Tajiks are a Persian-speaking Iranian ethnic group native to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan, the second largest in Afghanistan which constitutes over half of the global Tajik population, they speak varieties of a Western Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, its small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups are included as Tajiks. In China, the term is used to refer to its Pamiri ethnic groups, the Tajiks of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages. In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are counted as a separate ethnic group; as a self-designation, the literary New Persian term Tajik, which had some previous pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranians, has become acceptable during the last several decades as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia. Alternative names for the Tajiks are Eastern Persian, Fārsīwān, Dīhgān which translates to "farmer or settled villager", in a wider sense "settled" in contrast to "nomadic" and was used to describe a class of land-owning magnates as "Persian of noble blood" in contrast to Arabs and Romans during the Sassanid and early Islamic period.
The Tajiks are an Iranian people, speaking a variety of Persian, concentrated in the Oxus Basin, the Farḡāna valley and on both banks of the upper Oxus, i.e. the Pamir Mountains and northeastern Afghanistan and western Afghanistan. The ancient Tajiks were chiefly agriculturalists before the Arab Conquest of Iran. While agriculture remained a stronghold, the Islamization of Iran resulted in the rapid urbanization of historical Khorasan and Transoxiana that lasted until the devastating Mongolian invasion. Several surviving ancient urban centers of the Tajik people include Herat, Bukhara, Khujand and Kabul. Contemporary Tajiks are the descendants of ancient Eastern Iranian inhabitants of Central Asia, in particular, the Sogdians and the Bactrians, other groups, with an admixture of Western Iranian Persians and non-Iranian peoples. According to Richard Nelson Frye, a leading historian of Iranian and Central Asian history, the Persian migration to Central Asia may be considered the beginning of the modern Tajik nation, ethnic Persians, along with some elements of East-Iranian Bactrians and Sogdians, as the main ancestors of modern Tajiks.
In works, Frye expands on the complexity of the historical origins of the Tajiks. In a 1996 publication, Frye explains that many "factors must be taken into account in explaining the evolution of the peoples whose remnants are the Tajiks in Central Asia" and that "the peoples of Central Asia, whether Iranian or Turkic speaking, have one culture, one religion, one set of social values and traditions with only language separating them." Regarding Tajiks, the Encyclopædia Britannica states:The Tajiks are the direct descendants of the Iranian peoples whose continuous presence in Central Asia and northern Afghanistan is attested from the middle of the 1st millennium bc. The ancestors of the Tajiks constituted the core of the ancient population of Khwārezm and Bactria, which formed part of Transoxania. Over the course of time, the eastern Iranian dialect, used by the ancient Tajiks gave way to Farsi, a western dialect spoken in Iran and Afghanistan; the geographical division between the eastern and western Iranians is considered and to be the desert Dasht-e Kavir, situated in the center of the Iranian plateau.
According to John Perry: The most plausible and accepted origin of the word is Middle Persian tāzīk'Arab', or an Iranian cognate word. The Muslim armies that invaded Transoxiana early in the eighth century, conquering the Sogdian principalities and clashing with the Qarluq Turks consisted not only of Arabs, but of Persian converts from Fārs and the central Zagros region. 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 referred to the Arabs as "Tajika" in the 8th and 9th century. By the eleventh century, the Qarakhanid Turks applied this term more to the Persian Muslims in the Oxus basin and Khorasan, who were variously the Turks' rivals, models and subjects. Persian writers of the Ghaznavid, Seljuq and Atābak periods 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. Iranians soon accepted it as an ethnonym, as is shown by a Persian court official's referring to mā tāzikān "we Tajiks"; the distinction between Turk and Tajik became stereotyped to express the symbiosis and rivalry of the nomadic military executive and the urban civil bureaucracy. According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the oldest known usage of the word Tajik as a reference to Persians in Persian literature can be found in the writings of the Persian poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi; the 15th century Turkic-speaking poet Mīr Alī Šer Navā'ī used Tajik as a reference to Persians. An exampl
John D. Hawke Jr. served as the United States Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance from 1995 to 1998, was United States Comptroller of the Currency from 1998 to 2004. John D. Hawke Jr. was born in New York City on June 26, 1933. He was graduated from Yale University in 1954 with a B. A. in English. From 1955 to 1957 he served on active duty with the U. S. Air Force. After graduating in 1960 from Columbia University School of Law, Hawke was a law clerk for Judge E. Barrett Prettyman on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 1961 to 1962 he served as counsel to the Select Subcommittee on Education in the U. S. House of Representatives. Hawke joined the Washington, D. C. law firm of Arnold & Porter as an associate in 1962 and became a senior partner. In 1975 he left the firm to serve as general counsel to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, returning in 1978. From 1987 to 1995 he served as chairman of the firm. From 1970 to 1987 Hawke taught courses on federal regulation of banking at the Georgetown University Law Center.
He has taught courses on bank acquisitions and financial regulation and serves as the chairman of the Board of Advisors of the Morin Center for Banking Law Studies. In 1987 Hawke served as a member of a committee of inquiry appointed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to study the role of futures markets in connection with the stock market crash in October of that year, he was a founding member of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee and served on the committee until joining the Treasury Department in April 1995. Hawke served for 3½ years as Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance. In that capacity he oversaw the development of policy and legislation in the areas of financial institutions, debt management, capital markets. After serving as Comptroller of the Currency, 1998–2004, Hawke returned to private practice with the well-connected Washington, D. C. law firm of Arnold & Porter. Hawke resides in Washington, D. C, he has four adult children. Hawke was sworn in as the 28th Comptroller of the Currency on December 8, 1998.
After serving for 10 months under a recess appointment, he was sworn in for a full five-year term as Comptroller on October 13, 1999. During his term as Comptroller, Hawke has stressed the importance of the safety and soundness of national banks through such supervisory initiatives as Project Canary and the "Supervision in the Future", which makes extensive use of technology, he has introduced management and budget reforms in the internal operations of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as well as programs designed to increase workplace diversity. The disparity between the supervisory fees that state and national banks pay has been a priority during Hawke's tenure, he has emphasized relief from regulatory burden for national banks, his community bank initiative stresses increased outreach. Hawke has written extensively on matters relating to the regulation of financial institutions and is the author of Commentaries on Banking Regulation, published in 1985. John D. Hawke, Jr. Comptroller of the Currency 1998 – 2004
Reid Supply Company is a global supplier of industrial parts based in Muskegon, Michigan. It has been one of the major employers in the Muskegon region since its founding in 1948. Reid Supply Company is known for serving industries like medical, alternative energy and gas, aerospace, food processing, manufacturing and government; as of December 31, 2013 Reid Supply Company was rebranded Essentra in accordance with their global rebranding. Reid Tool Supply started in 1948 by Mr. Liberty Reid; as an office manager and purchasing agent in a local tool supply and die shop, he discovered that there were many tools/parts which were not available. This inspired him to start Reid Tool Supply in his home, with the help of Gloria. Mr. Reid stocked those hard-to-get parts in inventory for immediate delivery. Great customer service was one of the founding principles of Reid Tool Supply. In about 4 years, Reid Tool Supply moved from Mr. Reid's house and into a newly constructed warehouse. By 2005, Reid Tool Supply was offering a wider range of industrial tools and parts, changed its name to Reid Supply Company to reflect its expanded offerings.
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