Ghazal for Iranians Who Don't Hate Arabs

To Rom, and Parichehr

Today I met Iranians who don't hate Arabs.
They smiled and said "hey, selam," even knowing I was Arab.

They didn't have green eyes, yet they seemed to bear up
pretty well without them, and they don't fault Arabs,

not all of us, at least, for Nahavand, and the bloody flare-up
at Karbala; after all, remember, Imam Husayn was Arab.

I was a little scared at first, but soon I scraped my chair up
closer and acknowledged half our poetry and science isn't Arab.

Half? Two thirds! Three quarters! All Persian! I went clear up
to The Arabian Nights, to Ibn Sina; who says he was Arab?

We parleyed on Ferdawsi. They didn't want to tear up
all the Arabic words in Farsi, since they don't hate Arabs.

They didn't insist, "Say ‘Persian!'" or "We're Aryan, like Europe."
They felt kin to "Third World" peoples, even Arabs.

Not royalists who think the Shah just got a bad rap,
though they don't love the Republic, they don't blame Arabs.

For making Persians browner, for conquest, and Umayyuds,
if it helps, janem, I apologize, on behalf of Arabs,

and for implying by misnaming that the Gulf belongs to our hub
(let all the waters be yours! who needs water when you're Arab!).

Paradise we got from Persians! It was a one-way educarab,
as backward as we were (there's not much more to rhyme with "Arab").

For forcible conversion of the all letter p's we could scare up
to f's just so they could trip off the tongues of Arabs-

por priendship and pondness' sake, I give it all-all-up!
Mohja's relieved to find Iranians who don't hate Arabs.

 
"Ghazal for Iranians Who Don't Hate Arabs" first appeared in Pulse.

Mohja Kahf: photo Weyam Ghadbian, courtesy UA prBorn in Damascus, Syria, Mohja Kahf is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas. She has published three books: a novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, a volume of poetry, E-mails from Scheherazad, and Western Representations of the Muslim Woman. Her poems have been projected on the facade of the New York Public Library, and published in more conventional venues such as Mizna, Banipal, Paris Review, Tiferet: A Journal of Literature and Spirituality, and Atlanta Review, as well as the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond from W.W. Norton, and Hayan Charara's Inclined to Speak. Some of Kahf's short fiction is online at MuslimWakeUp.com's "Sex and the Ummah" column. An Arkansas resident for the last fourteen years, Kahf has lived in the Arab world and returns there regularly with her husband and three children. Kahf's next poetry manuscript is about Hajar, Sarah, and Abraham, and she is working on a book of essays on interfaith and faith issues, called Love, Anyway: Letters from Your Muslim Aunty. She recently won the Pushcart Prize for an essay, and is a cultural ambassador with the Levantine Cultural Center.