The Venture of Islam: The expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods , he defined it thus: "The rise of Persian had more than purely literary consequences: it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom.... Most of

3094-463: Is attested from the middle of the 1st millennium BC. The ancestors of the Tajiks constituted the core of the ancient population of Khwārezm (Khorezm) and Bactria, which formed part of Transoxania (Sogdiana). Over the course of time, the eastern Iranian dialect that was used by the ancient Tajiks eventually gave way to Farsi , a western dialect spoken in Iran and Afghanistan. The geographical division between

3213-534: Is little else than Persian poetry in Turkish words. But such was not consciously their aim; of national feeling in poetry they dreamed not; poetry was to them one and indivisible, the language in which it was written merely an unimportant accident. In general, from its earliest days, Persian culture was brought into the Subcontinent (or South Asia) by various Persianised Turkic and Afghan dynasties. South Asian society

3332-580: Is symbolically expressed in the Shiite tradition that Husayn ibn Ali , the third Shi'ite Imam, had married Shahrbanu , daughter of Yazdegerd III , the last Sassanid king of Iran . This genealogy makes the later imams, descended from Husayn and Shahrbanu, the inheritors of both the Islamic Prophet Muhammad and of the pre-Islamic Sassanid kings. After the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran, Pahlavi ,

3451-497: Is the author of the standard A Literary History of Ottoman Poetry in six volumes, whose name has lived on in an important series of publications of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts, the Gibb Memorial Series . Gibb classifies Ottoman poetry between the "Old School", from the 14th century to about the middle of the 19th century, during which time Persian influence was dominant; and the "Modern School", which came into being as

3570-697: Is the largest remaining community of Central Asian Jews and resides primarily in Bukhara and Samarkand, while the Bukharaian Jews of Tajikistan live in Dushanbe and number only a few hundred. From the 1970s to the 1990s the majority of these Tajik-speaking Jews emigrated to the United States and to Israel in accordance with Aliyah . Recently, the Protestant community of Tajiks descent has experienced significant growth,

3689-959: Is used, it is called the Tajiki language . In Afghanistan , unlike in Tajikistan , Tajiks continue to use the Perso-Arabic script , as well as in Iran. When the Soviet Union introduced the Latin script in 1928, and later the Cyrillic script, the Persian dialect of Tajikistan came to be disassociated from the Tajik language. Many Tajik authors have lamented this artificial separation of the Tajik language from its Iranian heritage. One Tajik poem relates: Once you said 'you are Iranian', then you said, 'you are Tajik' May he die separated from his roots, he who separated us . Since

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3808-637: The Caucasus endured until the loss of Azerbaijan , Armenia , eastern Georgia and parts of the North Caucasus to Imperial Russia following the Russo-Persian Wars in the course of the 19th century. The culture of peoples of the eastern Mediterranean in Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt developed somewhat independently; India developed a vibrant and completely distinct South Asian style with little to no remnants of

3927-595: The Chester Beatty Library , Dublin. The emperor often took out auguries from a copy of the diwan of Hafez belonging to his grandfather, Humayun . One such incident is recorded in his own handwriting in the margins of a copy of the diwan , presently in the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library, Patna . The court poets Naziri , ‘Urfi , Faizi , Khan-i Khanan , Zuhuri , Sanai , Qodsi , Talib-i Amuli and Abu Talib Kalim were all masters imbued with

4046-557: The Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province in Tajikistan, and Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in China. Some of the famous Islamic scholars were from either modern or historical East-Iranian regions lying in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and therefore can arguably be viewed as Tajiks. They include Abu Hanifa , Imam Bukhari , Tirmidhi , Abu Dawood , Nasir Khusraw and many others. According to

4165-507: The Mediterranean Sea . Under their rule, many pre-Islamic Iranian traditional arts like Sassanid architecture were resurrected, and great Iranian scholars were patronized. At the same time, the Islamic religious institutions became more organized and Sunni orthodoxy became more codified. The Persian jurist and theologian Al-Ghazali was among the scholars at the Seljuq court who proposed

4284-819: The Pamiri ethnic group that lives in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwestern China . They are one of the 56 nationalities officially recognized by the government of the People's Republic of China . According to the 1999 population census , there were 26,000 Tajiks in Kazakhstan (0.17% of the total population), about the same number as in the 1989 census. According to official statistics , there were about 47,500 Tajiks in Kyrgyzstan in 2007 (0.9% of

4403-483: The Qarluq Turks (see Bregel, Atlas, Maps 8–10) consisted not only of Arabs, but also of Persian converts from Fārs and the central Zagros region (Bartol'd [Barthold], "Tadžiki," pp. 455–57). Hence the Turks of Central Asia adopted a variant of the Iranian word, täžik, to designate their Muslim adversaries in general. For example, the rulers of the south Indian Chalukya dynasty and Rashtrakuta dynasty also referred to

