Persian Stereotypes Essay

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A considerable amount of misleading information or stereotype are common when it came to countries of the Middle East. One stereotype is that Persians are similar to Arabs. The truth is that there was a Persian empire and an Arab empire. Persepolis is the Greek name of the city of Parsa, which means “the city of Persians” (Mark 2009). It was constructed under the ruling of king Darius the great in 518 BCE, who made it the new capital of the Persian Empire (Mark 2009). During the era of the Persian Empire, the land was known to be the land of the Aryanam people; from which was later derived the name ERAN meaning the land of the Aryans (Renaming 2007). Westerners used the name “Persia” whenever they mentioned Iran (Renaming 2007). In 1935, Reza …show more content…

Indeed, Iranians were mistakenly taken for Arabs. During the Iranian crisis, a survey revealed that more than 65 percent of Americans classified Iran as an Arab country, while 8 percent confessed that they had no idea whether it was Arab or not (Shaheen 1985).
First of all, Persians are not Arabs. In fact, the differences between the Persian culture and the Arab culture are undeniable yet subject to confusion for a long time now. A key element that defines a culture is its language. The language spoken by the Persians is called Farsi which is definitely different from Arabic. In fact, the Arabic alphabet is the foundation of few languages such as Kurdish, Farsi, Urdu, Turkish and Pashto; yet they are all different from one another (Nicholson 2017). Actually Farsi and Arabic share the same alphabet but come from two different language groups and families (Nicholson 2017). Farsi is part of the Iranian language group and the Indo-European family; while Arabic is from the semantic language group and Afro-Asiatic family (Nicholson 2017). Iranians were able to hold on to their language

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