Each of Iran’s recent wars has been quick to acquire a name. On the day Israel stopped bombing Iran in June 2025, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to declare the conflict over and, to nobody’s surprise, place himself at the center of the story. “I would like to congratulate both Countries,” he said, “Israel and Iran, on having the Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence to end, what should be called, ‘THE 12 DAY WAR.’”

Nine months later, on February 28, Israel and the United States bombed Iran again. By the end of the conflict’s first week, Iran’s state media had begun calling it the War of Ramadan. The bombing had started halfway through the holy month, and the name was meant to cast Iran’s defense in a sacred light. The conflict lasted forty days. Today, whether you call it the Forty-Day War or the War of Ramadan says a great deal about where you stand politically.

On July 8 the fragile cease-fire collapsed. Over the past few days the US has resumed heavy bombing, almost all of it concentrated along Iran’s southern edge, the thousand-mile coastline stretching from Abadan to Chabahar, with the apparent aim of asserting control over the Strait of Hormuz. The naming machines are already at work: in the Persian-language media, the label I have encountered most often is the War of the South.

There is no malice in the name, and it is true that so far the south has been the US’s primary target. But the bombing of Tehran was never described as an attack on the north, nor were the bombings of Isfahan and Yazd called attacks on the center. If the headlines emphasize the geography in just this case, it is in part because the south has long had a particular set of associations in Iranian culture.

In his book Go East, Young Man the historian Richard V. Francaviglia shows how, over the last two centuries, Americans fashioned their own Orient in the West, viewing the region­’s deserts and palm trees through the prism of the same romantic and aesthetic fantasies that Europeans had long projected onto the East.¹ By the late nineteenth century the references were everywhere. Utopian communities called themselves Mecca. In The Innocents Abroad Mark Twain mused that the Arab men he encountered in Syria “reminded me much of Indians” and called the terrain in rural Greece a “rougher piece of country than exists any where else outside of the State of Nevada.” Popular songs about westward journeys made much use of images like the one at the center of “Midnight at the Oasis,” in which Maria Muldaur sings, “I’ll be your belly dancer, prancer, and you can be my sheik.”

Reading Francaviglia’s book reminded me of my own confusion when I used to hear people in the north of Iran, and Tehran in particular, talk about the south. During my years in the capital the dominant image of the south among northerners was one of abundance and sensuality: endless palm groves, vast, pristine beaches, fiery cuisine, lustful men. The south is also synonymous with the Iranian oil economy, which puts it in the role both of the affectionate mother that feeds the rest of the country and of the gregarious father who always picks up the check. Northerners tend, meanwhile, to exoticize practices common in the south—especially zār rituals related to spirit possession—that bear the traces of African influences due to the long history of sea commerce and the slave trade in the Gulf of Aden and Persian Gulf. The south is the land of passion and beauty as opposed to the north’s dull, rational, colder metropolises, the region where magic and reality grow inseparable.

I am a full-on southerner. I grew up in Ahvaz, and my parents grew up in Abadan. Both my grandmothers were from Bushehr, both my grandfathers from Khuzestan. My father’s family comes from the port of Daylam, north of Bushehr, where many of his cousins spent their lives as fishermen.

Ahvaz lay at the heart of the territory Saddam Hussein sought to annex during the Iran–Iraq war. Throughout the war the city was bombed relentlessly. Every summer, once school was out, my family escaped the air raids and drove to Daylam. My father’s cousins, feeling obliged to entertain the war-stricken child, often took me with them on fishing trips on the Persian Gulf.

We would head out at dawn, as the sun just started emerging on the horizon. For the first couple hours the sea was gentle, the breeze cool, the water calm and brass-colored. Then the sun climbed higher, beating down mercilessly until the seascape became a wet hell. The humidity grew so oppressive that not a drop of sweat could evaporate. I would sit in the boat gasping for air, counting the minutes until we returned to shore.

But with Abdolhossein, the youngest of my father’s cousins, the sea became something else. Unlike the quiet, stoic fishermen around him, Abdolhossein was wiry and restless, in constant conversation with the world. On bad days he scolded the sea for its stinginess and pleaded with it to be more generous tomorrow. He read every wind as though it carried a secret message about the day’s catch, grimacing at one breeze and welcoming another.

While we waited for the nets, Abdolhossein told stories. He had a born storyteller’s instinct for suspense and drama and an old man’s love of local folklore. He told me many tales about cunning old women, young girls in search of love, penniless young men who stumbled on cursed treasure. I no longer remember the plots, but I remember the pattern: ordinary people would be going about their quiet lives in a southern village when a div would appear and throw the world into chaos.

In classical Persian mythology, the div is an evil supernatural being, usually imagined as a horned humanoid monster. In southern folklore the div may be a giant crab, an enormous fish, a sea dragon, or an ordinary but deceitful traveler. What these incarnations have in common is that they are strangers. Whether it comes out of the sea to the south or across the land from the north, the div is always an outsider, and its arrival always spells trouble.

A cursory survey of the south’s past sheds some light on why the local folklore is replete with unwelcome foreigners who inflict misery. For most of its modern history, the south of Iran has been subject to two forms of colonialism: an internal one from the land and an external one from the sea.

