When the Owners of the Land Write Their History
This article reclaims the history of Ahwaz from the perspective of the owners of the land, examining how Iranian occupation extended beyond territory into names, memory, identity, and the right of the Ahwazi Arab people to define themselves. From Susa and Dur Untash to Howeyzeh, Mohammerah, and 1925, it argues that recovering history is not a return to the past, but a restoration of the people’s right to their memory, identity, and future.
Ahwaz was not occupied only on the day the army entered it.
It was occupied the day the Ahwazi human being was forced to read himself in a book written by someone else.
This is the deeper crime that maps do not see.
Armies can enter the land, but occupation is not complete until it enters the human being’s interpretation of himself; until it changes his name, rearranges his memory, and convinces the world that the land that was broken had always belonged to the one who broke it.
From here, the history of Ahwaz begins as it must be written: not from the archive of occupation, nor from the map of the victor, nor from the sentence shaped in the offices of states that saw the land as oil, a passage, and a buffer, but from the first right that precedes every document: the right of the owners of the land to say who they are.
Neither the occupier, nor its ally, nor the archive of power has the right to determine the starting point of Ahwaz’s history.
The owners of the land are the owners of the narrative, and whatever is extracted from the sources of others is used as evidence inside their narrative, not as an authority above it.
The contemporary Ahwazi Arab people are not a people newly arrived on a land without history. They are the living human and civilizational continuation of the owners of this land. Susa, Elam, and Dur Untash are part of their national history and civilizational memory, not a chapter to be confiscated and attached to the history of the occupying state.
For this reason, we do not write the history of Ahwaz as a party adding its narrative to equal narratives. We write it as the owners of the land who were deprived, for more than a century, of the right to define what happened to them, and who have now returned to write the truth from within it.
The land does not lose its memory because a power renamed it.
A people does not lose its history because an occupation wrote another narrative over it.
And the human being does not become subordinate because his opponent possessed the school, the map, the archive, and the weapon.
Ahwaz was not an emptiness waiting for someone to give it meaning. It was a land with memory, water, river, name, people, rule, location, and wealth.
Before it was reduced to the name imposed by the occupation, this land was part of a deep civilizational space.
Susa is documented worldwide as a civilizational site with layers extending from the late fifth millennium BCE, bearing witness to Elamite, Mesopotamian, and other civilizational interactions.
And Dur Untash, or Chogha Zanbil, is documented as an Elamite religious city founded by the Elamite king Untash-Napirisha in approximately the thirteenth century BCE.
But the value of this memory is not in stone alone.
Its deeper value is that this land was not born from the narrative of modern occupation.
It did not begin when it was called by a name other than its own.
And it did not come into existence on the day the other placed it in his register.
The most dangerous falsification of history is not always the invention of a complete lie, but the transformation of conquest into origin, domination into legitimacy, the imposed name into truth, and the passage of empires into an eternal lineage.
For this reason, the phrase “Ahwaz was occupied” is not enough if we do not understand what occupation means.
Occupation is not merely placing a hand on the land.
It is placing a hand on the meaning of the land.
It is to say to the owner of the place: we will not take from you only the river, the oil, and the city; we will also take from you the ability to explain yourself.
Here begins the erasure of the human being.
When the Ahwazi human being is forced to read his land in the language of his occupier, the issue is not linguistic. It is a reshaping of consciousness.
The child who reads the name of his land as the occupier wrote it does not learn geography only; from the beginning, he learns that between him and his memory stands an intermediary called power. The father who loses the name of his city does not lose a word on the map, but part of the road that used to return him home. The woman who carries the memory of the house in language and story does not preserve a small family past; she preserves what the imposed maps failed to erase. As for the young man who feels that his history has been stolen and does not know where to begin the question, he is not lost because he has no roots, but because he was born inside a narrative designed to separate the root from its owner.
In this way, erasure does not become an event in the past, but a daily system that enters the school, the house, the language, and the memory, until the human being feels that his estrangement from his history is natural.
And when a people is told that its history can only be understood through the center that occupied it, the crime does not occur in the past alone; it is reproduced every day inside the mind.
The most dangerous occupation is not to take your land, but to make you search for your history in the library of the one who stole it.
That is why we do not return to the British archive to ask it for the legitimacy of Ahwaz. Britain was not an innocent witness, was not the owner of the land, and was not a trustee of the Ahwazi human being. It was a colonial power that read the region through the eye of oil, passageways, balances, and fear of major transformations. If we return to its documents, we do not return so that it may write our narrative, but so that we may read it against its intention: as a trace of the interest that conspired against the land and its owner.