4522-463: The Seljuq , Timurid , Mughal , and Ottoman dynasties. Persianate culture flourished for nearly fourteen centuries. It was a mixture of Persian and Islamic cultures that eventually underwent Persification and became the dominant culture of the ruling and elite classes of Greater Iran , Asia Minor , and South Asia . When the peoples of Greater Iran were conquered by Islamic forces in

4641-464: The Shahnameh was viewed as more than literature. It was also a political treatise, as it addressed deeply rooted conceptions of honor, morality, and legitimacy. Illustrated versions of it were considered desirable as expressions of the aspirations and politics of ruling elites in the Iranian world. The Persianate culture that emerged under the Samanids in Greater Khorasan , in northeast Persia and

4760-445: The Soviet Union and the exodus of Russians from Central Asia. Nevertheless, Russian fluency is still considered an vital skill for business and education. The dialects of modern Persian spoken throughout Greater Iran have a common origin. This is due to the fact that one of Greater Iran 's historical cultural capitals, called Greater Khorasan , which included parts of modern Central Asia and much of Afghanistan and constitutes as

4879-591: The World Factbook , Tajiks make up about 25–27% of Afghanistan 's population, but according to other sources, they form 37–39% of the population. Other sources however, for example the Encyclopædia Britannica , state that they constitute about 12–20% of the population, which is mostly excluding Persianized ethnic groups like some Pashtuns , Uzbeks , Qizilbash , Aimaqs etc. who, especially in large urban areas like Kabul or Herat , assimilated into

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4998-597: The Zoroastrian , and Buddhist pre-Islamic heritage of the Tajik people. Early temples for fire worship have been found in Balkh and Bactria and excavations in present-day Tajikistan and Uzbekistan show remnants of Zoroastrian fire temples. Today, however, the great majority of Tajiks follow Sunni Islam , although small Twelver and Ismaili Shia minorities also exist in scattered pockets. Areas with large numbers of Shias include Herat , Badakhshan provinces in Afghanistan,

5117-399: The madrasas . As the result of the impacts of Persian literature as well as to further political ambitions, it became a custom for rulers in the Persianate lands to not only commission a copy of the Shahnameh , but also to have his own epic, allowing court poets to attempt to reach the level of Ferdowsi: Thus, as with any piece of historical writing, the Shahnameh can be evaluated as

5236-568: The ulama on these dogmatic issues was the Nezamiyeh , better known as the madrasas , named after its founder Nizam al-Mulk , a Persian vizier of the Seljuqs. These schools became the means of uniting Sunni ulama , who legitimized the rule of the Sultans. The bureaucracies were staffed by graduates of the madrasas, so both the ulama and the bureaucracies were under the influence of esteemed professors at

5355-598: The (ideally) nomadic military executive and the urban civil bureaucracy (Niẓām al-Molk: tāzik, pp. 146, 178–79; Fragner, "Tādjīk. 2" in EI2 10, p. 63). The word also occurs in the 8th-century Tonyukuk inscriptions as tözik , used for a local Arab tribe in the Tashkent area. These Arabs were said to be from the Taz tribe, which is still found in Yemen. In the 7th-century, the Taz began to Islamize

5474-458: The 11th-century Garshāspnāmeh by Asadi Tusi . This tradition, chiefly a Timurid one, resulted in the creation of Islamic epics of conquests as discussed by Marjan Molé. Also see the classification employed by Z. Safa for epics: milli (national, those inspired by Ferdowsi's epic), tarikhi (historical, those written in imitation of Nizami's Iskandarnamah ) and dini for religious works. The other source of inspiration for Persianate culture

5593-515: The 16th century. The Ottoman Empire's undeniable affiliation with the Persianate world during the first few decades of the sixteenth century are illustrated by the works of a scribe from the Aq Qoyunlu court, Edris Bedlisi. One of the most renowned Persian poets in the Ottoman court was Fethullah Arifi Çelebi , also a painter and historian, and the author of the Süleymanname (or Suleyman-nama ),

5712-459: The 19th century, Tajiki has been strongly influenced by the Russian language and has incorporated many Russian language loan words . It has also adopted fewer Arabic loan words than Iranian Persian while retaining vocabulary that has fallen out of use in the latter language. Many Tajiks can read, speak or write in Russian, however the prestige and importance of Russian has declined since the fall of

5831-581: The 7th and 8th centuries, they became part of an empire much larger than any previous one under Persian rule. While the Islamic conquest led to the Arabization of language and culture in the former Byzantine territories, this did not happen in Persia. Rather, the new Islamic culture evolving there was largely based on pre-Islamic Persian traditions of the area, as well as on the Islamic customs that were introduced to

