We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2020
Due to the illegal movement of goods and people, the Khuzistan-Basra frontier, like many other borderlands in the region, represented a liminal space for border dwellers and the Iranian state. Although scholars have written about the migration that was endemic to the early nation-building period, the consequences of this movement in the latter half of the 20th century require further exploration. Well into the 1970s, Iranian migrants and border dwellers complicated citizenship, evinced by the Pahlavi monarchy's failure or refusal to offer them their rights. The Iranian archives prove that, decades into the nation-building project, local dynamics continued to exert tremendous influence on Iranians and even superseded national policies.
1 Municipality of Bandar Imam Khomeini, 6 March 1995, Iranian National Archive (hereafter INA), 293/009705/0063.
2 Marvin Howe, “Iraq's Deportees: Pawns in a Power Game,” New York Times, 31 January 1972, 6.
3 The war, of course, has its own robust historiography. Lawrence Potter's Gulf/2000 project is perhaps the most pioneering in its methodological scope. In the words of Lawrence Potter and Gary Sick, the “project has, over the past decade, brought together citizens of the Persian Gulf states to explore their mutual concerns and to seek ways to improve personal contact and understanding”; Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 1Google Scholar. The topic of the war gains tremendous attention in biographies of Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini, of which there are many. There is still much to study on the topic of the war itself, however. Pierre Razoux has written one of the most ambitious books on the topic recently, called The Iran–Iraq War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)Google Scholar. William Murray and Kevin Woods, who published their own monograph by the same title only a year prior, offer an impressive chronicle of the military history of the war; The Iran–Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. One of the most dynamic studies of the conflict, a social history centering on the Ba‘th Party's citizen-regime relationship, is Khoury's, Dina Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cultural histories like the volume edited by Milich, Stephan, Pannewick, Friederike, and Tramontini, Leslie, Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma, and Memory in Iraqi Culture (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2012)Google Scholar have supplemented our understanding of the conflict. From the Iranian perspective, historians emphasize the religious element of the war. Surdykowska's, Sylwia Martyrdom and Ecstasy: Emotion Training in Iranian Culture (Warsaw: Warsaw University, 2006)Google Scholar is one such example.
4 All Persian translations are by the author. Department of Finance, 1926, INA, 240/6069/47.
5 Shaherzad Ahmadi, “Local Ambivalence in the Arabistan-Basra Frontier, 1881–1925,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2019): doi: 10.1080/13530194.2019.1651630.
6 Yekta, Hossein, Bohran dar Khuzistan: Rooz Shomar-i Jang-i Iran va Iraq (Tehran: Center for Research on the Iran–Iraq War, 2008), 43Google Scholar.
7 McKeown, Adam, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 208), 275Google Scholar.
8 Many of these studies of border dwellers revolve around Iranian tribes. Just to name a few: Tapper, Richard, Frontier Nomads of Iran: A Political and Social History of the Shahsevan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cronin, Stephanie, Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921–1941 (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; Garthwaite, Gene, Khans and Shahs: A History of the Bakhtiyari Tribe in Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009)Google Scholar; Khazeni, Arash, Tribes and Empire: On the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and Klein, Janet, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
9 Shaherzad Ahmadi, “Local Ambivalence in the Arabistan-Basra Frontier, 1881–1925,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, doi: 10.1080/13530194.2019.1651630.
10 Sahlins, Peter, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Ellis, Matthew, Desert Borderland: The Making of Modern Egypt and Libya (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 8, original emphasisGoogle Scholar.
12 Oruc, Firat, Sites of Pluralism: Community Politics in the Middle East (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Ellis, Desert Borderland, 8.
14 Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 55Google Scholar.
15 Ibid.
16 According to Hunter's, Shireen Arab-Iranian Relations: Dynamics of Conflict and Accommodation (New York: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019)Google Scholar, this is because “cultural and identity-related factors have not been the only or even the most important determinants of Arab-Iranian relations. . . . What has had a more significant impact has been the political systems and ideologies of Iran and Arab states . . . [which may be assessed by] analyzing the internal setting of states’ foreign politics and by using the methods of the foreign policy–analysis school” (xvii). This is reflected in the fact that she, like many other authors studying the topic of Iran and Iraq, does not take seriously Saddam Hussein's claim on the frontier Arabs living in Khuzistan. This article de-emphasizes the state from the historical narrative while acknowledging the profound impact of modernization and the politics of metropoles.
17 Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh, Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (London: Oxford University Press, 2011), 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Tagliacozzo, Eric, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 4Google Scholar.
19 Lorimer, J. G., Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ‘Oman, and Central Arabia, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1908), 1Google Scholar.