British policy in the region was tied to imperial interests, to the protection of its route to India, and to the attempt to entrench its influence in Persia. It then reassessed its policy in the south during the rise of Reza Khan. Encyclopaedia Iranica notes that Britain, in its desire to support Reza Khan, effectively abandoned the protection and support it had previously extended or promised to local leaders such as Sheikh Khazal in Ahwaz.
Here we do not see a neutral document.
We see the mind of empire changing its allies when its interests change.
We see how political friendship becomes a sheet of paper that can be burned.
And we see how a great power can betray a human being and a land, then leave the next century to pay the price.
The year 1925 was not an administrative transfer.
It was not natural unification.
It was not the return of a land to a center.
It was the political breaking of an Ahwazi Arab entity, a blow against an independent Ahwazi political will, the betrayal of an ally, and the opening of a long door to erasure.
Sheikh Khazal was not a personal detail in history. He was a moment in which the tragedy of an entire land was condensed: an Ahwazi Arab ruler who was deceived, captured, removed from his land, and then ended in Tehran far from Mohammerah. The British files themselves preserve reports on Britain’s relations with Khazal; they mention his arrest, his detention in Tehran, and his death there years later. A file in the Qatar Digital Library, from British archival materials, even states that Khazal died in Tehran “most likely from poisoning” — a sign that does not give the archive the right to write the narrative, but reveals that Khazal’s end is not the story of an ordinary death as power wants to close it.
But the betrayal of Khazal was not the betrayal of one man.
It was the betrayal of a land.
The betrayal of a covenant.
And the betrayal of a people left before a project that sought to turn them from owners of a right into subordinates in the language of others.
From that moment, the deeper occupation began: a war against the name, the memory, the language, and the inner image of the Ahwazi human being.
Occupation does not steal oil alone.
It steals the language with which the human being describes himself.
It does not control the land alone.
It controls the imagination that allows a people to imagine a different future.
And it does not change names without reason.
It knows that a name is memory compressed into a word.
When Arabic names are erased, it is not only a voice on the map that is erased; the road by which the human being returns to himself is erased.
And when Ahwaz is forcibly tied to the history of the occupying center, it is not merely information being shaped; it is an epistemic cage being shaped, and the Ahwazi is asked to live inside it.
This is occupation when it reaches its most dangerous stage:
not merely to prevent you from speaking, but to place in your mouth the words with which you will speak about yourself.
But Ahwaz was not a weak land, as the imposed narrative wants to portray it. It was not without rule, without power, or without political memory. From Howeyzeh and the Musha’sha’iyyah to Mohammerah and Sheikh Khazal, forms of independent Ahwazi Arab rule extended across this land: rule standing on its own, not born of a Persian center, and not reducible to subordination to any center outside Ahwaz.
Historical references state that the Musha’sha’iyyah emerged in Howeyzeh from the fifteenth century and remained an influential local Arab force in Howeyzeh and its surroundings for many long centuries.
From here we understand the difference that the Iranian narrative tries to erase:
Empires may pressure.
They may invade.
They may bargain.
They may write documents.
But the passage of power over a land does not mean ownership of its soul.
The existence of authority in one moment does not mean ownership of all history.
And occupation does not become an origin because it has lasted long.
If conquest were lineage, no people in the world would remain owners of their history.
That is why we do not accept the question as occupation formulated it.
We do not ask: did the center allow Ahwaz to exist?
We ask: by what right did it make itself the center of a land that was not born from it?
This is not only a battle of names.
It is a battle over who possesses the right of interpretation.
Every occupation needs three crimes in order to settle:
to take the land,
to change its name,
and to make its children doubt their own narrative of it.
Ahwaz was subjected to these three crimes. The land was taken, the names were changed, and then a narrative was built around it that wants the world to see occupation as if it were nature, and to see the owner of the land as if he were a temporary objection to a history he did not write.
But the owner of the land is not temporary because he was delayed in speaking.
A human being may be prevented from writing for a time, but his prevention does not make the narrative of the one who prevented him true.
Memory may be buried beneath schools, maps, and official documents, but it does not die if someone remains who knows that the imposed name is not the name of the house.
For this reason, we do not write the history of Ahwaz today in order to add a narrative to the market of narratives.
We write it because history, when its owners do not write it, becomes a weapon in the hand of the one who stole the land.
We write it not to return to the past, but to prevent the past from remaining a prison designed by the occupier inside our consciousness.
We write it not in order to weep, but in order to understand how erasure became a system.
We write it not in order to hate anyone, but in order to refuse that injustice continue in the form of knowledge.