5950-586: The Arab conquest to the Mongols and is longer than Ferdowsi's work. The literary value of these works must be considered on an individual basis as Jan Rypka cautions: "all these numerous epics cannot be assessed very highly, to say nothing of those works that were substantially (or literally) copies of Ferdowsi. There are however exceptions, such as the Zafar-Nameh of Hamdu'llah Mustaufi a historically valuable continuation of

6069-450: The Arab world to the west, the dividing zone falling along the Euphrates . Socially the Persianate world was marked by a system of ethnologically defined elite statuses: the rulers and their soldiery were non-Iranians in origin, but the administrative cadres and literati were Iranians. Cultural affairs were marked by a characteristic pattern of language use: New Persian was the language of state affairs, scholarship and literature and Arabic

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6188-467: The Arabs as "Tajika" in the 8th and 9th century. By the eleventh century ( Yusof Ḵāṣṣ-ḥājeb , Qutadḡu bilig , lines 280, 282, 3265), the Qarakhanid Turks applied this term more specifically to the Persian Muslims in the Oxus basin and Khorasan, who were variously the Turks' rivals, models, overlords (under the Samanid Dynasty ), and subjects (from Ghaznavid times on). Persian writers of the Ghaznavid, Seljuq and Atābak periods (ca. 1000–1260) adopted

6307-409: The Basin of the Oxus and the Jaxartes; and in the heyday of the Mughal, Safawi, and Ottoman regimes New Persian was being patronized as the language of literae humaniores by the ruling element over the whole of this huge realm, while it was also being employed as the official language of administration in those two-thirds of its realm that lay within the Safawi and the Mughal frontiers. E. J. W. Gibb

6426-426: The Kazakhstan border. There are currently estimated to be over one million Tajik guest workers living in Russia, with their remittances accounting for as much as half of Tajikistan's economy. There are an estimated 220,000 Tajiks in Pakistan as of 2012, mainly refugees from Afghanistan. During the 1990s, as a result of the Tajikistan Civil War , between 700 and 1,200 Tajiks arrived in Pakistan, mainly as students,

6545-435: The Middle-Persian of pre-Islamic times, but enriched by Arabic vocabulary and written in the Arabic script. The Persian language, according to Marshall Hodgson in his The Venture of Islam , was to form the chief model for the rise of still other languages to the literary level. Like Turkish , most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims were heavily influenced by Persian ( Urdu being

6664-443: The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his Iranian bride. Iranian poets, such as Sa’di , Hafez , Rumi and Nizami , who were great masters of Sufi mysticism from the Persianate world, were the favorite poets of the Mughals. Their works were present in Mughal libraries and counted among the emperors’ prized possessions, which they gave to each other; Akbar and Jahangir often quoted from them, signifying that they had imbibed them to

6783-521: The Muslim "successor-states" which had been carved, after the victory of the Deccanese Muslim princes at Talikota in A.D. 1565, out of the carcass of the slaughtered Hindu Empire of Vijayanagar. For this vast cultural empire the New Persian language was indebted to the arms of Turkish-speaking empire-builders, reared in the Iranian tradition and therefore captivated by the spell of the New Persian literature, whose military and political destiny it had been to provide one universal state for Orthodox Christendom in

6902-421: The Oxus to the southern territories of the Persian Gulf. Shah Isma'il's successors went further and adopted the title of Shāhanshāh (king of kings). The Safavid kings considered themselves, like their predecessors the Sassanid Emperors, the khudāygān (the shadow of God on earth). They revived Sassanid architecture, build grand mosques and elegant charbagh gardens, collected books (one Safavid ruler had

7021-507: The Pamiris are counted as a separate ethnic group. As a self-designation, the literary New Persian term Tajik , which originally had some previous pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranians , has become acceptable during the last several decades, particularly as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia. Alternative names for the Tajiks are Fārsīwān (Persian-speaker), and Dīhgān (cf. Tajik : Деҳқон ) which translates to "farmer or settled villager", in

7140-467: The Persian language and Persianate culture was brought deep into India and carried further in the 13th century. The Seljuqs won a decisive victory over the Ghaznavids and swept into Khorasan; they brought Persianate culture westward into western Persia, Iraq, Anatolia, and Syria. Iran proper along with Central Asia became the heartland of Persian language and culture. As the Seljuqs came to dominate western Asia, their courts were Persianized as far west as

7259-426: The Shah-nama" and the Shahanshahnamah (or Changiznamah ) of Ahmad Tabrizi in 1337–38, which is a history of the Mongols written for Abu Sa'id. Second, poets versified the history of a contemporary ruler for reward, such as the Ghazannameh written in 1361–62 by Nur al-Din ibn Shams al-Din. Third, heroes not treated in the Shahnameh and those having minor roles in it became the subjects of their own epics, such as

