The Farsi word “azizam” – meaning my dear or my darling in English – may not have the same level of global resonance as habibi or ma chérie, but to us Persians it’s a daily refrain. We use it with our family, partners, friends; my cat probably thinks it’s her middle name by now. So it felt huge when Ed Sheeran announced that the lead single from his new album would be called just that: Azizam.
The track, inspired by the Iranian heritage of Stockholm-based producer Ilya Salmanzadeh, has divided critics, with a Telegraph review calling it “a slice of pure pop froth that couldn’t be any more generic and upbeat if it was written by an AI programme”. But these reproaches are missing a whole other dimension: that the song has triggered a huge emotional response from millions of Iranians around the world. “Hearing a beloved artist embrace our language with such care? We feel it. And we’re here for it,” said one popular comment on Sheeran’s Instagram.
For so long, Iranians have become used to being ostracised or misrepresented in western popular culture. Take the movie 300, a fictional retelling of the Greco-Persian wars, in which the Persians were essentially depicted as barbarians; or Ben Affleck’s Argo, about the Iran hostage crisis, which stereotyped Iranians as fanatical and ignorant.
“If you’re an Iranian and you live in the diaspora, you understand what it’s like to be misunderstood, especially if you grew up in the post 9/11 era,” a TikTok user said. “Non-Iranians or people who aren’t from the Middle East don’t understand how beautiful our culture is, our language, our history and our struggle, what we’ve been through.” So having one of the world’s best-selling artists celebrate that beauty has got to mean something. “Now you’re going to have a lot of non-Iranians be like … ‘what a beautiful word’.”
Persians are incredibly proud of our culture and history. Iranians will be quick to tell you that Persia is the world’s oldest continuous civilisation, that poets like Rumi and Hafez and Ferdowsi influenced literary traditions for centuries. Many still love to claim Freddie Mercury – or “Farrokh joon” (dear Farrokh) – as one of our own (his parents were Parsi, an ethnic group descended from Persian Zoroastrians who emigrated to India in the eighth century). And Ed Sheeran will heretofore surely be known as Ed Shirini (“sweets” in Farsi), or as the comedian Shaparak Khorsandi joked in the manner of a typical Persian mum, Sheeran derives from Eee-ran anyway. Yes, I tell my friends, Brian Cox is a fantastic actor, but more importantly did you know he and his Persian wife’s cat is called Pishi (Persian for kitty)? Yes, Animal was a massive Bollywood hit, but did you know the song that enthralled Indian audiences from the film is a 50s Iranian tune?
Critics have called Azizam inauthentic and derivative, but I disagree – it has a real Iranian flavour. This includes its hook, the use of instruments like the daf and santur, and backing vocals from huge Iranian pop stars Arash and Andy, the latter of whom delighted fans by playing it at a recent concert and saying he felt “deeply connected” to the song. There’s also a full Farsi version coming, featuring a singer “who’s as big as it gets in the Persian community” according to Sheeran. Then there’s the fact that it was released during Nowruz, the Persian new year marking the spring equinox, which is a time of celebration and coming together to eat (including a lot of shirini of course), give gifts and dance. This song will have been played in Iranian households around the world. The video alone amassed more than 8m views in two days, Tik Tok is full of Iranians “gher”-ing to it – that irresistible feeling that makes you want to shake your hips on the dancefloor – and the song will undoubtedly be played at Iranian weddings for years to come.
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But there is a deeper message: however fraught international relations become, culture can still bring us together. Sheeran has played to this before, collaborating with west African pop stars such as Burna Boy and Fireboy DML, and he learned Spanish for a record with Colombian singer J Balvin. Cynics have suggested this is canny, even craven: a way of courting a series of global audiences to expand Sheeran’s brand. More generally, exploitative sampling or insensitive imitation of global-majority artists has of course resulted in plenty of cultural appropriation over the years. But there’s evident joy in the way Sheeran sings over these fusions, and splicings of MENA music and British pop are often creative as well as commercial successes, as proved by the Chemical Brothers’ Galvanize, Blur’s Out of Time, or Coldplay’s recent We Pray, featuring Palestinian-Chilean singer Elyanna.
Sheeran said the similarity of the Middle Eastern instruments on Azizam to the Irish traditional music he grew up with brought home how much “music connects us all and really is a universal language”. There’s no better representation of that than online videos of an American crowd in a pub in Ipswich, Massachusetts last week, blaring out “azizam” in unison. Jimmy Fallon even sang it on the Tonight Show. So for that, and all the above, I’ll simply say: Ed, you are our azizam.