Word: persianized
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...Just hours before Obama touched down at Bagram air base on Sunday evening, Karzai had flown home from Tehran, where he celebrated the Persian new year with America's least favorite foreign leader, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That followed a day trip to Kabul earlier this month by the Iranian President. (See pictures of President Obama in Afghanistan...
...indeed, the streets of Iran did erupt into flames. But the opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not organize it. Tuesday evening was the beginning of Nowrooz, the two-week-long traditional Iranian New Year celebration, which for more than three millenniums marked the beginning of spring in the Persian world. The popular holiday, celebrated with bonfires and, more recently, illegal fireworks, is so hoary it predates the three Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - a fact that the mullahs who rule Iran are quite sensitive about. One ayatullah, Nasser Makarem Shirazi, called the first day of Nowrooz a "superstitious...
...first day of Nowrooz has always been irresistible to Iranians, because it is tied not to Muslim piety but to Persian pride. Its roots are in Zoroastrianism, the world's first monotheistic religion - the country's national faith before Islam - one in which fire is revered as a symbol of purity. Apart from the theocracy, most Iranians in and outside the country, irrespective of their religion, celebrate the ancient rites. The Tuesday-night event itself is known as Chaharshanbe Suri (literally "Wednesday Party," because dusk brings the new day in Iran) and was originally intended as a ritual to ward...
...call, such as Malacca, India's Malabar coast and Malindi in Kenya, by Muslim pilots of Arab, Indian or African extraction. "They were essentially following maritime routes that had been in use by people in the Indian Ocean for ages," says Wade. Many academics argue that the popular Arab-Persian tale of the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, littered also with snippets of Indian folklore, was derived from the real travels of Zheng He - making the mariner as much a pan-Asian protagonist as a Chinese...
...opposition may want to test the government further, however. Talk on the street is that the next opportunity for protests may come with an ancient Zoroastrian fire festival that takes place in mid-March, just before the Persian New Year, around the start of spring. Meanwhile, opposition websites and social-media channels cited a meeting between Mousavi and Karroubi this week that had Karroubi calling for a referendum on the popularity of Ahmadinejad's government. But that muffled noise is all that can be mustered nowadays. Speaking via official media, Rafsanjani may be signaling, louder than he has since...