Necessity & nostalgia
Book review
July 11, 2005
iranian.com
One Faisal bin Salman al-Saud has written a
book entitled Iran,
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf (I.B. Tauris,
2003). This essay discusses the book.
Among the passion plays that
pass for regional politics in the Persian Gulf none inflames an
Iranian’s sensibilities more
than when one calls this body of water Arabian Gulf. The arm of
the Indian Ocean that separates the Iranian plateau and Arabian
Peninsula in Southwest Asia has been known as the Persian Gulf
for over two thousand years. See generally, C. Edmund Bosworth, “The
Nomenclature of the Persian Gulf,” in Alvin J. Cottrell,
ed., The Persian Gulf States (1980). The practice of calling the
gulf “Arabian” began by the Bahraini separatists in
the 1930s as a rebuff to the Iranian government’s continued
claim to the Bahrain Islands on historical grounds. See John Marlowe, “Arab-Persian
Rivalry in the Persian Gulf,” in Journal of the Royal
Central Asian Society, vol. 51, no.1 (1964), p. 30.
Bin Salman stays away
from the use of the label “Arabian
Gulf” contrary to the demands of his pedigree, and avoids
using the term Persian Gulf perhaps as a concession to his publisher
in order to garner a wider appeal for the book. The result therefore
is the seemingly neutral use of term the Gulf that, in a scholarly
work, makes geographical non-sense and it is intellectually dishonest.
The absurdity of the exercise is apparent right at the start when
Bin Salman opens (p. 1) with “Iran’s long Gulf coast
and its trade through the Strait of Hormuz...” The
term Gulf as used in this phrase could have referred just as equally
to the Gulf of Oman, a body of water that received its name because
it led to Oman and not because it belonged to Oman.
Unless there
is an attempt to conform geographical identity to one’s own
selfish and egocentric vision of history, there is no compelling
reason for changing place-names. The name Persian
Gulf predated the rise of the Iranian territorial state in pre-Islamic
times and came before modern Iranian nationalism in the sixteenth
century. The term did not begin as an expression of national ownership
of the waterway, itself a legal impossibility in international
law then and now; nor can anyone given to serious scholarship accept
the validity of hyper-nationalistic statements like the one dubiously
attributed to the mid-nineteenth century Iranian chief minister
(pp. 2, 84) that all the waters and islands in the gulf were Persian,
or the view held by radical Arabs (p. 29) that the gulf is Arab.
In this book, Bin Salman harkens to a less complicated
era in Persian Gulf politics when the foreign minister of an Arab
country like
Kuwait could refer publicly to “the Persian Gulf” (p.
103) and a British scholar did not have to abandon his own precedent
in order to please a particular fad, benefactor or audience (p.
171, titles of J.B. Kelly’s works). This is not to say that
the term Gulf in the vernacular is an absurdity, which it is not.
In their internal conversations, the British civil servants uttered
the term as an intimate label for a region that shaped their common
narrative and experience. Equally, the Arabs and Iranians, particularly
the inhabitants of the coasts and islands, have used the shorthand
Khalij to refer to this body of water in their private conversations.
Bin
Salman provides an eminently readable analysis of the near-four
years that preceded the termination of Britain’s colonial
commitments in the Gulf on 1 December 1971 and the emergence of
a new order there. An admixture of references to written works,
mostly secondary sources, laced with oral cogitation and rumination
of the elder statesmen of the day, coaxes the reader into the processes
that ultimately culminated in the independence of Bahrain and Qatar,
creation of the United Arab Emirates, Iran-Sharjah jurisdictional
partition of Abu Musa Island, and establishment of exclusive Iranian
possession and jurisdiction over Tonb-e Bozorg and Tonb-e Kucheck
Islands.
The waters that Bin Salman plies in this work are
well traveled; the ground is well trodden and the field of study
abounds
in vegetation
of every description. There are however a few novelties that
Bin Salman brings to the historical account of the events of
1968-71. He highlights the contribution of the United States to
the evolution
of the Iranian-Saudi relations and the resolution of the Bahrain,
Tonbs and Abu Musa issues, all gleaned properly from interviews,
diaries and US archival documents available at the Lyndon B.
Johnson
Library.
