Abstract
One of the longest running toponymic battles in the world revolves around the nomenclature of “The Gulf.” I even received an e-mail admonishing me to only use the term “Persian Gulf” when referring to the body of water between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula. I explained to the writer that although as a rule I do use “Persian Gulf” in my writing, my purpose in this paper was to call into question the nature of the ethnic identity of the denizens of this region.1 Rather than identifying them as either Persian or Arab, I want to make the case for these individuals as Gulf residents, independent of an exclusive Arab or Persian identity. I very much like a term that the people of the region use themselves on occasion: Khaliji, from the word for Gulf, khalij, which has the virtue of working in Arabic, Persian, and South Asian languages, and is very expressive.
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Notes
Louise Sweet had the same problem in describing the people of the Gulf. She footnotes her article as follows: “Initially I have called the region the Persian or Arabian Gulf to accommodate the present claims issuing from the states concerned today. Thereafter, I use simply ‘the Gulf’.” (L. E. Sweet, “Pirates or Polities? Arab Societies of the Persian or Arabian Gulf, 18th Century,” Ethnohistory 11 (1964): 276). Many Iranians regard the use of “The Gulf” in referring to the Persian Gulf as a sophistry, and object to it. Since I am describing an Arabic-Persian mixed population indigenous to the Gulf, and belonging to neither the Arabic nor Persian cultural spheres exclusively, I see no other alternative for this discussion. I acknowledge that the body of water itself is properly called the Persian Gulf.
See here Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991);
E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
and Maurice Halbwachs and Lewis A. Coser, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
David DeCamp, “Toward a Generative Analysis of a Post-Creole Speech Continuum,” in Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, ed. Dell Hymes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
A Guttman Scale is an implicational scale of items that indicate the strength of the presence or absence of a particular characteristic. Developed by Louis Guttman in 1944, the process of scaling is based on Guttman’s insight that those who agree with a more extreme test item will also agree with all less extreme items that preceded it; however, it has many other uses besides measuring opinion. It may also measure behavioral or cultural tendencies in a population. The scale may be thought of as an array with items placed horizontally from left to right. If the extreme left side of the scale indicates a 100 percent existence of a characteristic, and the extreme right side a 100 percent absence of that characteristic, the presence of an item in the middle of the scale implies the presence of all items to its left, and the absence of all items to its right. The scale can be set up with two mutually exclusive characteristics on either end of the scale. DeCamp’s scale for Jamaica (see note 5) contrasts “Creole” with “English” characteristics for the Jamaican population. Individuals can be ranked along the scale as being “more Creole” or “more English” depending on their clothing, speech, and cultural preferences. Cf. Louis Guttman, “The Basis for Scalogram Analysis,” in Measurement and Prediction, Samuel A. Stouffer, et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950).
D. T. Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
Thomas Ricks, “Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi’i Iran, a.d. 1500–1900,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 36 (2001): 407–18.
William O. Beeman, “The Village of Laz: An Anthropological Investigation of a Village Community in the Persian Gulf” (BA thesis, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, 1964).
L. E. Sweet, “Pirates or Polities? Arab Societies of the Persian or Arabian Gulf, 18th Century,” Ethnohistory 11 (1964): 264.
James Onley and Sulayman Khalaf, “Shaikhly Authority in the Pre-oil Gulf: An Historical Anthropological Study,” History and Anthropology 17 (2006): 189–208.
Sultan Muhammad Al-Qasimi, The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988);
also Patricia Risso, “Qasimi Piracy and the General Treaty of Peace,” Arabian Studies 4 (1978): 47–57,
and Charles E. Davies, The Blood-Red Arab Flag: An Investigation into Qasimi Piracy, 1797–1820 (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1997).
George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, 1892; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1966), 409–10.
This appears to have been a reflex to the increased import duties being imposed by Russia on Iran’s northern borders at this time. The Iranians, cognizant that most shipping in the Gulf involved British goods, wanted to make up for the increased Russan duties by imposing the higher tariffs on the Gulf ports. For Bandar Lingeh, this made its entrepôt even less tenable. (Cf. Willem Floor, “Tea Consumption and Imports in Qajar Iran,” Studia Iranica 33 (2004): 47–111, see here 72–73). Floor notes that Russian dominance in the tea trade—one of the most important imports—came to an end in 1917 at the end of World War I, and the Gulf again became the main source for tea imports, but it was too late for Bandar Lingeh at this point. The trade had already moved to Dubai.
Lewis Pelly, “Visit to Lingah, Kishm, and Bunder Abbas,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 34 (1864): 252.
Floor, “Tea Consumption and Imports in Qajar Iran,” 77–79; Rudi Matthee, “From Coffee to Tea: Shifting Patterns of Consumption in Qajar Iran,” in The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 237–66.
See further Lawrence Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf in the 19th Century,” in War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and Present, ed. Roxane Farmanfarmaian (London: Routledge, 2008), 125–48.
The boundary disputes and negotiations were a continual feature of British occupation, as the twenty-nine volumes of documents solely on this topic attest. See Richard Schofield and Gerald Blake, eds., Arabian Boundaries: Primary Documents (Farnham Common, UK: Archive Editions, 1988).
For a narrative study see John C. Wilkenson, Arabia’s Frontiers: The Story of Britain’s Boundary Drawing in the Desert (London: I. B. Tauris, 1991).
James Onley, “The Politics of Protection in the Gulf: The Arab Rulers and the British Resident in the Nineteenth Century,” New Arabian Studies 6 (2004): 30–92.
William O. Beeman, The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other (Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood, 2005).
Contractual wives, called sigha or mutʿa wives are exclusively a Shiʿi phenomenon. The institution is decried by Sunnis. The contract can be as short as one minute, and as long as 99 years, and is outside of the four wives allowed under Islamic law. The institution has been described by Shahla Haeri in Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’i Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989).
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© 2009 Lawrence G. Potter
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Beeman, W.O. (2009). Gulf Society: An Anthropological View of the Khalijis—Their Evolution and Way of Life. In: Potter, L.G. (eds) The Persian Gulf in History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618459_8
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