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7378-426: The Tajik community accounts for 5% of the nation's population. However, these numbers do not include ethnic Tajiks who, for a variety of reasons, choose to identify themselves as Uzbeks in population census forms. During the Soviet " Uzbekization " supervised by Sharof Rashidov , the head of the Uzbek Communist Party, Tajiks had to choose either stay in Uzbekistan and get registered as Uzbek in their passports or leave

7497-733: The Tajik sample was assigned to the North African maternal haplogroup X2j. The dominant paternal haplogroup among modern Tajiks is the Haplogroup R1a Y-DNA. ~45% of Tajik men share R1a (M17), ~18% J (M172), ~8% R2 (M124), and ~8% C (M130 & M48). Tajiks of Panjikent score 68% R1a, Tajiks of Khojant score 64% R1a. The high frequency of haplogroup R1a in the Tajiks probably reflects a strong founder effect . According to another genetic test, 63% of Tajik male samples from Tajikistan carry R1a. An autosomal DNA study by Guarino-Vignon et al. (2022), suggested that modern Tajiks show genetic continuity with ancient samples from Tajikistan and Turkmenistan . The genetic ancestry of Tajiks consists largely of

7616-408: The Tajik's ancestral homeland, played a key role in the development and propagation of Persian language and culture throughout much of Greater Iran after the Muslim conquest. Furthermore, early manuscripts of the historical Persian spoken in Mashhad during the development of Middle to New Persian show that their origins came from Sistan , in present-day Afghanistan. Various scholars have recorded

7735-477: The Tajiks is predominantly Persianate but with strong elements from other cultures of Central Asia, such as Turkic and heavily infused with Islamic traditions. The Tajiks are an Iranian people, speaking a variety of Persian, concentrated in the Oxus Basin, the Farḡāna valley (Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan) and on both banks of the upper Oxus, i.e., the Pamir Mountains (Mountain Badaḵšān, in Tajikistan) and northeastern Afghanistan (Badaḵšān). Historically,

7854-659: The Turkic Ghaznavids and Seljuks (11th and 12th centuries), the Timurids (14th and 15th centuries), and the Qajars (19th and 20th centuries). The Ghaznavids, the rivals and future successors of the Samanids, ruled over the southeastern extremities of Samanid territories from the city of Ghazni . Persian scholars and artists flocked to their court, and the Ghaznavids became patrons of Persianate culture. The Ghaznavids took with them Persianate culture as they subjugated Western and Southern Asia . Apart from Ferdowsi, Rumi , Abu Ali Sina , Al-Biruni , Unsuri Balkhi, Farrukhi Sistani , Sanayi Ghaznawi and Abu Sahl Testari were among

7973-406: The affairs of everyday life and in the business of government, they preferred their own ideas; but in the sphere of science and literature they went to school with the Persian, intent not merely on acquiring his method, but on entering into his spirit, thinking his thought and feeling his feelings. And in this school they continued so long as there was a master to teach them; for the step thus taken at

8092-434: The ancient Tajiks were chiefly agriculturalists before the Arab Conquest of Iran . While agriculture remained a stronghold, the Islamization of Iran also resulted in the rapid urbanization of historical Khorasan and Transoxiana that lasted until the devastating Mongolian invasion. Several surviving ancient urban centers of the Tajik people include Samarkand , Bukhara , Khujand , and Termez . Contemporary Tajiks are

8211-401: The borderlands of Turkistan exposed the Turks to Persianate culture; The incorporation of the Turks into the main body of the Middle Eastern Islamic civilization, which was followed by the Ghaznavids , thus began in Khorasan; "not only did the inhabitants of Khurasan not succumb to the language of the nomadic invaders, but they imposed their own tongue on them. The region could even assimilate

8330-464: The centers of the Islamic world eastward. The institutions stabilized Islamic society into a form that would persist, at least in Western Asia , until the 20th century. The Ghaznavids moved their capital from Ghazni to Lahore in modern Pakistan , which they turned into another center of Islamic culture. Under their patronage, poets and scholars from Kashgar , Bukhara , Samarkand , Baghdad , Nishapur , Amol and Ghazni congregated in Lahore. Thus,

8449-404: The children of Tajik refugees in Afghanistan. In 2002, around 300 requested to return home and were repatriated back to Tajikistan with the help of the IOM , UNHCR and the two countries' authorities. 80,414 Tajiks live in the United States. A 2014 study of the maternal haplogroups of Tajiks from Tajikistan revealed substantial admixture of West Eurasian and East Eurasian lineages, and also

