Khuzestan province
Khuzestan province is one of the 31 Provinces of Iran. Located in the southwest of the country, the province borders Iraq and the Persian Gulf, covering an area of. Its capital is the city of Ahvaz. Since 2014, it has been part of Iran's Region 4.
Khuzestan comprises much of what historians refer to as ancient Elam, whose capital was at Susa. It was once one of the most important regions in the Ancient Near East.
Etymology
The Old Persian term for Elam was Hujiyā when they conquered it from the Elamites. This element is present in the modern name. Khuzestan, meaning "the Land of the Khuz," refers to the original inhabitants of this province. In the Achaemenid Empire, this term is Huza or Huja, as in the inscription on the tomb of Darius the Great at Naqsh-e Rostam. They are the "Shushan" of Hebrew sources, a borrowing from Elamite Šuša. In Middle Persian, the term evolved into "Khuz" and "Kuzi." The pre-Islamic Partho-Sasanian inscriptions give the province the name Khwuzestan. The name of the city of Ahvaz also has the same origin as the name Khuzestan, being an Arabic broken plural from the compound name, "Suq al-Ahvaz" "Market of the Huzi". This was the medieval name of the town that replaced the pre-Islamic name.The entire province was still known as "the Khudhi" or "the Khuji" until the reign of the Safavid king Tahmasp I and, in general, the course of the 16th century. The southern half of the province—south, southwest of the Ahvaz Ridge, had come by the 17th century to be known, at least to the imperial Safavid chancery, as Arabistan. A contemporaneous history, the Tarikh-e Alam-ara-ye Abbasi by Iskandar Beg Munshi, written during the reign of Abbas the Great, regularly refers to the southern part of Khuzestan as "Arabistan". The northern half continued to be called Khuzestan. In 1925, the entire province regained its old name, and the term Arabistan was dropped.
There is also a very old folk etymology which maintains the word "khuz" stands for sugar and "Khuzi" for people who make raw sugar. The province has been a cane sugar-producing area since the late Sassanian times, such as the sugar cane fields of the Dez River side in Dezful. Khuzhestanis cultivate sugarcane even today in Haft Tepe. The province's name in Syriac is Beth Huzaye.
History
Antiquity
The province of Khuzestan is one of the centres of ancient civilization, and one of the most important regions of the Ancient Near East, based around Susa. The first large scale empire based here was that of the powerful 4th millennium BC Elamites.Archeological ruins verify the entire province of Khuzestan to be home to the Elamite civilization, a non-Semitic, and non-Indo-European-speaking kingdom, and
"the earliest civilization of Persia". The name Khuzestan is derived from the Elamite, likely pronounced /xuʒa/, later Middle Persian Hūzīg, Arabic al-Xūzīya.
In fact, in the words of Elton L. Daniel, the Elamites were "the founders of the first 'Iranian' empire in the geographic sense." Hence the central geopolitical significance of Khuzestan, the seat of Iran's first empire.
In 640 BC, the Elamites were defeated by Ashurbanipal, coming under the rule of the Assyrians who brought destruction upon Susa and Chogha Zanbil. But in 538 BC, Cyrus the Great was able to re-conquer the Elamite lands after nearly 80 years of Median rule. The city of Susa was then proclaimed as one of the Achaemenid capitals. Darius the Great then erected a grand palace known as Apadana there in 521 BC. But this astonishing period of glory and splendor of the Achaemenian dynasty came to an end by the conquests of Alexander of Macedon. The Susa weddings was arranged by Alexander in 324 BC in Susa, where mass weddings took place between the Persians and the Macedonians. After Alexander, the Seleucid dynasty came to rule the area.
As the Seleucid dynasty weakened, Mehrdad I the Parthian, gained ascendency over the region. During the Sassanid dynasty this area thrived tremendously and flourished, and this dynasty was responsible for the many constructions that were erected in Ahvaz, Shushtar, and the north of Andimeshk.
During the early years of the reign of Shapur II, Arabs crossed the Persian Gulf from Bahrain to "Ardashir-Khora" of Fars and raided the interior. In retaliation, Shapur II led an expedition through Bahrain, defeated the combined forces of the Arab tribes of "Taghleb", "Bakr bin Wael", and "Abd Al-Qays" and advanced temporarily into Yamama in central Najd. The Sassanids resettled these tribes in Kerman and Ahvaz. Arabs named Shapur II, as "Shabur Dhul-aktāf" after this battle.