The inland div has come in all sorts of shapes over the centuries, but to southerners it has always done the same thing: extract the resources beneath their feet for transport north without benefit to the local community. In 1908 the discovery of oil in Khuzestan set off a scramble to loot the region, which spread across the south after offshore reserves were found in the Iranian waters of the Persian Gulf in the 1960s. I was surrounded by oil workers throughout my childhood and adolescence, and I always heard the same refrain from them: whether the boss was British Petroleum, the National Iranian Oil Company, or the Petroleum Ministry, the fact was that local workers toiled away in unbearable conditions to produce oil while a complicated, mysterious bureaucracy took the fruit of their labor and transported it elsewhere, paying them modest wages and making exorbitant profits.

The other div, the intruder from the sea, offers a metaphor for Western colonialism. The Portuguese came first, in the sixteenth century, during the age of Vasco da Gama and global exploration. They took Hormuz Island, which gave them a crucial perch in the strait and thus in the main commercial route between India and Europe. About a century later the Safavid king Shah Abbas joined forces with the British army and drove them out. If you were to visit those islands now, some four centuries later, you would still see the ruins of the Portuguese fortress and its abandoned cannons.

Then came the British. The British East India Company had a longstanding presence in southern Iran starting in the seventeenth century, and to protect their business they occasionally resorted to military force. The most egregious case happened during World War I, when the Germans also set their sights on the south, especially the port of Bushehr. In the summer of 1915 the British Indian Army arrived there, both to fight the German influence and to take advantage of the weakness of the ruling Qajar monarchy in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution. They took the city without much trouble. Their short occupation, however, was marred by regular ambushes and surprise attacks by local resistance networks, most effectively from Tangestan, the stronghold of the Iranian military leader Rais-Ali Delvari. Eventually the British decided that occupying Bushehr was not worth the cost. To the southerners there is nothing new about the American military presence in the south: yet another div threatening to conqueror the region from the sea.

Iranian literature has its own version of Southern Gothic. One of its pioneers was Gholam Hossein Sa’edi, who wasn’t from the south but understood it better than most. Each of the linked stories that comprise his masterpiece, a slim collection called Fear and Trembling (1968), takes place in a small coastal village populated by kind, naïve fishermen. Then an intruder, a modern div, shows up and wreaks havoc.

The second story’s intruders arrive in a pickup truck, one wearing a military helmet and the other sporting a beard, marking him as a member of the clergy. They come from the city, and the mullah has gone from village to village in the south, staying only in places that offer “good women, good dates, good water.” It turns out that in each village he marries one of the women, impregnates her, and disappears. 

In the village at the center of the story, the mullah eats like a glutton while dispensing nuggets of wisdom and theological bloviations to impress the locals. He marries a young woman and leaves shortly after she becomes pregnant. Near the end of the story she gives birth to a monster, a baby “with a giant head and tiny legs and a massive mole on its back from which jutted out long black hair. Beneath the mole, a soft bulge, the shape of a cow’s eye, observed the world.”

The 1979 revolution and the subsequent Iran–Iraq War made this story painfully prescient. The corrupt, extremist clergy and the Revolutionary Guards forged a disastrous alliance, prolonging the war with Iraq, closing off every avenue to reform, embarking on military adventures across the region, and massacring peaceful protesters. In the past weeks these two forces did their part to undermine the fragile cease-fire that had protected Iran from further US–Israeli attacks and generated the hope for a more permanent settlement. Rather than work toward a lasting peace, they called for revenge and dispatched their supporters to hold loud rallies in the streets of Tehran. Eventually, under unclear circumstances, the Revolutionary Guards seem to have attacked oil tankers in Omani waters, giving the Trump administration a pretense for escalation. Once the hostilities resumed, those warmongers retreated to their well-ventilated houses in Tehran, abandoning southerners to unbearable heat, power outages, and American bombs. The div from the north was at it again.

The other div, the stranger from the sea, appears in the fourth story of Fear and Trembling. At the opening of the narration, two villagers stand on the shore talking. “The thing about the sea is that it’s never honest,” one says. “It has two faces. One day it’s empty, one day it’s full. It’s like it’s messing with you.” At that moment they see a child walk on the water toward them and step onto the shore. The child wears a thin, two-colored shirt and has curly hair. His fair skin glows in the sun. Even his eyes are different colors. When they ask him who his parents are and how he got there, he only laughs or winces in response.

They take the child to the village, feed and clothe him, and wonder what to do with him. At night he wanders through the town, banging on doors and waking everyone up, yet no one can catch him. The villagers, unsettled by the child’s appetite and his restlessness, decide to get rid of him by taking him out of the village and abandoning him on the road. They do so and return home, only to find him already walking back toward the village.

The allusions are clear. The light-skinned, innocent-looking child who walks on water like Jesus, arrives from the sea, takes advantage of local hospitality, and ends up filling the villagers with a kind of supernatural dread calls to mind the Portuguese, the British, and now the Americans, who still make pretensions to liberating the oppressed masses of the world—from Vietnam to Iraq and Iran—even as they wreak havoc. “The air was clear,” Sa’edi ends the fourth story, after the kid returns to the village, “and something was laughing cheerfully out of the water. The men, anxious and terrified, huddled together and stared at the sea, their eyes filled with misery.”