8568-672: The cost of sustaining the Arab caliphs , the Umayyads , and in the 8th century, a general Iranian uprising—led by Abu Muslim Khorrasani —brought another Arab family, the Abbasids , to the Caliph's throne. Under the Abbasids, the capital shifted from Syria to Iraq , which had once been part of the Sassanid Empire and was still considered to be part of the Iranian cultural domain. Persian culture, and

8687-790: The customs of the Persian Barmakid viziers , became the style of the ruling elite. Politically, the Abbasids soon started losing their control over Iranians. The governors of Khurasan , the Tahirids , though appointed by the caliph, were effectively independent. When the Persian Saffarids from Sistan freed the eastern lands, the Buyyids , the Ziyarids and the Samanids in Western Iran, Mazandaran and

8806-651: The descendants of ancient Eastern Iranian inhabitants of Central Asia, in particular, the Sogdians and the Bactrians . Possibly are descendants from other groups, with an admixture of Western Iranian Persians and non-Iranian peoples. The latter group may include Greeks who were known to have settled in the Tajikistan and Uzbekistan region following the conquests of Alexander the Great and some of them were referred to as Dayuan by Chinese chronicles. According to Richard Nelson Frye ,

8925-508: The early population associated with the Tarim mummies . The authors concluded that Tajiks "present patterns of genetic continuity of Central Asians since the Bronze Age". The language of the Tajiks is an eastern dialect of Persian , called Dari (derived from Darbārī , "[of/from the] royal courts", in the sense of "courtly language"), or also Parsi-e Darbari. In Tajikistan, where Cyrillic script

9044-692: The eastern and western Iranians is often considered historically and currently to be the desert Dasht-e Kavir , situated in the center of the Iranian plateau. During the Soviet–Afghan War , the Tajik-dominated Jamiat-e Islami founded by Burhanuddin Rabbani resisted the Soviet Army and the communist Afghan government . Tajik commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud , successfully repelled nine Soviet campaigns from taking Panjshir Valley and earned

9163-511: The eastern provinces of Lebap and Mary adjoining the borders with Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. The population of Tajiks in Russia was about 350,236 according to the 2021 census, up from 38,000 in the last Soviet census of 1989. Most Tajiks came to Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union , often as guest workers in places like Moscow and Saint Petersburg or federal subjects near

9282-646: The epic, poets who eulogized their patrons and their ancestors in masnavi form for monetary reward, and poets who wrote poems for rulers who saw themselves as heroes in the Shahnameh , echoing the earlier Samanid trend of patronizing the Shahnameh for legitimizing texts. First, Persian poets attempted to continue the chronology to a later period, such as the Zafarnamah of the Ilkhanid historian Hamdollah Mostowfi (d. 1334 or 1335), which deals with Iranian history from

9401-519: The evolution of the peoples whose remnants are the Tajiks in Central Asia" and that "the peoples of Central Asia, whether Iranian or Turkic speaking, have one culture, one religion, one set of social values and traditions with only language separating them." Regarding Tajiks, the Encyclopædia Britannica states: The Tajiks are the direct descendants of the Iranian peoples whose continuous presence in Central Asia and northern Afghanistan

9520-542: The far-flung cities of the Persianate world, from Anatolia to India . Persianate culture involved modes of consciousness, ethos, and religious practices that have persisted in the Iranian world against hegemonic Arab Muslim ( Sunni ) cultural constructs. This formed a calcified Persianate structure of thought and experience of the sacred, entrenched for generations, which later informed history, historical memory, and identity among Alid loyalists and heterodox groups labeled by sharia -minded authorities as ghulāt . In

9639-491: The formation of Anjuman-i Ma’arif, an academy devoted to the strengthening of Persian language as a scientific language. From about the 12th century, Persian lyric poetry was enriched with a spirituality and devotional depth not to be found in earlier works. This development was due to the pervasive spread of mystical experience within Islam. Sufism developed in all Muslim lands, including the sphere of Persian cultural influence. As

9758-458: The genetic makeup of Southern Central Asian populations, such as the Tajiks. A follow-up study by Dai et al. (2022) estimated that the Tajiks derive between 11.6 and 18.6% ancestry from admixture with from an East-Eurasian steppe source represented by the Xiongnu , with the remainder of their ancestry being derived from Western Steppe Herders and BMAC components, as well as a small contribution from

9877-688: The government there has made a conscious effort to revive the legacy of the Samanid empire, the first Tajik-dominated state in the region after the Arab advance. For instance, the President of Tajikistan , Emomalii Rahmon , dropped the Russian suffix "-ov" from his surname and directed others to adopt Tajik names when registering births. According to a government announcement in October 2009, approximately 4,000 Tajik nationals have dropped "ov" and "ev" from their surnames since

