buhran

Buhran is a term used across Persian-speaking and neighboring linguistic communities to denote crisis or emergency. In Persian, written as بحران, the word conveys periods of hardship, danger, instability, or acute difficulty. It is used in modern Iranian and Afghan Persian, Dari, and Urdu to describe economic crises, political crises, social upheaval, or disaster situations. The concept is common in discussions of governance, public policy, disaster response, and individual or collective hardship, and it often appears in phrases such as economic crisis or political crisis.

Geographic usage exists as well, since Buhran or its variants appear as toponyms in Iran and surrounding regions. In such cases, the name is part of village or district identifiers and typically reflects historical, administrative, or local naming practices rather than the abstract sense of crisis.

In transliteration, buhran may be written as borhan or bohran in different systems, but the Persian script standard is بحران. The term is widely understood in Urdu- and Persian-language media and literature to denote severe or acute distress, rather than a minor problem, and it commonly appears in news reports, scholarly writing, and public discourse about crises and emergencies.