20 Richard Schofield, “Position, Function, and Symbol: The Shatt al-Arab Dispute in Perspective,” in Potter and Sick, 31.
21 Darling, Linda, “The Mediterranean as a Borderland,” Review of Middle East Studies 46, no. 1 (2012), 54–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Svat Soucek, “Arabistan or Khuzistan,” Iranian Studies 17, no. 2-3, 204–5; Shahnavaz, Shahbaz, Britain and the Opening Up of South-west Persia 1880–1914: A Study in Imperialism and Economic Dependence (London: Routledge, 2005), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Champain, J. U. Bateman, “On Various Communication between Central Persia and the Sea,” in Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, vol. 5 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1883), 125, 136Google Scholar.
24 Readman, Paul, Radding, Cynthia, and Bryant, Chad, eds., Borderlands in World History, 1700–1915 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Just to list a few of the most pioneering works in this vein: Weber, David, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1946: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Taylor, Alan, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001)Google Scholar; Brooks, James, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Camacho, Alicia Schmidt, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the US–Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
26 This process is described in great detail by Sabri Ates in Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. Ates perceives rather less autonomy in his subjects than I do. Following Pekka Hamalainen and Samuel Truett, Ates asserts that, with the rise of nation–states, “borderland people lost their ability to manipulate or negotiate with state power, play rival states against each other, and ‘live autonomously’ as a result of the territorialization of the state-space” (33). Of course, the present study does not deny the diminishing capacity of tribes to negotiate their best interests with the state. Nevertheless, the archives illustrate many means through which border dwellers and migrants remained aloof from the state and even supported each other, thereby destabilizing the strict categories of citizenship and borders proffered by Tehran.
27 Sahlins, Boundaries, 8.
28 Sharma, Aradhana and Gupta, Akhil, “Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization,” in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, ed. Sharma, Aradhana and Gupta, Akhil (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 25Google Scholar.
29 Ibid.
30 Schayegh, Cyrus, “‘Seeing Like a State’: An Essay on the Historiography of Modern Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 1 (2010): 37–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Schayegh, Cyrus, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Cole, Juan R. I., The Roots of North Indian Shi‘ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722–1859 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Litvak, Meir, “Continuity and Change in the Ulama Population of Najaf and Karbala, 1791–1904: A Socio-Demographic Study,” Iranian Studies 23, no. 1-4 (1990): 31–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heern, Zackery, The Emergence of Modern Shi‘ism: Islamic Reform in Iran and Iraq (London: Oneworld, 2015)Google Scholar.
33 Litvak, Meir, Shi‘i Scholars of Nineteenth-Century Iraq: The ‘Ulama’ of Najaf and Karbala (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17Google Scholar.
34 Nakash, Yitzhak, Reaching for Power: The Shi‘is in the Modern Arab World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Browers, Michaelle, “Najaf and the (Re)Birth of Arab Shi‘i Political Thought,” in Writing the Modern History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges, ed. Tejel, Jordi, Sluglett, Peter, and Bocco, Riccardo (London: World Scientific, 2012)Google Scholar.
35 Letter from the Department of Finance, 1926, INA, 240/4610/5.
36 Iraqi Police Report on Internal Security, 29 June 1935, British National Archives (hereafter BNA), AIR 23/657/25B.
37 Mr. Shirvani, “Ghanoon-i Mohaejrat be Iran,” Ettela'at, 23 August 1926, 1.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Letter from Ahmad Mehr to the Parliament, 1922, Iranian Library of Congress (hereafter ILC), 5234563765612555755705760.
42 Dokhtar-e Lur, directed by ‘Abd al-Husayn Sapanta (Bombay, India: Imperial Film Company, 1936), DVD.
43 Letter from Hassan, 28 April 1932, ILC 205/24652.
44 Ibid.
45 “Etterazat-i Iranian dar Iraq,” Bakhtar-i Emruz, 8 May 1952, 5.
46 Letter from Hassan, 2 November 1941, ILC, 20/03274/00009-11.
47 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 20 August 1928, INA, 240/23141.
48 8 June 1942, BNA, FO 624/28/156.
49 Abrahamian, Ervand, Iran in between Two Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 148Google Scholar.
50 “The inability of the Qajar dynasty to maintain and exercise its power led to a semi-permanent state of banditry, tribalism, and instability in Iran, described in Persian as the state of ‘moluk al-tavayefi’ (rule of tribes), synonymous to chaos,” as Afshin Shahi and Ehsan Abdoh-Tabrizi write in, “The Shi‘i State and the Socioeconomic Challenges of the Sunni Communities in Iran: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” in Oruc, Sites of Pluralism, 92.
