Ajam

[4] Since the early Muslim conquests, it has been adopted in various non-Arabic languages, such as Turkish, Azerbaijani, Chechen, Kurdish, Malay, Sindhi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Kashmiri, and Swahili.

Today, the terms ʿAjam and ʿAjamī continue to be used to refer to anyone or anything Iranian, particularly in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf.

Communities speaking the Persian language in the Arab world exist among the Iraqis, the Kuwaitis, and the Bahrainis, in addition to others.

[7] In general, during the Umayyad period ajam was a pejorative term used by Arabs who believed in their social and political superiority, in early history after Islam.

Ajam was first used for people of Persia in the poems of pre-Islamic Arab poets; but after the advent of Islam it also referred to Turks, Zoroastrians, and others.

[8] During the Umayyad period, the term developed a derogatory meaning as the word was used to refer to non-Arab speakers (primarily Persians) as illiterate and uneducated.

According to Clifford Edmund Bosworth, "by the 3rd/9th century, the non-Arabs, and above all the Persians, were asserting their social and cultural equality (taswīa) with the Arabs, if not their superiority (tafżīl) over them (a process seen in the literary movement of the Šoʿūbīya).

After these controversies had died down, and the Persians had achieved a position of power in the Islamic world comparable to their numbers and capabilities, "ʿAjam" became a simple ethnic and geographical designation.

[8] گفتمش چو دیوانه بسی گفتی و اکنون پاسخ شنو ای بوده چون دیوان بیابان عیب ار چه کنی اهل گرانمایه عجم را چه بوید شما خود گلهء غر شتربان Jalal Khaleqi Motlaq, "Asadi Tusi", Majaleyeh Daneshkadeyeh Adabiyaat o Olum-e Insani [Literature and Humanities Magazine], Ferdowsi University, 1357 (1978).