The other gripping narrative concerns the evolution
of Iranian-Saudi relations itself and this takes up the entire
Chapter
3. The chapter
expresses in words what the book’s jacket seeks to convey
by showing side by side the likenesses of the Shah Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi of Iran and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, two men of regional
stature and international respect who, in this reviewer’s
opinion, seized the best three years of their rule to fashion an
unprecedented cooperation. The embodiment of it all was the 1969
Iran-Saudi Arabia Continental Shelf Agreement, by which Saudi Arabia
recognized Iranian sovereignty over Farsi Island and Iran recognized
Saudi sovereignty over the nearby Arabi Island. In an exceptional
display of international legal magnanimity, Saudi Arabia agreed
that Iran’s Khark Island be given some weight in determining
the dividing line between the two countries’ maritime boundary
in the middle of the Persian Gulf.
The treatment of the Bahrain
issue in Chapter 3 may give the impression that the matter was
resolved in consequence of Iranian-Saudi efforts
to resolve their immediate bilateral issues. The sovereignty of
Bahrain was never a legal issue between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Bin Salman correctly implies, without saying so in as many words,
the eventual independence of Bahrain was all along a subject of
discussion among Iranians themselves (p. 55) -- to give up a century
and a half of a paper claim over the island, at what price and
to what end?
In his treatment of the Iran-Sharjah agreement over
Abu Musa Island, Bin Salman’s sober analysis and presentation
(pp. 85-88, 96-98, 106-119) takes from the sober approach that
Iran and Sharjah
themselves adopted toward the matter near the end of Pax Britannica.
However, his overall treatment of the islands has serious problems.
From a documentary perspective, the text of the 1971 Iran-Sharjah
Memorandum of Understanding over Abu Musa was available when Bin
Salman completed his research for the book (1997) and yet he reproduced
the salient points of the memorandum in reference to a news organization’s
synopsis of it (p. 117).
There is a troubling invention by Bin
Salman -- he repeatedly
refers (e.g., pp. 2, 23, 106, 176) to the Tonbs and Abu Musa as “Hormuz
islands.” The problem with this moniker is that the three
islands have not been considered geographically or historically
as a part of the Strait of Hormuz, that distinction being reserved
exclusively for the islands of Qeshm, Hormuz, Larak and Hengam
on the northern shore and the Quoins, and a number of other smaller
islands off the Musandam Peninsula on the southern shore of the
strait. To identify the Tonbs and Abu Musa with the strait is to
misplace them geographically, as the Tonbs and Abu Musa, while
proverbially at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, are a good distance
away from the Strait of Hormuz itself. Bin Salman may have intended
to covey the message that these islands were once a part of the
Kingdom of Hormuz on the Iranian littoral, but then his message
of charity is devalued by his assertion that the Qasemi shaikhs
of Ras al-Khaimah and Sharjah succeeded to that kingdom’s
insular possessions in the eastern gulf (p. 2).
In fairness, Bin
Salman prefaces (p. 79) his treatment of the UAE and Iranian claims
to the islands by reminding the reader that
each side “use[s] historical facts in different ways to support
their respective claims.” He then jumps right into the same
trap of obfuscation and equivocation as everyone else. “While
a detailed examination and weighing of these historical claims
is beyond the scope of this book,” he writes (p. 79), “an
outline of some of the main arguments from both sides may be in
order.” In order, indeed, but it is difficult to see how
that exercise is helped by an overwhelming and exclusive reliance
on a few secondary sources with questionable objectivity.
There
are a number of factual errors and omissions that detract from
the book. The assertion is made (p. 79), without an appropriate
supporting citation, that Britain recognized the Qasimi ownership
of Abu Musa in the 1870s, at a time when the official British maps
and surveys showed the island as Iranian. On the say-so of a secondary
source, Bin Salman dates the start of the Iranian claim to the
Tonbs as 1877 (p. 79), without suggesting a basis or document for
it. The lowering of the Iranian flag from the Tonbs and Abu Musa
in 1904 is described (p. 80) as a “speedy evacuation” by
Iran, without the mention of an agreement between Iran and Britain
to that effect -- Iran had agreed to the removal of its flag and
guards from the islands in exchange for the promise that “an
opportunity would be given them of discussing the status of the
islands with the British Government... ” See J. G. Lorimer,
Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia (Calcutta,
1915) (Westmead, England: Gregg International, 1970), vol. 1, p.