The existence of prominent scientific and cultural centers such as Academy of Gundishapur which gathered distinguished medical scientists from Egypt, the Byzantine Empire, and Rome, shows the importance and prosperity of this region during this era. The Jondi-Shapur Medical School was founded by the order of Shapur I. It was repaired and restored by Shapur II and was completed and expanded during the reign of Anushirvan.
Muslim conquest of Khuzestan
The Muslim conquest of Khuzestan took place in 639 AD under the command of Abu Musa al-Ash'ari from Basra, who drove the Persian satrap Hormuzan out of Ahvaz. Susa later fell, so Hormuzan fled to Shushtar. There his forces were besieged by Abu Musa for 18 months. Shushtar finally fell in 642 AD; the Khuzistan Chronicle records that an unknown Arab, living in the city, befriended a man in the army, and dug tunnels through the wall in return for a third of the spoil. The Basrans purged the Nestorians—the Exegete of the city and the Bishop of Hormizd, and all their students—but kept Hormuzan alive.There followed the conquests of Gundeshapur and of many other districts along the Tigris. The Battle of Nahāvand finally secured Khuzestan for the Muslim armies.
During the Muslim conquest the Sassanids were allied with non-Muslim Arab tribes, which implies that those wars were religious, rather than national. For instance in 633–634, Khaled ibn Walid leader of the Muslim Army, defeated a force of the Sassanids' Arab auxiliaries from the tribes of Bakr, 'Ejl, Taghleb and Namer at 'Ayn Al-Tamr.
The Muslim settlements by military garrisons in southern Iran was soon followed by other types of expansion. Some families, for example, took the opportunity to gain control of private estates. Like the rest of Iran, the Muslim conquest thus brought Khuzestan under the rule of the Arabs of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, until Ya'qub bin Laith as-Saffar, from southeastern Iran, raised the flag of independence once more, and ultimately regained control over Khuzestan, among other parts of Iran, founding the short-lived Saffarid dynasty. From that point on, Iranian dynasties would continue to rule the region in succession as an important part of Iran.
In the Umayyad period, large groups of nomads from the Hanifa, Banu Tamim, and Abd al-Qays tribes crossed the Arabian Gulf and occupied some of the richest Basran territories around Ahvaz and in Fars during the Second Fitna in 661–665 / 680–684 AD.
During the Abbasid period, in the second half of the 10th century, the Assad tribe, taking advantage of quarrels under the Buwayhids, penetrated into Khuzestan, where a group of Tamim had been living since pre-Islamic times. However, following the fall of the Abbasid dynasty, the flow of Arab immigrants into Persia gradually diminished, but it nonetheless continued. In the latter part of the 16th century, the Bani Kaab, from Kuwait, settled in Khuzestan. And during the succeeding centuries, more Arab tribes moved from southern Iraq to Khuzestan.
Qajar period
According to C.E. Bosworth in Encyclopædia Iranica, under the Qajar dynasty "the province was known, as in Safavid times, as Arabistan, and during the Qajar period was administratively a governor-generalate." Half of Khuzestan was not known as Arabistan. Khuzestan's northern, more populous parts, with the capital at Shushtar, retained the old name, but also occasionally was incorporated into the district of the Greater Lur due to the large Bakhtiari population in half of Khuzestan.In 1856, in the course of the Anglo-Persian War over the city of Herat, the British naval forces sailed up the Karun river all the way to Ahvaz. However, in the settlement that followed, they evacuated the province. Some tribal forces, such as those led by Sheikh Jabir al-Kaabi, the Sheikh of Mohammerah, fared better in opposing the invading British forces than those dispatched by the central government, which was quite feeble. But, the point of the invasion of the province and other coastal regions of southern Persia/Iran were to force the evacuation of Herat by the Persians and not the permanent occupation of these regions.
Pahlavi era
In the two decades before 1925, although nominally part of Persian territory, the western part of Khuzestan known as the Emirate of Muhammara functioned for many years effectively as an autonomous emirate known as "Arabistan". The eastern part of Khuzestan was governed by Bakhtiari khans. Following Sheikh Khazʽal Ibn Jabir's rebellion, the western part of Khuzestan's emirate was dissolved by Reza Shah government in 1925, along with other autonomous regions of Persia, in a bid to centralize the state. In response Sheikh Khaz'al of Muhammerah initiated a rebellion, which was quickly crushed by the newly installed Pahlavi dynasty with minimal casualties. A low level conflict between the central Iranian government and the Arab nationalists of the province continued since.The name of 'Khuzistan' came to be applied to the entire territory by 1936. Over the next decades of the Pahlavi rule, the province of Khuzestan remained relatively quiet, gaining to hold an important economic and defensive strategic position.