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Persian Power

 
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aryabakhtiar



Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Posts: 17

PostPosted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 2:02 am    Post subject: Persian Power Reply with quote

-Distribute to all your American friends and discussion boards this is informative to them.

http://www.ocmetro.com/metro070804/Cover070804.html

Persian Power
By Stan Brin

Arezou Bakhtjou considers herself typical of young Iranian-American professionals. She is university-educated, works as a licensed real estate broker and expects to enroll at Whittier law school next fall with an eye on becoming a patent attorney.

But Bakhtjou is not a typical immigrant: She has been living in the United States for only 18 months. While even most Iranian-Americans consider her story somewhat unusual, she illustrates the rapid success this new local community has experienced in the past 25 years. From the Moshayedi brothers, founders of SimpleTech, a $300-million public company included on Inc. Magazine’s list of the Fastest Growing Companies in America, to Paul Makarechian, owner of the St. Regis Resort and Spa in Dana Point, to Dr. Fardad Fateri, former president of DeVry University, Iranians have achieved prominence in every aspect of business and the professions, from high-tech to education and the arts.

Persian accents are heard everywhere in Orange County, especially in Irvine and the South County area, but most people don’t know who Iranian-Americans are. In fact, nobody seems to know how many Iranian-Americans actually live in Orange County.

Worse, Iranian-Americans have had a difficult time being recognized as a distinct community by the public, the mass media, even the government, all of which tend to confuse them with Arab-Americans.

“We’re not Arabs!”

But as any Iranian-American will tell you, Persians are not Arabs, any more than Koreans are Japanese.

“Meaning no disrespect to Arab-Americans,” they tell everyone who will listen. “We are very proud of our own culture, our own language, cuisine and history.”

In fact, relations between Iran, or Persia, as the country was traditionally called, and the Arab world have been tense for many centuries (see sidebar, “The Tragic Pageant of Persian History”). And nothing annoys Iranian-Americans more than being mistaken for Arabs ­ their accent and appearance is very different.

Furthermore, most Iranian-Americans consider themselves to be secular refugees from theocratic tyranny. They have no connection, whatsoever, with the current government of Iran, which they contemptuously dismiss as the “mullah regime.” In fact, many Iranian-Americans are not Muslim at all, but Jews, Bahais, Christians and even followers of the Zoroastrian religion of the ancient Persian Empire.

Persian or Iranian?
They’re both, actually. Persia, or Fars, is the ancient term for the country. The people and their language are called Farsi.

And as all Persians are quick to point out, their language is not related to Arabic in any way. Like English, Italian, Russian, Urdu and Hindi, Persian is a member of the Indo-European family of languages and shares a number of grammatical ties. Some words, such as the Persian “lab” for the English “lip,” haven’t changed since the first Indo-European tribes went their separate ways perhaps 5,000 years ago.

Most ethnic minorities in the country speak a dialect of Farsi or a related language, such as Kurdish. Azaris in the northwest, however, speak a dialect of Turkish, and there are many Arabs living in the region bordering Iraq.

The term Iran is derived from Aryan, the name historians and anthropologists gave to a wave of tribes that migrated out of the Caucacus Mountains, traveling south and east into Persia and India.

Reza Shah adopted the current official name, Iran, in 1935, and the current regime has never changed it back

The Tragic Pageant of Persian History

Persia suddenly burst into the West after King Cyrus, known as Kurosh in Persian, united the Medes and the Persians in the 6th century B.C., founding the Achaemenid Dynasty.

One of history’s truly remarkable rulers, Cyrus is the great liberator of the Bible who freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity. His successors tried to conquer Greece, but were beaten back in such epic battles as Marathon and Salamis.

Alexander the Great conquered the Achaemenids in 331 B.C. and burned their capital, Persepolis, whose ruins remain hauntingly beautiful today.

Three hundred years later, Parthian rulers held off repeated Roman attacks on the country. In the late 6th century A.D., the great Persian King Khosro conquered most of the eastern Mediterranean but was stopped at the gates of Constantinople by the Byzantine Emperor Heracleas.

In the year 637, invaders professing the new religion of Islam suddenly burst out of the Arabian Desert. In a few short years, these Arabs conquered all of Persia, imposing their own language and alphabet, all but destroying native Persian culture. It took the country 300 years to regain its independence.

This invasion, and its brutal aftermath, was the single, most-searing event in Persian history. If there is 1 thing that unites all Persians, even those who support the current regime, it is a resentment of that invasion and subsequent Arabic cultural influences.

