Recently the wife of the President of Iran, Jamila Alamolhod, made a scandalous statement on a Venezuelan TV channel, showing how deeply Turkophobia is ingrained in the ruling elite of the Islamic Republic of Iran. She utterly falsely and blithely declared: "The Turks are the ancient enemies of Iran", even though, as we know, it was the Turks who created and strengthened Iran's power for centuries and contributed to the flourishing of Iranian culture. Persian poetry, incidentally, flourished in Iran under the Turkic dynasties.

In the words of Jamilah Alamolkhod, the Turks and Mongols "attacked everything" in Iran. But how could the Turks attack "themselves"? After all, they were the ones who ruled Iran! Only the Akhmenid dynasty in antiquity and the Sassanid dynasty in the pre-Islamic period can be considered ethnically "Persian" and with a great "stretch" from the dynasties which ruled Iran. All other dynasties that ruled Iran were not Persian, but mostly Turkic. According to many historians, the Arshakids, who ruled the Parthian Kingdom, which included the territory of the current Iran, also belonged to the Turks.  The Arshakids came from what is now Turkmenistan.

It was under Turkic rulers that the Islamic culture and the unique Islamic Shiite civilization in Iran blossomed. It is strange to hear Turkophobic statements from the wife of the president of Islamic Republic of Iran. Who is she then, a Muslim, or more of a Persian ethnic nationalist? It turns out that everything Islamic in Iran's culture that was created under the Turkic rulers is the "heritage of the invaders"?  

Meanwhile, Jamilah Alamolhoda is not only considered a very educated woman in Iran, but also a policy maker in the field of education. She has a PhD in education and is an associate professor in the Department of Pedagogy and Psychology at the University of Tehran. At one time Jamileh Alamolkhoda even headed the Institute for Humanitarian Studies, and since March 2020 she has been appointed head of the Council for the Transformation and Renewal of the country's Education System. And it is very sad that, in fact, education policy in the Islamic Republic of Iran is led by a person infected with Turkophobic stereotypes, which were imposed on the non-Turkic peoples of the East back in the 19th century by European historical falsifiers. These falsifications have nothing to do with real history.

Undoubtedly, there were wars between various Turkic powers (the longest one was between Ottomans and Safavids), but they were in no way directed against Persians as a people, because the Turks fought the wars between the Turks. The Persians did not take part in these wars, because the same Safavids tried not to involve them in military service, fairly considering that their Persian subjects were more capable to peace work, trade, spiritual sphere, and not to military business. The number of ethnic Georgians in the Safavid army, for example, was much greater than the number of ethnic Persians, although Georgians were many times smaller than Persians in the Safavid Empire. The Persians themselves were able to live and develop under the protection of the "Turkic sword". Turkic rulers themselves were patrons of Persian culture, and among them there were, for example, poets who wrote both in Turkic and Farsi.

It is very sad that Turkophobic views are not only cultivated in the family of the President of Iran, but also publicly expressed in a geopolitically very difficult situation when Iran wants to collide with Turkic countries, especially Turkey and Azerbaijan.

Grigol Giorgadze