Beatrice Nicolini
Introduction
Qeshm is the largest island in the Persian Gulf and occupies a position of singular historiographical ambiguity. Administered today as part of Iran's Hormozgan province, the island belonged for close to a century to the Omani sphere of authority projected across the Persian coast by the Al Bu Said dynasty. This layered political history has left Qeshm with an identity that resists a single national narrative. The island's past as an Omani dependency, its long function as a node of the Indian Ocean slave trade that produced a distinct Afro-descendant population, and its present role as the fulcrum of Iranian military strategy in the Strait of Hormuz together make Qeshm a case study in the entanglement of Gulf history and contemporary geopolitics. Despite this significance, the island remains one of the least studied territories of the Western Indian Ocean world, a gap this article seeks to outline alongside the historical and strategic dimensions that make Qeshm worthy of far greater scholarly attention.
Qeshm under Omani rule
The Omani presence on Qeshm must be situated within the broader expansion of the Al Bu Said dynasty across the Persian littoral during the second half of the eighteenth century. Ahmad bin Said Al Busaidi founded the dynasty in Oman in 1744 after expelling Persian forces from Suhar, and his successors extended Omani maritime power northward across the Gulf. In 1793 Sultan bin Ahmad, then Imam of Muscat, occupied both Qeshm and the neighbouring island of Hormuz, concluding an arrangement with the Persian authorities that granted Muscat control over Bandar Abbas and its dependent coastline from Jask to Bandar Lengeh. This was not an isolated episode of conquest but the culmination of decades of Omani naval assertiveness in the region: Dutch commercial records already attest to Omani attacks on Qeshm in 1712 and 1717, and Oman's rivalry with the Qawasim of Ras al-Khaimah for control of the island persisted through much of the century. Omani administration of Qeshm and the adjacent Persian ports continued under Said bin Sultan, whose long reign in the first half of the nineteenth century represented the apex of Al Bu Said maritime power stretching from East Africa to the Persian coast. Omani control over Bandar Abbas, Hormuz, and Qeshm persisted, with fluctuating degrees of effective authority, until 1868, when the Qajar government reasserted direct Persian sovereignty and terminated the arrangement that had allowed Muscat to farm the customs revenues of these ports. The episode remains a rare instance in modern Gulf history of an Arabian polity holding formal or quasi-formal jurisdiction over territory on the Persian shore, and it explains why Qeshm continues to appear, however marginally, in the historiography of the Omani Empire rather than exclusively in that of Iran.
The Afro-descendant community of Qeshm
Qeshm's maritime position at the narrows of Hormuz made it, together with Bandar Abbas and Bandar Lengeh, one of the principal points of entry for the Indian Ocean slave trade that carried enslaved East Africans, largely Bantu-speaking populations from the Zanj coast and from present-day Mozambique, Tanzania, and Malawi, into southern Persia between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The descendants of these forced migrations constitute today a recognisable Afro-Iranian population concentrated along the Hormozgan coast and on Qeshm itself. Locally this community and its members are referred to by terms rooted directly in the memory of that trade: Zangi, derived from Zanzibar as the port of departure, and the related expression Siah-e Zangi, meaning literally the Black Zanzibari, which continues to circulate in southern Iranian vernacular and in Bandari folk song. The community is also frequently designated collectively as Afro-Iranian, and in some coastal usages as Bambasi. Their most visible cultural inheritance is the zar, a healing practice centred on spirit possession and exorcism through drumming, song, and trance, led by ritual specialists known as Baba Zar and Mama Zar, and closely related to comparable practices documented among East African diaspora populations in Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Somalia. A cognate tradition, gowati, ascribes healing properties to dance and has fed directly into the development of Bandari music, the folk idiom of the Hormozgan coast. The Iranian historian Behnaz Mirzai has done more than any other scholar to document this community, notably through her documentary film on Afro-Iranian life centred on interviews conducted with zar practitioners on Qeshm, work that situates the island squarely within the historiography of abolition and diaspora in the Western Indian Ocean.