The Ahwazi narrative is not an emotional reaction against the Iranian narrative.
It is the return of consciousness to its owner.
It is the movement of the Ahwazi from an object explained by others into a subject that explains itself.
From a people mentioned in the margins of others into a people that places the first page in its own name.
From a human being asking the opponent for proof of his existence into a human being who says: I am the proof you tried to erase.
Here the world must hear not only the voice of anger, but the voice of moral truth:
A land that is plundered does not lose its owner.
Wealth that is stolen does not become innocent because it has entered a state budget.
A name that is imposed does not become truth because it is repeated in books.
And international silence does not turn a crime into fate.
For a long time, the world has treated Ahwaz as if it were a margin inside a larger file. But this margin is the heart of the matter. Because the Ahwazi question is not the question of a region only, but a global human question:
What happens to the human being when his land is occupied and then he is asked to believe another name for it?
What happens to memory when it is written from outside its owners?
What happens to truth when maps become stronger than testimony?
And what happens to the world when it becomes accustomed to seeing peoples through the eyes of those who oppressed them?
The silence of the world is not a vacuum.
Silence makes reality.
When the world is silent about the erasure of the name, it helps erase the human being.
And when it accepts the narrative written by occupation, it becomes part of the apparatus of knowledge that consolidates the occupation after the army has consolidated the land.
That is why we say to the world:
Do not ask the Ahwazi to prove himself in the language of the one who denied him.
Do not place the documents of power above the memory of the victim.
Do not treat the Arabic name as if it were a political position while treating the imposed name as neutrality.
Neutrality between the name and the maker of that name is not neutrality; sometimes it is the quiet continuation of the crime.
And we say to the Ahwazis:
Do not search for yourselves in the mirror made by the occupation.
Do not accept that your history begins from the moment you were broken.
Do not allow the one who changed the names of your cities to explain to you the meaning of your land.
And do not forget that a people that recovers its name begins to recover the road to its future.
Ahwaz is not a province in the imagination of the occupation.
Ahwaz is a land, a people, a memory, and a right.
It is not oil without an owner.
It is not a river without memory.
It is not a city without a name.
It is not a cause waiting for someone to bestow recognition upon it.
Ahwaz is the question they tried to bury beneath wealth.
It is the memory they tried to drown in curricula.
It is the human being they wanted to make a stranger inside his own home.
And it is the land that, every time its name was changed, returned from the mouths of its people more truthful.
From today, no narrative has the right to begin from the erasure of the owners of the land.
No history has the right to turn occupation into an origin.
And no power has the right to ask the Ahwazi to apologize because he remembered.
We do not recover Ahwaz from the past.
We recover the past from the hand of the one who turned it into a weapon against Ahwaz.
We begin from the land before occupation.
From the name before falsification.
From memory before erasure.
From Susa and Dur Untash before the land was reduced to an imported narrative.
From Howeyzeh and the Musha’sha’iyyah before it was said that Ahwaz knew no rule.
From Mohammerah and Khazal, and from the history of independent Ahwazi Arab rule, before the political breaking was reimagined as natural unification or as the return of a land to a center to which it had never belonged.
From the Ahwazi human being before the occupation tried to turn him into a number, a minority, a security problem, or a shadow inside his own homeland.
We do not write the history of Ahwaz in order to live in the past.
We write it because whoever does not possess the narrative of his past will be sentenced to live in a future written by someone else.
The Ahwazi narrative that begins today is not a call to hatred, but a call to the justice of memory.
It is not a denial of the existence of others, but a refusal to deny the owners of the land.
It is not a passing cry, but the foundation of an epistemic right: that the human being write his history from within himself, not from the mouth of the one who occupied him.
Therefore we say it as a rule, not as a metaphor:
Ahwaz does not return to history today; history returns to its owners.
When the owners of the land write their history, the past is no longer a grave for memory, but becomes the beginning of recovering the future.
When the Ahwazi recovers his name, he does not recover a word only; he recovers the road to himself.
And when he rejects the narrative that made him subordinate, he does not reject a sentence in a book; he rejects the prison that was built inside his consciousness.
This is the beginning.
From now on, we do not read Ahwaz as the occupation wanted it to be read.
We read it as it knows itself.
As its people carried it in memory when maps tried to betray them.
And as it will be written anew, not by the hand of the one who occupied it, but by the hand of the one who remained a witness to it, an inheritor of it, and responsible before it.
When the owners of the land write their history, erasure becomes impossible.
— Hamid Shayea Al-Ahwazi —
13.8.2026
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