Persia eventually adopted the Shiah strain of Islam, which reveres Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed, and his descend-ants, while Sunni Islam prevailed in most of the Arab world.

Arab rulers were followed by a succession of dynasties, most of them of Turkish origin, until 1925, when Reza Shah founded the last Pahlavi dynasty, and tried to restore Persian national pride and power.

Although the country still retains the new name he gave it in 1935, Reza Shah largely failed to force the major powers to recognize Iran’s sovereignty. The reason was geography: The Russians, both tsarist and Communist, saw Persian territory as an outlet to the warm water of the Persian Gulf, while the British saw Russian ambitions as a threat to their oil supply.

Although neutral in both world wars, Iran became a battleground in both. During World War I, Turkish and Russian forces fought each other in the north. During World War II, Soviet and British forces partitioned the country into “spheres of influence” in order to secure a supply route from the United States to the Russian Front.

The rise of the Cold War caused the Soviets to try to maintain its sphere, attempting to detach much of northern Iran into a “People’s Republic of Azerbaijan.” A few years later, a nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, allied himself with the pro-Soviet Tudeh party, which caused the United States to help engineer his downfall.

The last shah, Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown in 1979 by religious theocrats who created the “Islamic Republic” so detested by Iranian-Americans.

It was that upheaval that drove many of Orange County’s Persian immigrants out of their ancestral land.

NIAC Executive Director Dokhi Fassihian says, “Iranians rank as having the highest percentage of master’s degrees of any ethnic group in the United States. Iranian culture puts a great deal of value on education, more than on other aspects of life.”

The cream of the crop

This trait may explain the success of Iranian-Americans in the professions: They see education as an asset that can last throughout their lifetimes. In general, they want stability and are not after the quick buck.

The Moshayedi brothers ­ Manouch, Mike and Mark ­ are examples of this class of educated Iranian-Americans. SimpleTech, the computer memory company they founded in 1990, is one of Orange County’s leading high-tech firms, employing 400 people. The company manufactures and markets a comprehensive line of more than 2,500 memory and storage products through a worldwide network of distributors. All 3 brothers are engineers, and Mark and Manouch hold MBAs, as well.

Makarechian, 30, is president and CEO of Makar Properties. Besides owning the $350 million St. Regis Resort and Spa, the UC Santa Barbara graduate is developing luxury hotels and communities from La Jolla to Palm Beach, including Pacific City in Huntington Beach, a high-end, oceanfront project that will include 516 condominiums; 191,000 square feet of retail, restaurant and office space; and a 400-room resort hotel. Born in Tehran, he grew up in the Untied States after his father, Hadi Makarechian, fled from post-revolutionary Iran.

“The mullah’s loss is America’s gain,” adds attorney Babak Sotoodeh of Tustin, founder and president of the Alliance of Iranian- Americans. “Imagine what has happened ­ the cream of educated Iranian society has moved here, bringing all their skills with them.”

Some attended Iranian universities and immigrated; more attended American graduate schools and stayed on after earning advanced degrees, often working at menial jobs as they worked to become established. According to the old joke, “You could always tell which taxi driver is Persian ­ he’s the one with Ph.D. on his license.”

In fact, the Persian community in the United States consisted mainly of students and former students until the “Islamic Revolution” of 1979 forced an entire educated class to emigrate. Many were loyal to a secular monarchy, others feared being sucked up by the meat grinder of the 8-year-long Iran-Iraq war, still others saw their businesses dry up as wealthy clerics gained a stranglehold on the national economy.

Dr. Fardad Fateri of Newport Coast was typical of the student-immigrants: He came to this country in 1981, when he was 16. He received a BA from UC Irvine, an MA in social sciences from Cal State Fullerton and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from U.S. International in San Diego ­ now called Alliant International University. He later did post-doctoral work at Harvard.

Dr. Fateri maintains that Iranian-American’s high level of education has allowed them to slip into the American mainstream with unprecedented speed. “The Iranian community has culturally assimilated faster than every other community that I have studied. Persians have been here in large numbers only since the 1980s, but we live among the general population rather than in isolated neighborhoods, and we intermarry.”
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reza



Joined: 11 Mar 2004
Posts: 466
Location: England

PostPosted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 9:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
the great Persian King Khosro conquered most of the eastern Mediterranean


don't forget the might of shapur the first and his conquests in asia against the romans, he was one of the greatest kings of persia.
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