حق

What it means

حق (hagh) covers three overlapping meanings: a legal or moral right, the quality of being correct, and truth itself. The word is borrowed from Arabic حَقّ (haqq), built on the root ح-ق-ق (h-q-q) meaning to establish, to make firm, or to be true. In Persian حق داشتن (hagh dâshtan) means both to be right and to have a right to something, which collapses a distinction that English keeps separate. If you say حق داری (hagh dâri), you are saying either “you are right” or “you have the right to,” and context disambiguates. In Islamic theology الحق (al-haqq) is one of the 99 names of God, meaning the Absolute Truth or the Real, and Persian mystic poets like Rumi use حق frequently in this sense. In everyday speech, however, حق is entirely practical: حق با توئه (hagh bâ tost) means “you are right,” and حق داری اعتراض کنی (hagh dâri e’terâz koni) means “you have the right to object.”

How to use it

• حق داری ناراحت باشی. (hagh dâri nârâhat bâshi.) “You have every right to be upset.”
• این حق توئه. (in hagh-e tost.) “This is your right.”
• حق با اونه. (hagh bâ une.) “He is in the right.”
• حقم رو میخوام. (haghamo mikhâm.) “I want what I am owed / I want my right.”

Cultural note

حق is one of the words that makes Persian simultaneously legalistic and mystical. In everyday disputes Iranians invoke حق to assert that something is owed to them or that their position is morally correct. At the same time, centuries of Sufi poetry have given the word a transcendent dimension, so that حق can shift from a practical claim in a conversation to a name for the divine in a poem without the listener finding it jarring. This layering of the worldly and the sacred into a single word is characteristic of Persian’s debt to both Arabic jurisprudence and Islamic mysticism.

References

• Dehkhoda
• Vajehyab