Persian Gulf National Day
10 Ardibehesht (April 29) is a proud day in Iranian history. On July 13, 2005, the government of Iran passed a resolution according to which 10 Ardibehesht (April 29) was named “Persian Gulf National Day” in the Iranian Calendar. The Persian Gulf is considered an important and strategic region and there are several important ports on the shores of the Persian Gulf, among which mention can be made of Sharjah, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Bandar Abbas.
10 Ardibehesht (April 29) is a proud day in Iranian history. On July 13, 2005, the government of Iran passed a resolution according to which 10 Ardibehesht (April 29) was named “Persian Gulf National Day” in the Iranian Calendar.
The Persian Gulf is bordered by Iran to the north, Kuwait and Iraq to the west, and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to the south. Its area is 240,000 sq. km and it is the third largest gulf in the world after the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson Bay. The Persian Gulf is connected to the Oman Sea by the Strait of Hormuz and through it to the open seas, and its important islands are Khark, Abu Musa, Greater Tunb, Lesser Tunb, Kish Island, Qeshm Island, and Lavan, all of which are parts of the Iranian Territory.
The Persian Gulf is considered an important and strategic region and there are several important ports on the shores of the Persian Gulf, among which mention can be made of Sharjah, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Bandar Abbas.
10 Ardibehesht (April 29) is an important day in the history of Iran; a day that is reminiscent of the sacrifices of the proud nation of Iran and the bravery of the Iranian army led by Imam Qoli Khan (Iranian military and political leader who served as a governor of Fars), making the Portuguese invaders leave after 117 years of repressive control over the southern coasts of the country in April 1622 AD when the Safavid king, Shah Abbas I, was able to free Hormuz from the Portuguese and, therefore, his name will always be remembered for this decision of his.
The Persian Gulf is the third largest gulf in the world and due to its geographical location its name has always been the Persian Gulf, throughout human history, and people all over the world know it as the Persian Gulf or the Persian Sea. The oldest available documents about the Persian Gulf go back to the surviving books from ancient Greece.
In these books, the Greek historians have referred to this waterway with the name “Persicus Sinus”, which means “Persian Gulf”, and the repetition of the same name had made many of the remaining maps of the Europeans of the later centuries refer to it with the same name, i.e. Persian Gulf.
According to the writings of Greek historians such as Herodotus (484-425 BC), Ctesias (445-380 BC), Xenophon (430-352 BC), and Strabane (63 BC-24 AD), who lived before Christ; the Greeks were the first people who referred to this sea as Persicus, Parse, Persai, and Persepolis, which means the territory of the Persians.
English-speaking people also called this specific geographical area PERSIAN GULF, which is actually a simple translation of the name “Khalij-e Fars”, and the countless maps left behind by English sailors and geographers of the 16th and 17th centuries are undeniable documents of this historical fact. In the book Al-Alag al-Nafisa, written in 290 AH (902 AD), Abu Ali Ahmed ibn Omar, popularly known as Ibn Rustah, wrote: “But a gulf emerges from the Indian Sea towards the land of Persia, which is called “Khalij-e Fars” (Persian Gulf)”. Mohammad Abdulkarim Sobhi, too, has, in the book “Ilm al- Khara’it”, included maps in the Arabic language and referred to this see as “Al-Khalij-al-Farsi” and “Bahr-e Fars”.
Distortion of the Name of the Persian Gulf
Following the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which cut off the hands of British companies from this important source of energy and cut ties between Iran and the British, the age-old colonialists, the political representative of England in Bahrain since 1950 was the first person to use the name Arabian Coast for the geographical region of the southern part of the Persian Gulf, which was the protectorate of Britain, and then began to gradually use the term Arabian Gulf, However, he never succeeded to change the world opinion about the authentic name of the Persian Gulf.
This is despite the fact that until the early 1960s, there was no controversy about the name of the Persian Gulf, and in all European, Asian, and American sources, encyclopedias, and geographical maps of these countries, the name of the Persian Gulf has been mentioned by the same name in all languages.
As mentioned earlier, the term “Arabian Gulf” was first used by the representative of England living in the Persian Gulf, Roderick Owen, in a book entitled “Golden Bubble: Arabian Gulf” where he wrote that “I had not seen any other name than the Persian Gulf in all the books and maps, but after spending a few years on the shores of the Persian Gulf (Bahrain), I realized that the inhabitants of the southern coast are Arabs, so I thought we should call it Arabian Gulf.”
In recent years, some Arab countries on the southern coast of the Persian Gulf together with their Western masters, have tried a lot to distort the name of the Persian Gulf in order to create credit for themselves. Of course, they were not the only ones following this path, and, for example, another case of the distortion of the name of the Persian Gulf happened in 2004 by the magazine National Geographic, which raised public anger and protest among social and cultural activists who sent thousands of e-mails and letters of protest to this magazine. And following an internet petition made with more than 120 thousand signatures to the said institution. the director of the famous American institution apologized to the Iranian people and promised to make up for their mistake.
