| OCR Text |
Show 24 A distinction should also be made between the various tribes which reside in Iran. various While a certain number of tribes, the majority are nomadic tribesmen who reside in the villages nomadic tribesmen raise are sheep, cattle city dwellers belong to the and/or village dwellers. generally farmers, and horses and Those while the produce an important part of the Persian supply of meat, dairy products and wool (Cottam, 1964). The largest tribes, the Kurds, live in the northwestern portion of Iran. Kurds reside another an guage, Zagros Mountains To the south of the tribe, the Lurs. area occupied by the These two tribes are alike in lan archaic form of present day Persian, and customs. thousand years they have lived in the areas they now in the occupy. For several The major difference between these two tribes exists in the form of religion- -most Kurds belong to the Sunni sect of Islam, while the majority of Lurs are Shiah, Islam (Vreeland, 1957). Farther south the Bakhtiari. found the most The Bakhtiari day Persian that are not a are even native speak a speakers powerful dialect so and united of the tribes, far removed from present find it difficult to understand. religious people, although apparently they are Shiahs They (Vreeland, 1957:43). Along Their is a the coast of the Persian Gulf live certain small Arab tribes. religion is Islam of both sects--Shiah and Sunni--and their mixture of Arabic and Persian. language |
