First: Today [February 21] is International Mother Language Day. Like in previous years, the calendar reminds us that linguistic monopolies still exist in this geography. There is no need to elaborate on the obvious; for anyone who is neither ignorant nor prejudiced, the necessity of official recognition of mother tongues is self-evident and undeniable. After years of speaking, writing, and demanding, there should be no need to explain or justify the issue anymore. Only one path lies ahead: the official recognition of marginalized languages.
Second: The legitimacy of a human right does not depend on the will of the majority. Millions of people cannot deny an obvious right; if they could, the booted oppressors who stood on the shoulders of the majority would have been the most legitimate—from Hitler to Mussolini. The suppression of our language, backed by a dominant majority, is a projection of the denial of “us,” cloaked in a polished democratic veneer. Even if such a majority exists, we will refuse to recognize it.
Third: Language, for us, is not a tool to deny the “other.” We do not share the vision of Iran of people like Seyyed Javad Tabatabai, who claims dominion over half the world and its history, linking local wisdom to the West, Greece, and Aristotle. Nor do we share the desire of Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel to preserve and purify the Persian language, exporting Persian vocabulary to eastern neighbors at vast expense. History carries no racial taste for us as it does for Tabatabai; fortunately, this racial flavor is meaningless to us. For them, history is a nostalgia of power, a dream of Aryan rule over the world. For us, it is innocent curiosity about distant years. Our ninety-year linguistic deprivation has been an involuntary erasure and manipulation of our history—a parody of a past we will never fully grasp. At the same time, we are free from the concerns of Haddad-Adel and secure about the future of our language; in nearby regions, Turkish serves as the language of science and philosophy, with hundreds of thousands of copies and millions of readers, and Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Prize gathers dust on the shelf. We are far behind in our own language, let alone able to claim we could flourish it.
So what use is official recognition of our mother tongue? We are a fragmented generation. A generation whose linguistic inability has taken away its ability to remember; we are deprived of experiencing the present. For this generation, language is a tool for life, for experience, and for reaching the “gateway to the now”—a now that has long been withheld from us.
Fourth: Every moment, we are denied recognition—in cafés and on streets. A non-negligible portion of ordinary people, intellectuals, celebrities, and politicians alike acquiesce to this denial. This drive for uniformity, this audacious denial of the “other,” and this thirst for cultural homogenization do not spring from pragmatism—they are fascism, even if unconscious. Indeed, fascism nests in human unawareness; it grows and takes root there. Fascism is the enemy of diversity, obsessed with uniformity so that, when the time comes, mobilizing the masses becomes easy. Silent fascism arrives unnoticed, in the indifference of all, and once it takes hold, its voice deafens everyone.
There should be no compromise or tolerance toward fascists. Any passivity is complicity and partnership with them. If concerned citizens and officials do not act, it will not take long before Aryan supremacists, veiled in pragmatism, raise their broken crosses—not in Berlin or Paris, but in the streets of Tabriz, Sanandaj, and Ahvaz. The official recognition of ethnic identities and marginalized languages is the first step. Representing differences and diversity disarms fascism.