Re geo-linguistics

To: Retort
From: GS

[Geoff Sea argues for Khazar over Caspian, in memory of a heterodox Turkic polity. IB]

<x-tad-smaller>Darbandi's riff on the name of the gulf between Arabia and Persia is quite bizarre. More than half of the coastline is, indeed,</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller> </x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>Arabian. No surprise that the Arabs call it the Arabian Gulf. That Americans in the region defer to local hosts is a matter of politeness. The other choice, that of imposing the name we happen to use in English, would be the truly imperialistic option. Three cheers for the unboorish Americans, who will, no doubt, defer to local custom also when visiting the Persian side, shall we say.</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>
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</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>The better case would be what we call the Caspian Sea, deferring to the Russian name when the Russians control only a min</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>u</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>scule portion of the sea's coastline, and even that coast is not historically Russian. The Iranians and the Turkic peoples who are indigenous to the area all call it the Khazar Sea, remembering the time when the Turkic Khazars ruled its waters 1100 years ago. Use of the Eurocentric Caspian name made some legalistic sense during the reign of the Soviet Union, but that argument is as dead as Trotsky. That the Khazar Sea is the location of huge disputed oil deposits might be a particularly important reason to disavow Russia's linguistic hegemony.</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>
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</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>A skeptic might wonder whether so-called anti-imperialist Islamophiles are reluctant to take up the banner of the Khazar Sea because the leaders of the Khazar state were Jewish. Though led by Jews, the Khazar Empire was an early model of cosmopolitan tolerance, uniting large Muslim, Christian, and shamanic communities into a single heterodox </x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>nation</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>. That the memory of this nation still lives is a wondrous thing. And if the name is good enough for the ayatollahs of Iran and the dictators of Turkestan to endorse, isn't it worth fighting for?</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>
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</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>GS</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>
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