51 Report from the Ministry of Economic and Financial Affairs, 13 February 1934, INA, 240/2883/1.
52 19 August 1935, BNA, AIR 23/657/147.
53 Report from the Iranian consulate in Basra to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1931, INA, 240/78357/120.
54 Report from the Ministry of Economic and Financial Affairs, 13 February 1934, INA, 240/2883/1.
55 Letter from Seyyed Hussein to the Iranian ambassador in Iraq, 1945, INA, 293/5573/1; letter from Ali Reza son of Ebrahim to the Iranian ambassador in Iraq, 1945, INA, 293/5573/2.
56 Letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 3 February 1945, INA, 293/4473/3.
57 Report from the Department of Finance, 1948–49, INA, 240/11456/1.
58 Shahnavaz, Britain and the Opening Up of South-west Persia.
59 Report from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 19 April 1944, INA, 293/5573/4.
60 Schayegh, The Middle East, 90.
61 Report from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 19 April 1944, INA, 293/5573/4.
62 Transcript of Iranian Congress, 1 December 1946, INA, 240/21560/2.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Personal correspondences, province of Hamedan, June 1953, INA, 91/280/937/44.
66 Afshar, Iraj, Nigah beh Khuzistan: Majmu‘ah-i az Awza-i Tarikhi, Jughrafiya-i, Ijtima‘i, Ightisadi-i Mantagheh (Tehran: Ministry of Islamic Guidance, 1988), 246Google Scholar.
67 Letter from the Administration of National Customs, 8 November, 1941, INA, 240/292/34.
68 Foreign Information Report from the National Intelligence and Security Organization, 9 February 1959, INA, 290/1744/3-4.
69 Husayni, Zahra, Da: Khaterat-i Seyyedeh Zahra Hosseini (Tehran: Sureye Mehr Publication, 2008)Google Scholar.
70 The English translation is titled One Woman's War: Da (Mother); the Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseyni (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2014). “Translated by the scholar of Persian literature, Paul Sprachman, and published in English in 2014 under the title ‘One Woman's War: Da (Mother),’ the Islamic Republic reports with great excitement that the book has become an international cultural phenomenon”; “The English version of the book Da has been launched in New York,” Mehr News Agency, 6 October 2014, author's translation. I do not use Sprachman's English version; all translations are my own.
71 Husayni, 5.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., 11.
74 Taghati, Saham, Gol-i Simin: Khaterat-i Saham Taghati (Tehran: Sureye Mehr Publication, 2013), 8Google Scholar.
75 Ibid.
76 Ramhurmurzi, Ma‘suma, Yek Shanbe-ye Akhar (Tehran: Surey-e Mehr, 2003), 13Google Scholar.
77 Howe, “Iraq's Deportees,” 6. Of course, this took place in tandem with Mohammad Reza Shah's support of Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq to secure a more favorable border arrangement in Khuzistan. His efforts culminated in the Algiers Agreement of 1975, signed by Mohammad Reza Shah and Saddam Hussein, conceding the thalweg of the Shatt al-Arab to Iran.
78 ‘Purtaya, Ali, Iranian Bazgashteh az Iraq: Peygiri-eh Jaryan-i Jazb (Tehran: 1971), xGoogle Scholar; Howe, “Iraq's Deportees,” 6.
79 Sarukhani, Baghar, ‘Ali Purtaya, Saqebfar, Morteza, and Damavandi, Hussein, Iranian Bazgashteh az Iraq: Barresi-eh Koli, Gozaresh-i Aval (Tehran: 1970), 8Google Scholar.
80 Ibid., 33.
81 McKeown, Melancholy Order, 275.
82 Sarukhani et al., Iranian Bazgashteh az Iraq, 44.
83 Ibid., 23.
84 Ibid., 62.
85 Ibid., 24.
86 Ibid., 26.
87 Ibid., 82.
88 Ibid., 93, 101.
89 Ibid., 25.
90 Ibid., 33.
91 Ibid., 32, 34.
92 Ibid., 29.
93 Nevertheless, loans were offered to refugee entrepreneurs. Those who settled in Isfahan and Khuzistan gained the highest number of bank loans. Ibid., 47.
94 Purtaya, Iranian Bazgashteh az Iraq, 94.
95 Sarukhani et al., Iranian Bazgashteh az Iraq, 93, 98.
96 Ibid., 180.
97 Brubaker, Rogers, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 7Google Scholar.
98 Sarukhani et al., Iranian Bazgashteh az Iraq, 180.
99 Purtaya, Iranian Bazgashteh az Iraq, 20–21.
100 Hoover Institution, North Iraq Dataset, PUK 1262810-15880. Arabic translations are by the author.
101 Hoover Institution, PUK 1262837.
102 Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 3.
