Listening to an Iranian official describe his region as “West Asia” got me wondering if the word “Middle East” is on the outs and why. I suspect Middle East is eurocentric for some reason, but West Asia also preserves Europe as a continent, which is Eurocentric in its own way because Europe is not a continent and never was. If we’re calling anything West Asia, it should be Spain and Portugal.
Hm, interesting. In my experience, it is much more common for the minority groups to emphasize their ethnicity. Which makes sense, because they speak another language and often have family or even a farm ‘back home’ in some specific region of the country. Persians rarely speak of themselves in those terms.
For Afghani I think the difference comes back to the nation split again - they may be Persian, but they’re not Iranian. (It doesn’t really make sense but that’s how I think a lot of people think about this issue.) They are very much the target of a lot of prejudice as well.