9996-568: The great Iranian scientists and poets of the period under Ghaznavid patronage. Persianate culture was carried by successive dynasties into Western and Southern Asia, particularly by the Persianized Seljuqs (1040–1118) and their successor states, who presided over Iran , Syria , and Anatolia until the 13th century, and by the Ghaznavids, who in the same period dominated Greater Khorasan and parts of India . These two dynasties together drew

10115-404: The idiom of administration and literature. The Tahirid and Saffarid dynasties continued using Persian as an informal language, although for them Arabic was the "language for recording anything worthwhile, from poetry to science", but the Samanids made Persian a language of learning and formal discourse. The language that appeared in the 9th and 10th centuries was a new form of Persian, derivative of

10234-515: The language of Pre-Islamic Iran , continued to be widely used well into the second Islamic century (8th century) as a medium of administration in the eastern lands of the Caliphate . Despite the Islamization of public affairs, the Iranians retained much of their pre-Islamic outlook and way of life, adjusted to fit the demands of Islam. Towards the end of the 7th century, the population began resenting

10353-546: The language of religion. The Safavid dynasty ascended to predominance in Iran in the 16th century—the first native Iranian dynasty since the Buyyids . The Safavids, who were of mixed Kurdish , Turkic , Georgian , Circassian and Pontic Greek ancestry, moved to the Ardabil region in the 11th century. They re-asserted the Persian identity over many parts of West Asia and Central Asia, establishing an independent Persian state, and patronizing Persian culture They made Iran

10472-416: The language to simply "Tajiki" in 1994. On 6 October 2009, Tajikistan adopted the law that removes Russian as the lingua franca and mandated Tajik as the language to be used in official documents and education, with an exception for members Tajikistan's ethnic minority groups, who would be permitted to receive an education in the language of their choosing. Persianate society A Persianate society

10591-521: The learned authorities of Islam, the ulama , began using the Persian lingua franca in public. The crowning literary achievement in the early New Persian language was the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), presented by its author Ferdowsi to the court of Mahmud of Ghazni (998–1030). This was a kind of Iranian nationalistic resurrection: Ferdowsi galvanized Persian nationalistic sentiment by invoking pre-Islamic Persian heroic imagery and enshrined in literary form

10710-667: The middle of the eleventh century they [that is, the Saljuqs] had overrun Persia, when, as so often happened, the Barbarian conquerors adopted the culture of their civilized subjects. Rapidly the Seljuq Turks pushed their conquest westward, ever carrying with them Persian culture...[s]o, when some hundred and fifty years later Sulayman's son [the leader of the Ottomans]... penetrated into Asia Minor, they [the Ottomans] found that although Seljuq Turkish

10829-567: The more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims... depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration. We may call all these cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, 'Persianate' by extension." The term designates ethnic Persians but also societies that may not have been predominantly ethnically Persian but whose linguistic, material or artistic cultural activities were influenced by or based on Persianate culture. Examples of pre-19th-century Persianate societies were

10948-459: The most treasured folk stories. Ferdowsi's Shahnameh enjoyed a special status in Iranian courtly culture as a historical narrative as well as a mythical one. The powerful effect that this text came to have on the poets of this period is partly due to the value that was attached to it as a legitimizing force, especially for new rulers in the Eastern Islamic world: In the Persianate tradition

11067-543: The neighborhood remaining largely intact. Many people from other parts of Kabul came here to take shelter. One of the reasons why Khair Khana was spared is because of its north-western location – it was far from the Hezb-i Islami Gulbuddin forces who were attacking the city from the south-east, and in later years the Taliban who were based to the south. This Kabul Province , Afghanistan location article

11186-452: The nickname "Lion of Panjshir" ( شیر پنجشیر ). According to John Perry ( Encyclopaedia Iranica ): The most plausible and generally accepted origin of the word is Middle Persian tāzīk 'Arab' (cf. New Persian tāzi), or an Iranian (Sogdian or Parthian) cognate word. The Muslim armies that invaded Transoxiana early in the eighth century, conquering the Sogdian principalities and clashing with

11305-477: The north-east respectively, declared their independence. The separation of the eastern territories from Baghdad was expressed in a distinctive Persianate culture that became dominant in west, central, and south Asia, and was the source of innovations elsewhere in the Islamic world. The Persianate culture was marked by the use of the New Persian language as a medium of administration and intellectual discourse, by

11424-438: The outset developed into a practice; it became the rule with the Turkish poets to look ever Persia-ward for guidance and to follow whatever fashion might prevail there. Thus it comes about that for centuries Ottoman poetry continued to reflect as in a glass the several phases through which that of Persia passed...[s]o the first Ottoman poets, and their successors through many a generation, strove with all their strength to write what

