The Origins of the Arab-Iranian Conflict: Nationalism and Sovereignty in the Gulf between the World Wars by Chelsi Mueller (review)

Khalij-e Hamisheh-ye Fars, the Forever Persian Gulf, is what the Iranians like to call it. Modern Arabs typically refer to the waterway as the Arab or Arabian Gulf. Chelsi Mueller's richly informative monograph explains the origins of this divergent nomenclature. She draws on an array of sources, British archival material, a plethora of Persian-language newspapers, and secondary publications in both Arabic and Persian to argue that, like so many ethnic and religious conflicts in the modern world, the controversy over the "ownership" of the Gulf has little to do with ancient ethnic or religious strife and everything with to do twentieth-century politics. She identifies the interwar years and their burgeoning nationalism as crucial for the origins of this controversy. What used to be an interdependent yet decentralized "Gulf" culture revolving around trade and marked by fluid identities, in this period was appropriated by centralizing states espousing mutually exclusive historical narratives. The author's subsidiary argument is that Iran's irredentist claims on the southern littoral, especially Bahrain, were most incendiary in this regard, prompting the British to prop up their weak, divided Arab clients, which in turn helped the rulers of these shaykhdoms make the transition from traditional tribal leaders to the absolute monarchs they became following Britain's retreat from the region. All this is discussed with an eye to the profound changes that occurred in the regional economy, with the replacement of the traditional pearl industry by new sources of income (oil above all), resulting in a loss of influence for the traditional tribal elites and a shift in fortune for the region's dominant merchant families.

Chapter One sets the stage by discussing the Gulf's premodern history. If the waterway had a shared identity, the author submits, it was Sunni in terms of religion and it was mediated through commerce conducted by merchants with ties on both sides. Iran has longstanding claims to the southern littoral, going back to Shah 'Abbas I's conquest of Bahrain in 1603. Under the Safavid dynasty, Iran lost the island in the early eighteenth century, and Karim Khan Zand retook it some five decades later. From this time on, many Iranians moved to the shaykhdoms, initially seeking employment and, later, tax relief. Yet, Mueller explains, until the late nineteenth century Iran's authorities were quite indifferent even to their own Persian Gulf possessions. In the 1790s, under the Qajar dynasty, Iran ceded the customs revenue of Bandar 'Abbas, Hormuz, and Qeshm to the sultan of Oman—an arrangement that lasted until 1868, when Naser al-Din Shah finally regained control over the northern littoral.

Of course, the claims of the English and then British were even more tenuous. As outsiders, they did have a presence in the Gulf as of the early seventeenth century, but it was a subordinate one, revolving around trade conducted at the sufferance of the Safavid shah. As the British consolidated their rule in India and faced Napoleonic France as their main rival, they began to look at the region from a security perspective. In 1822 the Persian Gulf came under the auspices of British India and the general agent in Bushehr was tasked with suppressing piracy and combating gun running. British-controlled steam navigation and the advent of the telegraph further enhanced the Gulf's importance as a transportation and communication corridor. Hence the British made a separate arrangement with the tribal shaykhs against regional rivals, assuming the role of arbiters and guardians of the Gulf. Already prior to the rise of Iranian nationalism in the early 1900s, this stance created bad blood with Iran. Britain's refusal to recognize full Iranian sovereignty over Bushehr and its recognition of Abu Musa and the Tunb islands as belonging to Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah rankled the Iranian authorities well before Reza Pahlavi came to...