Let me begin by stating that the Zoroastrian Religion has no week names. It has the names of the twelve months and the thirty days of each month plus the five or six days to complete the year of 365.2422 days and to begin the exact solar year on Nowrûz – Newday, the beginning of Spring on or about 21st March at its hour, minute and second. Therefore, the names of the week were introduced after the fall of the Sassanian Empire in 652 CE, perhaps during the Umayyad/Abbasid times (661-1258 CE).
 
No doubt that the Jews, living in the Greater Iran from the days of Cyrus the Great to Yazdgerd III (550 BCE to 651 CE = 1,201 years), observed their week days. That is why the Persian names of the week are based on “Shanbeh/Shanbed – Sabbath.” They are Shanbeh, Saturday, Yak-Shanbeh, Sunday, Do-Shanbeh, Monday, Se-Shanbeh, Tuesday, Chahâr-Shanbeh, Wednesday, and Panj-Shanbeh, Thursday. All based on the Sabbath. Yek means one, do means two, se means three, chahâr means four and panj means five. 

The days are one to five days [after] Sabbath/Saturday. Friday was, most likely, Shesh-Shanbeh, Six-[days after] Saturday. It is now, by its Arabicized name, called “Jom’eh,” the Congregation day of the Muslims and also “Âdîneh,” a pure Persian name.
 
Then, why the pure Persian name is also used beside its Arabicized form of “Jom’eh?”  The term “Âdîneh” for Friday is not found in the highly known Shahnameh of Ferdowsi (completed in 1010 CE) and the important Persian dictionary “Borhân-e Qât’e” of Mohammad Hossein Khalaf-e Tabrizi with a pen name of “Borhân” (completed in 1652 CE). That makes the term to have been introduced later than 1652, more than 1,000 years after the Arab invasion and occupation. 

A thorough search of the Persian literature of the last 350 years has to be taken to find its first use. To the best of my knowledge, so far no one has ventured to find the beginning of its use. It may be noted that the flow of Arabic words into Persian was intensified during the Safavid and Qajar times and their contemporaries in India, the Mughals (1500-1900). Therefore, either it was introduced by a so-far-unknown scholar before the start of the so-called “enriching” of Persian by Arabic words or it should have been introduced sometime during the early period of the movement of replacing the Arabic words with pure Persian words, the last 75+ years.
 
From the philological point, I look at the form of “Âdîneh” in Pahlavi. The trouble with the Pahlavi script is that it has only 13 alphabetic letters to write about 24 sounds. Then it has the Aramaic logograms. A word can be with three or four sounds. 

It is perhaps one of the most intricate scripts to read. Therefore, the closest I find, with its various pronunciations, is “Âdwanak, Âdwank, Âdenak and Âdenk.” The word is homonym. It means “mirror” as well as “custom, manner, rite.” Incidentally, the Baluchi for mirror is “âdenk” but in Persian the “d” is lost and it has softened into “âyeneh/âyîneh.” Let us keep in mind that the Pahlavi “âdwen,” also for “custom, manner, rite,” becomes “âzîn/âyîn” in Persian. Therefore “Âdîneh,” is an older form of “âyîneh” in modern Persian and is closer to the Pahlavi “Âdenak,” meaning “custom, manner, rite.”
 
I, therefore, conclude that Friday has been named “Âdîneh” because it is day of Rite in Islam. It was used by a good scholar of Persian to give the Iranians a pure Persian name that would go better with the Shanbehs than the single Arabic word of “Jom’eh.”  “Âdîneh” is just a tiny clue to the fact that while the nations, from the northern border of the Arabian Peninsula to the northwestern African Morocco, became at least linguistically Arabicized; the Iranian stock, from the Kurds of Iraq, Syria and Turkey to the Tajiks and Afghans of the borders with China in the east, have preserved their Iranian Culture, including their languages, dresses and foods for the last 1,400 years, particularly Persian, which became the common language of all of them and even dominated the Indian Subcontinent for 800 years until the British and Russian imperialists made English and Russian to supersede it. Yes, “Âdîneh” is a tiny clue and yet of significance.

By Ali A. Jafarey