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| “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was 'well timed' in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.' We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that 'justice too long delayed is justice denied.'” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail |
On the occasion of Naser Fakouhi’s recent note
For the first group, conditions are “normal.” They have no grasp of discrimination because they have never experienced it. For the second, conditions are critical and unbearable, and must be changed. The first denies injustice; the second sees it as the enemy of order and deems the existing order unjust. These are the two opposing poles of disintegration; two openly contradictory camps.
Yet another group exists between these poles: those known as the “moderates.” They, on the one hand, see conditions as unjust, yet on the other, consider the realization of justice “not yet” possible. Time becomes their excuse for postponing justice. In their eyes, the moment for achieving justice has not yet arrived, the conditions are not yet in place, and patience is required.
Justice depends on human will, not on the passage of time. Time itself has no agency; it is neutral. It is human action that gives it shape—whether in establishing injustice or realizing justice.
A Century of Linguistic Discrimination
For nearly a century, we have endured linguistic discrimination, and today, more explicitly and resolutely than ever, we demand the dismantling of monolingual exclusivity. Our will is for the recognition of our language, without reduction, without caveats. The position of our opponents is clear. Yet another will emerges in the guise of moderation, set against us: the mediocre who, under the veneer of justice-seeking, side with the enemies of our language and culture. These paternalists claim the authority to determine the timing of linguistic justice—an explicitly racist view, grounded in the belief that we lack the intelligence to discern the proper temporal and spatial conditions for justice ourselves. Their “Be patient” is a tool to push us into stagnation, social paralysis, and habituation to discrimination. Meanwhile, they themselves benefit from this deferral: their mother tongue flourishes while ours, “waiting for the right conditions,” withers away.
Fakouhi’s Paternalism
Naser Fakouhi stands at the forefront of this paternalistic view. His anti-Turkish bias runs so deep that, in his book Urban Anthropology, he presents Farabi as Iranian-born and portrays the Safavids as Turkic-speakers whose Turkic or Kurdish origin is “unclear.” Now, in a recent essay, he designates Persian as the “fundamental principle” and implicitly calls upon us to exercise patience in the face of the state’s language policy.
Part of Fakouhi’s recent note reads as follows:
“Nevertheless, we must not forget that if multilingual or monolingual policies are not well managed, properly designed, and carefully implemented, they can seriously harm education. Thus, even if our brains have the capacity for multilingualism, until we are certain that the conditions for the simultaneous teaching of multiple languages exist, we must not proceed. Article 15 is very precise: according to this article, the issue is teaching the mother tongue in schools, not teaching in the mother tongue. In other words, this principle does not call into question the national foundation of Persian as the language of all Iranians. Rather, it paves the way for children to learn their mother tongue in a scientific way as a school subject, so that they may succeed in using both Persian and their mother tongue in their future lives.”
Fakouhi’s words are not simply a reflection of caution. They are an assertion of hierarchy: Persian as the unquestionable foundation, other languages tolerated only as supplements.
The Legitimacy of Impatience
In the eyes of the moderates, we are impatient—and they use this impatience to delegitimize our path. But they fail to see that this impatience, because it pursues justice and seeks to dismantle discrimination, is profoundly legitimate.
Their “Be patient,” insofar as it delays justice and normalizes injustice—even when dressed up in the rhetoric of justice-seeking—stands in direct opposition to justice.