11543-560: The population of Tajikistan. This number includes speakers of the Pamiri languages , including Wakhi and Shughni , and the Yaghnobi people who in the past were considered by the government of the Soviet Union nationalities separate from the Tajiks. In the 1926 and 1937 Soviet censuses, the Yaghnobis and Pamiri language speakers were counted as separate nationalities. After 1937, these groups were required to register as Tajiks. In Afghanistan,

11662-515: The population of the ancient cities of Bukhara and Samarkand , and are found in large numbers in the Surxondaryo Region in the south and along Uzbekistan's eastern border with Tajikistan. According to official statistics (2000), Surxondaryo Region accounts for 20.4% of all Tajiks in Uzbekistan, with another 34.3% in Samarqand and Bukhara regions. Official statistics in Uzbekistan state that

11781-460: The presence of South Asian and North African lineages, as well. Another study reports that "the Tajik mtDNA pool gene pool harbors nearly equal proportions of eastern Eurasian and western Eurasian haplotypes." West Eurasian maternal lineages included haplogroups H, J, K, T, I, W and U. East Eurasian lineages included haplogroups M, C, Z, D, G, A, Y and B. South Asian lineages detected in this study included haplogroups M and R. One lineage in

11900-621: The region at various times. Tajiks are therefore mainly Eastern Iranian in their ethnic makeup but speak a Persian dialect, which is a Western Iranian language , likely adopting the language in the 7th century AD following the Islamic conquest of Persia , when the prestigious Persian language consequently spread further east leading to the gradual extinction of the Bactrian and Sogdian languages. The Tajiks and their ancestors have inhabited Northern Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and other parts of Central Asia continuously for many millennia. The culture of

12019-488: The region by the Arab conquerors. Persianate culture, especially among the elite classes, spread across the Muslim territories in western, central, and south Asia, although populations across this vast region had conflicting allegiances (sectarian, local, tribal, and ethnic) and spoke many different languages. It was spread by poets, artists, architects, artisans, jurists, and scholars, who maintained relations among their peers in

12138-553: The region of Transoxiana in Central Asia. According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam , however, the oldest known usage of the word Tajik as a reference to Persians in Persian literature can be found in the writings of the famous Persian poet and Islamic scholar Jalal ad-Din Rumi . The 15th-century Turkic-speaking poet Mīr Alī Šer Navā'ī who lived in the Timurid empire also used Tajik as

12257-736: The region where their expertise in Persianate culture and administration secured them honored service within the Mughal Empire. Networks of learned masters and madrasas taught generations of young South Asian men Persian language and literature in addition to Islamic values and sciences. Furthermore, educational institutions such as Farangi Mahall and Delhi College developed innovative and integrated curricula for modernizing Persian-speaking South Asians. They cultivated Persian art, enticing to their courts artists and architects from Bukhara, Tabriz , Herat , Shiraz , and other cities of Greater Iran. The Taj Mahal and its Charbagh were commissioned by

12376-760: The republic for Tajikistan, which is mountainous and less agricultural. It is only in the last population census (1989) that the nationality could be reported not according to the passport, but freely declared based on the respondent's ethnic self-identification. This had the effect of increasing the Tajik population in Uzbekistan from 3.9% in 1979 to 4.7% in 1989. Some scholars estimate that Tajiks may make up 35% of Uzbekistan's population, and believe that just like Afghanistan, there are more Tajiks in Uzbekistan than in Tajikistan. Chinese Tajiks or Mountain Tajiks in China ( Sarikoli : [tudʒik] , Tujik ; Chinese : 塔吉克族 ; pinyin : Tǎjíkè Zú ), including Sarikolis (majority) and Wakhis (minority) in China, are

12495-499: The respective local culture. Tajiks (or Farsiwans respectively) are predominant in four of the largest cities in Afghanistan ( Kabul , Mazar-e Sharif , Herat , and Ghazni ) and make up the qualified majority in the northern and western provinces of Badakhshan , Panjshir and Balkh , while making up significant portions of the population in Takhar , Kabul , Parwan , Kapisa , Baghlan , Badghis and Herat . Despite not being Tajik,

12614-489: The rise of Persianised-Turks to military control, by the new political importance of non-Arab ulama and by the development of an ethnically composite Islamic society. Pahlavi was the lingua franca of the Sassanian Empire before the Arab invasion, but towards the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 8th century Arabic became a medium of literary expression. In the 9th century, a New Persian language emerged as

12733-552: The second-largest in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. More Tajiks live in Afghanistan than Tajikistan. They speak varieties of Persian, a Western Iranian language . In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, its small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups are included as Tajiks. In China, the term is used to refer to its Pamiri ethnic groups, the Tajiks of Xinjiang , who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages . In Afghanistan,

