Sins of the Fathers

The word in Farsi for “foreigner” is farangi and for “foreign land,” farangestan. They are the Persianized version of French and France. Their roots go back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Europeans intensified their interest in the Middle and Far East. France had a near monopoly of influence in Iran, so much so that Iranians identified French visitors as the sole representatives of foreigners. The fact that the founder of thermodynamics, Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, takes his third given name from Saadi Shirazi, the great thirteenth century Persian poet and literary figure, indicates the mutual influence of East and West on each other. The East was fascinated by the technological advances of the West while the West searched for the wisdom of such ancient luminaries as Buddha and Zoroaster.