Many histories of modern Iran are Tehran-centric, focusing either on Iran’s shahs or, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, on its ayatollahs. Consciously or not, they also focus on the country’s Persian political elites or, in earlier centuries, on its Turkic ones. Iran, however, has always been a rich tapestry of peoples and local cultures.
In Bordering on War, Ahmadi, a professor at Minnesota’s University of St. Thomas, explores the history of Khuzestan, the largely Arabic-speaking epicenter of Iran’s oil industry. Historically contested by the Ottoman Empire and then Iraq, Khuzestan has both a distinct culture and history of separatism.
Ahmadi utilizes both Persian and Arab primary sources to approach Khuzestan’s history with nuance. She traces the political history of the region but also explores how national identity was formed and notions of citizenship coalesced. She examines migration, trade, the relationship with Arab rule across the frontier, and the Iranians living in Iraqi border provinces, such as Basra and Maysan. She draws on records of Iran’s prerevolutionary SAVAK intelligence service, which worried about the loyalty of Iran’s Arabs.
Ahmadi organizes her book chronologically while emphasizing the thematic issues that dominated each period. Her narrative is clear and careful, and her writing detailed—perhaps too much so for the non-specialist reader—but clear to those familiar with the region.
She begins with an in-depth study of Sheikh Khaz’al’s early twentieth-century separatism, describing how Ottoman and Persian sources largely agree on the facts but frame them very differently. Reza Khan’s suppression of Khuzestani separatism ultimately propelled him to Iran’s throne in 1925. Ahmadi shows how Khaz’al’s opponents sought Tehran’s assistance against the ambitious sheikh. However, Iranian leaders were initially powerless to act because the Iranian state had few institutions to exert leverage in the region.
Ahmadi breaks new ground, highlighting aspects of cross-frontier interplay: the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s (later British Petroleum) employment of Iraqis, as well as the presence of Iraqi and Iraqi-Jewish schools inside Iran. She explores the relationship among border dwellers, who at times welcomed smuggling but at other times sought government protection for raising livestock and for defense against violent cross-border smugglers.
After Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, he embraced pan-Arabism, which inevitably affected Khuzestan. His regime simultaneously lured Iranian Arabs across the border with promises of jobs while expelling Persians who had lived in Iraq for generations. Indeed, while Saddam’s expulsions of Shiites remain fresh in regional public memory, Qasim set the precedent. Ahmadi’s history of both Arabic and Persian tribal and border regions is invaluable.
There is no shortage of literature on the 1979 Islamic Revolution, though too many scholars—Nikki Keddie and Ervand Abrahamian, for example—approach the monarchy’s fall as the natural apex of Iranian political evolution rather than as an anomaly. Ahmadi does not join this debate, but her analysis of revolutionary fervor in Khuzestan illuminates it. She compares pre-and post-revolutionary censuses to illustrate social disruption, transformation, and the impact of migration. Ahmadi also highlights the importance of Ayatollah Muhammad Khaqani, a native of Khuzestan, torn between the revolution and local perspectives, who ultimately rejected clerical rule, sought autonomy, and died under suspicious circumstances in 1986, while under house arrest.
Ahmadi’s scholarship deepens our understanding of the Iran-Iraq War. She traces how decades of Iraqi propaganda rather than a sudden and arbitrary decision led to Saddam’s invasion of Khuzestan. Iraqi credulity toward their own state propaganda also produced a miscalculation about Khuzestani loyalties. When Iraqi forces poured into Khuzestan, expecting its Arab-speakers to welcome them, they instead found a local population more loyal to Tehran than to Baghdad.
Bordering on War serves as an important resource not only for historians of Iran but also for scholars of Iraq, especially in its exploration of Baath-era outreach and relations with Iran’s Arabs. At a time when too many scholars substitute polemic for fact and theory for research, Ahmadi’s careful scholarship contributes substantially to Iranian studies.
