Bordering on War: A Social and Political History of Khuzestan

Perhaps no province has challenged nationalism in Iraq and Iran quite like Khuzestan, a border region which has fuelled intrigue, suspicion and the imagination in both Tehran and Baghdad. An Iranian territory with an estimated population of just under five million people, the oil rich province was one of the key battlegrounds during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Historically, the area was settled by an Arab Shia majority, with tribes who routinely move back and forth between the two nations and with ties to both countries, the question of loyalty has been a key site of contention for scholars, thinkers and policymakers alike. The politics of loyalty is a key question that Shaherzad Ahmadi explores in her new book Bordering on War: A Social and Political History of Khuzestan – while the people of Khuzestan are often spoken about from the point of view of elites in Tehran or Baghdad and often afforded little agency in accounts by historians, Ahmadi’s book aims to recentre the border people by treating them as active agents within history rather than passive subjects being shaped by history.

Stretching from the 19th century and taking us all the way to the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War, the question of how the people of the region dealt with the concept of loyalty in an ever changing environment is explored throughout this work. As Ahmadi argues, the people of Khuzestan “for the Ottoman-Qajar and later the Iran-Iraq borderland, these political alignments proved malleable.” In other words, as the book argues, the people of the borderland often changed their politics and would praise the new nations and boundaries, while totally subverting and ignoring them, moving freely between countries and smuggling items across boundaries. For the Arab tribes of Khuzestan, as is common with people who live in border zones, leveraging their political loyalty between Tehran and Baghdad as a means of securing their interests is a persistent feature throughout these periods. “Citizenship, trade, and education remained contested in an ongoing dialogue between marginalized groups and their states, creating an environment more conducive to the needs of the locals. Transnational migration liberated border dwellers to escape oppressive state strictures but also caused leaders in Tehran and Baghdad to question their national belonging,” the book explains.

Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings

An interesting take by Ahmadi is that the notion of loyalty of the Arab tribes of Khuzestan likely influenced Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1980. Some western historians have tended to view Hussein’s initiation of the war as irrational, but two factors make this not so. The immediate factor in the decision to launch the invasion to claim Khuzestan was the insurrection by local Arabs against Tehran in 1979. Saddam Hussein believed that they would welcome the Iraqis as liberators, what further cemented this view was the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution meant the Iran-Iraq border was even more porous than before and Iraq was able to carry out a bombing on an Iranian pipeline in Khuzestan.

However, Hussein misread the situation in Khuzestan as, while an insurrection was going on and there were separatists groups – chief among them Khalq-i Arab – most of the population were neutral or indifferent towards Iraq before the invasion and after the invasion many got behind Tehran. The war forced Iran to help integrate the Arabs of Khuzestan by publishing Arabic texts and integrating Khuzestan into national propaganda. But the idea that local Arabs would want to join on with Iraq was not Saddam Hussein’s private fantasy, as Ahmadi demonstrates, decades before his rule, Iraqi policymakers began encouraging them towards Iraq and Iraqi scholars emphasised the independent Arab spirit of the province. In particular, Iraqi historians were interested in the 1924 Sheikh Khazal rebellion in Khuzestan against Reza Shah, which was led by local tribal leader Sheikh Khazal. ‘To many [Iraqis] he embodied the Arab spirit of independence, the last gasp of the Arab community in the borderland against the racist Persian regime in Tehran.” Indeed, as Ahmadi argues, the rebellion does reflect the spirit of the time, but not as Iraqi historians imagined it did. “Khaz’al, like many others, used his position in the borderland to negotiate better terms for himself. Ordinary people, however, were more difficult to graft onto a national agenda.”

Ahmadi contrasts the uneasy place the Arabs of Khuzestan have within Iranian and Iraqi nationalism with the uneasy place Iraqi Iranians also had within both countries. Both groups are border people for different reasons, but ultimately they test the limits of nationalism and reveal the anxiety behind the facade of confidence.

Bordering on War offers an intriguing take on an understudied topic in western scholarship, while broad and sweeping works focus on national building projects from the metropolis, those in the margins of those projects are often not considered. These issues within scholarship also flow into media and political analysis, while we tend to view all political realities through the prism of Tehran or Baghdad, the rest of the country with its own politics rarely feature in our discussions. Bordering on War offers us a new way of thinking about the history of nationalism and thinking about those on the margins of it as active agents of change. A must read and necessary contribution to our knowledge about people who straddle the borders.