The scarcity of the existing literature
Notwithstanding its historical and demographic significance, Qeshm has attracted remarkably little sustained scholarly attention. The only monograph dedicated specifically to the island's history, authored by Willem Floor and Daniel Potts, was published as recently as the early 2020s and describes itself, accurately, as the first book-length treatment of Qeshm's past. The relevant entry in the Encyclopaedia Iranica offers a dense chronological reconstruction drawing on Dutch and English East India Company records but remains a reference article rather than an interpretive study. On the question of the Afro-Iranian population specifically, the available scholarship is thinner still and is concentrated almost entirely on the anthropology and clinical psychiatry of the zar ritual rather than on the social or economic history of the community that practises it. Historical work connecting Qeshm's Afro-descendant population to the broader Indian Ocean slave trade and to comparable abolitionist trajectories in Zanzibar, Oman, and the Swahili coast remains fragmentary and largely absent from mainstream Gulf historiography, which has tended to privilege the Arabian shore over the Persian one and Zanzibar over its northern Indian Ocean counterparts. This asymmetry is compounded by the constraints on archival access within Iran itself and by the linguistic barriers that separate Persian-language sources from the Arabic and English documentation more commonly used in Indian Ocean slavery studies. The result is a historiographical lacuna that leaves Qeshm simultaneously well attested in commercial and diplomatic records of the early modern period and almost invisible in the social history of the populations who actually inhabited it.
The contemporary geostrategic situation
Qeshm's position at the northern edge of the Strait of Hormuz has made it central to Iran's strategy of asymmetric control over the waterway through which roughly a quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade and a fifth of global liquefied natural gas transit. The island falls within the jurisdiction of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy's Second Khatam al-Anbiya maritime region and hosts radar installations, unmanned aerial vehicle bases, and naval facilities used to monitor and, when required, to interdict commercial shipping passing through the strait. This militarised function moved from latent capability to active use during the Iran war that began in February 2026, when Israeli and American strikes on Iranian territory prompted Tehran to close the Strait of Hormuz, mine sections of the waterway, and attack merchant vessels, precipitating a prolonged crisis in global energy markets. Qeshm was struck directly by American forces during the conflict, including an attack on a desalination plant that disrupted freshwater supplies to dozens of villages, and the island's radar and drone infrastructure was targeted in subsequent bombing campaigns aimed at degrading Iran's capacity to threaten shipping in the strait. A series of ceasefires negotiated through Pakistani and Omani mediation repeatedly broke down over the following months, with the United States periodically reimposing a naval blockade of Iranian ports. As of August 2026 negotiations continue, mediated by Oman, over temporary arrangements to regulate transit through the strait, while Iran has sought to institutionalise its claim to regulatory authority over the waterway through the creation of a Persian Gulf Strait Authority defining a corridor bounded in the west by the tip of Qeshm itself. The island thus embodies, in strikingly literal terms, the continuity between its historical function as a contested frontier of Gulf power and its present role as the fulcrum of one of the most consequential maritime chokepoints in the global economy.
Conclusion
Qeshm offers a rare vantage point from which to observe the long durée of Gulf history compressed into a single, modest-sized island. Its decades under Omani administration complicate any straightforward national narrative of the Persian Gulf's political geography, while its Afro-descendant population, still identifiable through the vocabulary of Zangi and Siah-e Zangi and through the living practice of the zar, testifies to the island's embeddedness in the wider Indian Ocean world of slavery and its afterlives. That this layered past remains so thinly documented, in contrast with the intensity of scholarly and journalistic attention now directed at Qeshm's military role in the Strait of Hormuz crisis, is itself a comment on the priorities that continue to shape Gulf historiography. A fuller integration of Qeshm's Omani, Afro-Iranian, and strategic dimensions into a single historical frame remains, for the moment, an agenda still largely to be written.
Beatrice Nicolini è professoressa ordinaria di Storia dell'Africa. Insegna Storia e istituzioni dell'Africa; Religioni, conflitti e schiavitù e Mondo dell'Oceano Indiano all'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.
