Following the Islamic conquest of Persia, Arabic virtually subsumed Persian as a literary tongue. Since that time Persian has adopted a large number of Arabic words—perhaps one-third or more of its lexicon—and borrowed grammatical constructions from Classical and, in some instances, colloquial Arabic.
However, only a small percentage speaks Arabic natively. Its status is largely a holdover from the Islamic conquest of Persia, when Arabic became the main literary tongue of the region. Persian has actually adopted a large number of Arabic loanwords since that time, in addition to other grammatical features.
With the exception of various minority ethnic groups in Iran (one of which is Arab), Iranians are Persian.
Iran consists of several ethnic groups, most of which speak Persian or another language closely related to Persian. Unlike most languages or Iran which are mutually intelligible to Persian, the Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages are not mutually intelligible.
Arabic and Persian are totally different languages, but both with a mostly common alphabet, overlapping vocabulary (nearly all going from Arabic to Persian), and with ties to Islam. The similarity is a bit like that between English and French.
Iran and Turkey are not Arab countries and their primary languages are Farsi and Turkish respectively. Arab countries have a rich diversity of ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities. These include Kurds, Armenians, Berbers and others.
Data from the World Values Survey indicates religious observance (i.e. at mosques) is very low and only an estimated 2% of the population attend Friday congregational prayers. Those who are devout Muslims often belong to the older generation. In brief, most Iranians believe in Allah (God) and the tenets of Islam.
One of the most common is the conflation of Middle Eastern ethnic groups. Many people continue to believe that “Persian” and “Arab” are interchangeable terms, when, in reality, they are labels for two distinct ethnicities. That is to say, Persians are not Arabs.
Iranian Muslims who are going to Saudi Arabia for Umrah will need a visa. If you are a foreign citizen, it is required. As long as you go outside of the Hajj season, you should be able to use an Umrah visa at any time during the year for pilgrimage.
In 1935 the Iranian government requested those countries which it had diplomatic relations with, to call Persia "Iran," which is the name of the country in Persian. The suggestion for the change is said to have come from the Iranian ambassador to Germany, who came under the influence of the Nazis.
The Persians are an Iranian ethnic group who comprise over half of the population of Iran. They share a common cultural system and are native speakers of the Persian language as well as of the languages that are closely related to Persian.
Generally, “Persia” today refers to Iran because the country formed over the center of the ancient Persian empire and the majority of its original citizens inhabited that land. Modern Iran is comprised of a large number of different ethnic and tribal groups.
The names Jasmine and Aladdin are both of Middle-Eastern origin, with “Aladdin” being derived from Arabic while “Jasmine” has its roots in Persian.
Following the imposition of the jizyah, many Zoroastrians chose to convert to Islam. The rate of conversions accelerated after the Abbasid caliphs moved their capital to Baghdad, leaving the administration of Persia to governors who destroyed ateshkadehs (fire temples) or converted them into mosques.
The final way to easily tell Persian from Arabic and Kurdish is through numbers. Whereas Arabic and Kurdish are identical, Persian numbers four, five, and six are written differently: ۶ ۵ ۴. And remember that longer numbers are written left-to-right the same as in English, so that 10 appears as ١٠ and not as ٠١.
The first group of followers is called the Sunni, and the second group is Shia. Nowadays the official religion of Iran is Shia, but Sunni is practice in a few places. Most Persians, including most Iranians, practice Shia branch of Islam!
The Egyptians are not Arabs, and both they and the Arabs are aware of this fact. They are Arabic-speaking, and they are Muslim—indeed religion plays a greater part in their lives than it does in those either of the Syrians or the Iraqi.
In the Persian Gulf region, people still refer to Persians as Ajami, referring to Persian carpets as sajjad al Ajami (Ajami carpet), Persian cats as Ajami cats, and Persian kings as Ajami kings.
Zoroastrianism was the state religion of three Persian dynasties, until the Muslim conquest of Persia in the seventh century A.D. Zoroastrian refugees, called Parsis, escaped Muslim persecution in Iran by emigrating to India.
Until the 16th century, Persia was mostly Sunni. At the turn of that century, the Safavid dynasty conquered much of what is now Iran and made Shiism the official religion. The conversion was accompanied by a massive crackdown on Sunnis, so that over time much of the population became Shia.
Sunni and Shi'i are the two largest branches of Islam, with the overwhelming majority of Iranians practicing Shi'i Islam. About 90 percent of Iranians practice Shi'ism, the official religion of Iran. [i] By contrast, most Arab states in the Middle East are predominantly Sunni.
The first mention of Arabs appeared in the mid-9th century BCE, as a tribal people in eastern and southern Syria and the northern Arabian Peninsula. The Arabs appear to have been under the vassalage of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, as well as the succeeding Neo-Babylonian, Achaemenid, Seleucid, and Parthian empires.
Islam in Turkey dates back to the 8th century, when Turkic tribes fought alongside Arab Muslims against Chinese forces at the Battle of Talas in 751 A.D. Spurred by the influence of ruling dynasties, many people converted to Islam over the next few centuries.
Turks don't speak Arabic.
Back in 1928, Ottoman Turkish, which used a lot of Arabic and Persian words, was replaced by the language spoken today. Ottoman script was abandoned for the Latin alphabet, and from 1932 the Turkish Language Association reintroduced many long forgotten Turkish words.