Welcome to the Land of Stans

 460 words

 🇺🇿  🇹🇯  🇹🇲  🇰🇿  🇰🇬  🇵🇰  🇦🇫 

The “land of Stans” is an expression you hear in the media from time to time describing various states and entities that lie within the middle belt of Asia, in a region designated as “Central Asia” or even “South–Central Asia”. The descriptor is actually a tautology, rather like saying, as is the wont of many politicians and commentators in the West, “East Timor”, rather than Timor-Leste❂. The word “–stan” is a Persian-language suffix which means “land of”. As a country or region within a country designation, the “land of stans” probably resonants in most people’s minds in recent times with the five CARS, the Central Asian Republics—Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan—formerly SSRs (Socialist Soviet Republics) which came into independent existence when the Soviet Union self-destructed in 1991 and much of its multi-ethnic empire unravelled.The five “stans” of Central Asia share more than a suffix in nomenclature, each has a connexion with the ancient fabled Silk Road as well as sharing historical and cultural ties while possessing distinct languages, cultures, and political systems.

Of course there were already “stans” inked in on the world atlas long before the CARs achieved independent nationhood. The best known, also broadly within the region of South-Central Asia, are not liberated offshoots of the USSR but of the British Raj. These are Afghanistan, which is self-explanatory, “the land of the Afghans”…and Pakistan. Etymologists have their take on the origins of the name “Pakistan”, the word "Pak" (پاک) means "pure" or "clean" in Persian and Pashto, from this we get “Pakistan”, in the Urdu and Persian languages, "the Land of the Pure", a departure from how the CARs got their respective nomenclatures, ie, from the names of the dominant ethnic groups in the location. The coiner of the name “Pakistan” in 1933, Choudhry Rahman Ali, proffers a second explanation for its genesis – as an acronym which encapsulates the entire area of the Muslim-majority regions in the northwest of the Indian sub-continent, which can be unpacked as:

Punjab

Afghania (the Pathan-inhabited Northwest Frontier Province) 

Kashmir 

I§

Sindh

and bookended by the suffix of the name Baluchistan. 

And there are other “stans” on the map which are not sovereign states in their own right but are regions or districts within a country, or across several countries, as with Kurdistan. Then there’s the autonomous zone Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan, and likewise Khuzestan, a province of south-western Iran, among others.

❂ in Bahasa Indonesian the word for "east" is timur, so the name “East Timor” strictly speaking is tautological 

 § the acronym behind the name “Pakistan” is fudged a bit, the “i” was inserted to facilitate the name’s pronunciation, although an alternative interpretation suggests “i” stands for “Indus”, the main river traversing the country