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After the fracas over the Gulf of Mexico, United States President Donald Trump has waded into yet another contentious naming dispute. This time, it is the one over the Persian Gulf, the body of water that separates the Iranian Plateau from the Arabian Peninsula.
The US President recently told reporters that he planned to make a final decision regarding the name of the water body during his visit to West Asia from May 13-16, according to media reports.
Trump will be visiting Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, all Arab states located along the Gulf, who have preferred the term ‘Arabian Gulf’ (al-Khalij al-Arabi) over the term ‘Persian Gulf’ to refer to the water body.
Polish Navy officer, scholar and professor of public international maritime law, Dariusz Rafał Bugajski, in his 2016 paper The Persian Gulf in the light of law of the sea, says that the Persian Gulf (along with the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, etc.) belongs to a group of “enclosed or semi enclosed seas” under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
These bodies of water are defined as “a gulf, basin or sea surrounded by two or more States and connected to another sea or the ocean by a narrow outlet or consisting entirely or primarily of the territorial seas and exclusive economic zones of two or more coastal States”.
The Persian Gulf is geologically very young, having been formed only 15,000 years ago. Its maximum width is 338 km, and the length to its northern coast is nominally almost 1,000 km, he notes.
The Gulf is a shallow body of water, with a mean depth of 50 metres and maximum 90 metres. Its surface area is approximately 251,000 square kilometres.
The Persian Gulf is named after the Iranian province of ‘Pars’, today called ‘Fars’, which gave ancient Persia its name and was the heartland of the Achaemenids and Sassanids.
“The Persians made themselves important in world history with the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century B.C.E. Their rise and center of power was from the province of Fars (Pars/ Persis) in the southwestern region of the Iranian plateau. Consequently, in the Greek sources, the body of water that bordered this province came to be known as the Persian Gulf. The use of ethnic names for bodies of water certainly presumes either that group’s dominance of the landmass or its seafaring activity. For the Persian Gulf, both are true,” Touraj Daryaee notes in The Persian Gulf Trade in Late Antiquity.
The body of water continued to be called the Persian Gulf or ‘Bahr Fars’, the Persian Sea, even after Arab Muslims conquered the Sassanid Empire of Iran in the 600s.
The roots of the current naming dispute between Iran and Arab nations, as per Bugajski, are less than a century old: “The name “Persian Gulf” is historical and probably came into use at the time of Darius I (522-486 B.C.). In possibly every map printed before 1960 and in most modern international treaties, documents and maps, this body of water is known under the name “Persian Gulf”, reflecting traditional usage since the Greek geographers Strabo and Ptolemy, and the geopolitical realities of the time with the powerful Persian.”
He adds that it was the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who first started a campaign to replace the term ‘Persian Gulf’ with ‘Arabian Gulf’ or ‘Arab Gulf’ starting in the 1950s. Nasser aimed at promoting pan-Arabism and opposing an Iranian hegemony in the region, according to Bugajski.
“Not until the early 1960s did a major new development occur with the adoption, by the Arab states bordering the Gulf, of the expression al-Khalij al-Arabi as a weapon in the psychological war with Iran for the political influence in the Gulf. The name “Gulf of Iran” is used by the International Hydrographic Organization,” concludes Bugajski.