12852-636: The shape of the Ottoman Empire and another for the Hindu World in the shape of the Timurid Mughal Raj. These two universal states of Iranian construction on Orthodox Christian and on Hindu ground were duly annexed, in accordance with their builders' own cultural affinities, to the original domain of the New Persian language in the homelands of the Iranian Civilization on the Iranian plateau and in

12971-509: The sharp antagonisms between empires stimulated the appearance of variations of Persianate culture. After 1500, the Iranian culture developed distinct features of its own, with interposition of strong pre-Islamic and Shiite Islamic culture. Iran's ancient cultural relationship with Southern Iraq ( Sumer / Babylonia ) remained strong and endured in spite of the loss of Mesopotamia to the Ottomans. Its ancient cultural and historical relationship with

13090-514: The spiritual bastion of Shi’ism against the onslaughts of orthodox Sunni Islam , and a repository of Persian cultural traditions and self-awareness of Persian identity. The founder of the dynasty, Shah Isma'il , adopted the title of Persian Emperor Pādišah-ī Īrān , with its implicit notion of an Iranian state stretching from Afghanistan as far as the Euphrates and the North Caucasus, and from

13209-594: The start of the year. In September 2009, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan proposed a draft law to have the nation's language referred to as "Tajiki-Farsi" rather than "Tajik." The proposal drew criticism from Russian media since the bill sought to remove the Russian language as Tajikistan's inter-ethnic lingua franca . In 1989, the original name of the language (Farsi) had been added to its official name in brackets, though Rahmon's government renamed

13328-420: The term and extended its use to cover Persians in the rest of Greater Iran , now under Turkish rule, as early as the poet ʿOnṣori, ca. 1025 (Dabirsiāqi, pp. 3377, 3408). Iranians soon accepted it as an ethnonym, as is shown by a Persian court official's referring to mā tāzikān "we Tajiks" (Bayhaqi, ed. Fayyāz, p. 594). The distinction between Turk and Tajik became stereotyped to express the symbiosis and rivalry of

13447-473: The total population), up from 42,600 in the 1999 census and 33,500 in the 1989 census. According to the last Soviet census in 1989, there were 3,149 Tajiks in Turkmenistan, or less than 0.1% of the total population of 3.5 million at that time. The first population census of independent Turkmenistan conducted in 1995 showed 3,103 Tajiks in a population of 4.4 million (0.07%), most of them (1,922) concentrated in

13566-410: The westernmost Indo-Aryan Pashayi people of northeastern Afghanistan have deliberately been listed as Tajik by census takers and government agents. This is a result of the census takers being Tajik themselves, wanting to increase their own numbers for “consequent benefits”. Although, Pashayi-speaking Nizari Isma’ilis refer to themselves as Tajik. In Uzbekistan , the Tajiks are the largest part of

13685-600: The works of Amir Khusrow , Sharaf Manayri and Jami, the Masnavi i-manavi of Rumi, the Jām-i Jam of Awhadi Maraghai , the Hakika o Sanā’i , the Qabusnameh of Keikavus , Sa’di's Gulestān and Būstān , and the diwans of Khaqani and Anvari . This intellectual symmetry continued until the end of the 19th century, when a Persian newspaper, Miftah al-Zafar (1897), campaigned for

13804-480: Was announced in October 2009. The mosque is planned to be built in Dushanbe and construction is said to be completed by 2014. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Civil War in Afghanistan both gave rise to a resurgence in Tajik nationalism across the region, including a trial to revert to the Perso-Arabic script in Tajikistan. Furthermore, Tajikistan in particular has been a focal point for this movement, and

13923-422: Was another Persian poet, Nizami , a most admired, illustrated and imitated writer of romantic masnavis . Along with Ferdowsi's and Nizami's works, Amir Khusraw Dehlavi 's khamseh came to enjoy tremendous prestige, and multiple copies of it were produced at Persianized courts. Seyller has a useful catalog of all known copies of this text. In the 16th century, Persianate culture became sharply distinct from

14042-557: Was enriched by the influx of Persian-speaking and Islamic scholars, historians, architects, musicians, and other specialists of high Persianate culture who fled the Mongol devastation. The sultans of Delhi , who were of Turko-Afghan origin, modeled their lifestyles after the Persian upper classes. They patronized Persian literature and music, but became especially notable for their architecture, because their builders drew from Irano-Islamic architecture, combining it with Indian traditions to produce

14161-557: Was the everyday speech of the people, Persian was the language of the court, while Persian literature and Persian culture reigned supreme. It is to the Seljuqs with whom they were thus fused, that the Ottomans, strictly so called, owe their literary education; this therefore was of necessity Persian as the Seljuqs knew no other. The Turks were not content with learning from the Persians how to express thought; they went to them to learn what to think and in what way to think. In practical matters, in

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