2138.
Not all of Bin Salman’s sloppiness was picked up by
his reader -- Sir
Denis Wright -- whose “practiced eye” he thanks (p.
xii) for saving him from “a number of embarrassing errors.” The
populated island of Great Tonb in 1971 (when Iran landed troops
there), 1997 (when Bin Salman’s research concluded) and 2003
(when the book was published) is suddenly described (p. 81) as
a deserted island! The population of Abu Musa is given (p. 81)
as 600 Arabs, as if the northern part of the island under Iranian
jurisdiction is devoid of its several hundred inhabitants! The
preparation for the Iranian landing on the islands on 30 November
1971 is said (p. 121) to have begun in early December [1971]!
 One
major equivocation by Bin Salman relates to the notion that Iran
and Britain had embarked on a “package deal” involving
the relinquishment of the Iranian claim to Bahrain in return for
the recognition of Iranian ownership of the Tonbs and Abu Musa
(p. 47). The Shah had indicated this to be a quid pro quo arrangement
(p. 40), but Bin Salman sides with the former British ambassador
to Tehran and his reader (p. xii), Sir Denis Wright, who (p. 40)
allegedly “made it clear ... that Britain was opposed
to such package deal.” Yet when it comes to his assessment
of the conversations on the same subject between Wright and the
Iranian minister of court, Assadollah Alam, as recorded contemporaneously
in Alam’s published diaries, Bin Salman disbelieves the British
complacency in going along with a package deal (pp. 85-87).
Despite
the additional evidence of U.S. archival origin that points to
some sort of a quid pro quo arrangement (p. 40), Bin Salman
still thinks that talk about the existence of a ”package
deal” is speculation (p. 127). Yet if, in Salman’s
own words, the solution of the Bahrain problem was a compromise
(p. 48) and was sealed as a deal (p. 51), then there had to have
been some consideration of equal or greater value flowing to Iran.
Otherwise, the relinquishing of the Iranian claim to Bahrain would
have been at best a sell out and worst yet an act of unilateral
gratuitous abandonment, pure and simple. Bin Salman fails to grasp
that Britain did not become the supreme power in Southwest Asia
without some straight talk, just as it could not disengage from
this theatre without some double talk. For Wright to have rebuffed
the Shah on the “package deal” would have been Wright’s
utter failure in his diplomatic craft, just as any admission of
a package deal to Bin Salman would have been an utter failure as
a statesman.
In closing, Bin Salman credits (p. 124) the regional
political environment, fostered by the Shah and moderate Arab leaders,
for “the
ease of Iran’s seizure of the islands.” Naturally,
in Bin Salman’s world view there is no room for the possibility
that perhaps the stomaching by many Arab leaders of Iran’s
arrival at Tonbs and Abu Musa was made all the more easy because
of the demerit of Ras al-Khaimah’s claim to the Tonbs and
the fact of a prior cooperative agreement between Iran and Sharjah
over Abu Musa.
 There is a larger moral to the story in Bin Salman’s
account of the events of 1968-1971, however. There is much to be
said about
the benefits of diplomacy and mutual respect between Iran and its
Arab neighbors, to view the issues that confront Iran and the various
Arab countries of the Persian Gulf as workable bilateral issues
without the need for a generalized form of ethnic or ideological
indictment. However, the most lacking at this time in the Persian
Gulf is the sort of public courage demonstrated in 1968-71 by the
Shah of Iran, King of Saudi Arabia, and the Emirs of Kuwait, Bahrain,
Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. The unnecessary deference
by the present ruling elites to radical and ultra-orthodox among
them makes result-oriented diplomacy a dubious pursuit.
About
Guive Mirfendereski is VP and GC at Virtual Telemetry Corporation
since 2004 and is the artisan doing business as Guy
vanDeresk (trapworks.com).
Born in Tehran in 1952, he is a graduate of Georgetown University's
College of Arts and Sciences (BA),
Tufts University's Fletcher School (PhD, MALD, MA) and Boston
College Law School (JD). He is the author of A
Diplomatic History of the Caspian Sea (2001) >>> Features
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