Editing Tajiks (section)

== Etymology ==
{{See also|Dehqan|Sart|Tayy#Fifth century}}
According to John Perry (''[[Encyclopaedia Iranica]]''):<ref name="Iranica" />
<blockquote>The most plausible and generally accepted origin of the word is Middle Persian tāzīk 'Arab' (cf. New Persian tāzi), or an Iranian (Sogdian or Parthian) cognate word. The Muslim armies that [[Muslim conquest of Transoxiana|invaded Transoxiana]] early in the eighth century, conquering the Sogdian principalities and clashing with the [[Qarluq Turks]] (see Bregel, Atlas, Maps 8–10) consisted not only of Arabs, but also of Persian converts from Fārs and the central [[Zagros]] region (Bartol'd [Barthold], "Tadžiki," pp. 455–57). Hence the Turks of Central Asia adopted a variant of the Iranian word, täžik, to designate their Muslim adversaries in general. For example, the rulers of the south Indian [[Chalukya dynasty]] and [[Rashtrakuta dynasty]] also referred to the Arabs as "Tajika" in the 8th and 9th century.<ref>Political History of the Chālukyas of Badami by Durga Prasad Dikshit p.192</ref><ref>The First Spring: The Golden Age of India by Abraham Eraly p.91</ref> By the eleventh century ([[Yūsuf Balasaguni|Yusof Ḵāṣṣ-ḥājeb]], [[Kutadgu Bilig|Qutadḡu bilig]], lines 280, 282, 3265), the [[Qarakhanid Turks]] applied this term more specifically to the Persian Muslims in the Oxus basin and Khorasan, who were variously the Turks' rivals, models, overlords (under the [[Samanid Dynasty]]), and subjects (from [[Ghaznavid]] times on). Persian writers of the Ghaznavid, [[Seljuq Empire|Seljuq]] and [[Atabeg|Atābak]] periods (ca. 1000–1260) adopted the term and extended its use to cover Persians in the rest of [[Greater Iran]], now under Turkish rule, as early as the poet ʿOnṣori, ca. 1025 (Dabirsiāqi, pp. 3377, 3408). Iranians soon accepted it as an ethnonym, as is shown by a Persian court official's referring to mā tāzikān "we Tajiks" (Bayhaqi, ed. Fayyāz, p. 594). The distinction between Turk and Tajik became stereotyped to express the symbiosis and rivalry of the (ideally) nomadic military executive and the urban civil bureaucracy (Niẓām al-Molk: tāzik, pp. 146, 178–79; Fragner, "Tādjīk. 2" in EI2 10, p. 63).</blockquote>[[File:Таджикские девушки.JPG|thumb|Young Tajik women in the 21st century.|250x250px]]The word also occurs in the 8th-century [[Tonyukuk inscriptions]] as ''tözik'', used for a local Arab tribe in the [[Tashkent]] area.<ref>{{cite book|title=Peoples of Central Asia|author=Lawrence Krader|publisher=Indiana University|page=54|year=1971}}</ref> These Arabs were said to be from the Taz tribe, which is still found in [[Yemen]]. In the 7th-century, the Taz began to Islamize the region of Transoxiana in Central Asia.<ref>{{cite book|title=L'Afghanistan et ses populations|language=fr|year=1976|author=Jean-Charles Blanc|page=80|publisher=Éditions Complexe}}</ref>

According to the ''[[Encyclopaedia of Islam]]'', however, the oldest known usage of the word ''Tajik'' as a reference to Persians in Persian literature can be found in the writings of the famous Persian poet and Islamic scholar [[Rumi|Jalal ad-Din Rumi]].<ref>[[Clifford Edmund Bosworth|C.E. Bosworth]]/B.G. Fragner, "Tā<u>dj</u>īk", in [[Encyclopaedia of Islam]], Online Edition: ''"...&nbsp;In Islamic usage, [Tā<u>dj</u>īk] eventually came to designate the Persians, as opposed to Turks [...] the oldest citation for it which Schraeder could find was in verses of <u>Dj</u>alāl al-Dīn Rūmī ..."''</ref> The 15th-century Turkic-speaking poet [[Ali Sher Nawa'i|Mīr Alī Šer Navā'ī]] who lived in the [[Timurid Empire|Timurid empire]] also used ''Tajik'' as a reference to Persians.<ref>Ali Shir Nava'i ''Muhakamat al-lughatain'' tr. & ed. Robert Devereaux (Leiden: Brill) 1966 p6</ref>