Shoushtari people

The Shoushtari people, or Shushtaris () are the native, long-settled inhabitants of the city of Shoushtar in Khuzestan province, south-western Iran, together with their descendants elsewhere in Iran and abroad. They are traditionally distinguished from the Bakhtiari and Arab populations of the surrounding region by their own vernacular, the Shoushtari dialect, a Southwestern Iranian variety closely related to the Dezfuli of neighbouring Dezful.

In the linguistic geography of Khuzestan, where most of the settled Iranian population speaks Lori dialects and the plains to the south and west are largely Arab, Shoushtar and Dezful have been described as two non-Lori "islands". Shoushtar was for many centuries the principal town of northern Khuzestan, and from the early modern period onward families from the city were prominent in Shia scholarship and in trade networks that reached Basra, the shrine cities of Iraq and the Indian subcontinent.

Name and definition

In Persian, Šuštari (and its Arabic equivalent al-Tustari, from the Arabic name of the city, Tustar) is a relational adjective (nisba) meaning "of Shoushtar". The word is therefore used in two senses: loosely, for anyone from the city regardless of origin, and more narrowly, for the native urban community whose mother tongue is the Shoushtari dialect, as distinct from Bakhtiari and Arab residents of the city and county. Many historical figures are known by the nisba Shoushtari or Tustari, including members of families that had lived outside Shoushtar for generations.

History

Antiquity

Shoushtar lies on the Karun river at the eastern edge of the Susiana plain, the historical heartland of Elam. The city's prosperity was built on an elaborate system of water management. The Shoushtar Historical Hydraulic System, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009, consists of diversion canals, weirs, bridge-dams, tunnels and watermills. UNESCO dates the system in its present form to the 3rd century CE, probably on foundations going back to the 5th century BCE, and describes it as drawing on Elamite and Mesopotamian expertise, with possible Nabataean and Roman influence. It supplied the town with water, powered mills, supported fish farming, river transport and defence, and irrigated some 40,000 hectares of farmland in the plain south of the city known as Mianab.

Early Islamic and medieval periods

During the Muslim conquest of Persia, the Sasanian commander Hormuzan withdrew to Shoushtar, where he was besieged for a long period by Basran forces under Abu Musa al-Ash'ari. The city fell in 642 (AH 21), reportedly after a defender opened the gates in exchange for his own safety; Hormuzan surrendered and was sent to Medina. (See Siege of Shoushtar.)

Under the caliphate the town remained an important provincial centre, noted for its silks and agricultural produce, although it was overshadowed at times by Ahvaz and Gundeshapur. Its irrigated fields were known for rice, sugarcane and orchards. Early Arabic geographers reported that, besides Arabic and Persian, the people of Khuzestan spoke a distinct language called Huzi; the historian 'Kevin van Bladel' has argued that this was the last attested form of Elamite. (See Language below for its relation to modern Shoushtari.)

Shoushtar produced several figures of wider Islamic importance in this period, most notably the early Sufi master Sahl al-Tustari (d. c. 896), who lived a secluded life in the town and was an early teacher of al-Hallaj. A wealthy Karaite Jewish merchant family from the town, known as the Tustaris, later became influential in Fatimid Egypt.

Safavid to Qajar periods

Unlike central Mesopotamia, Khuzestan was not badly damaged by the Mongol invasions, and Shoushtar remained a relatively prosperous provincial centre into the 19th century. In the Safavid era the city became a centre of Twelver Shia learning. The scholar Ni'mat Allah al-Jaza'iri (d. 1701), a student of Mohammad-Baqer Majlesi, served as Shaykh al-Islam of Shoushtar, and his descendants, the Jazayeri family, became one of the leading families of the city; for generations its merchants and scholars extended their networks as far as India.

Like several other Iranian towns, Shoushtar was divided between the rival urban moieties known as Haydaris and Ne'matis, whose members clashed periodically, especially during religious processions.

The 19th century brought severe setbacks. A cholera epidemic in 1831, remembered locally as "the plague of Shoushtar", caused heavy loss of life; among other effects, it killed the entire Mandaean priesthood of the town, which had been an important Mandaean religious and scribal centre. Further outbreaks of disease and two floods that breached the Band-e Kaisar weir reduced the cultivable land south of the city and contributed to its decline.

Modern period

The opening of the lower Karun to international navigation in 1888 led to the growth of a new river port at Ahvaz (then called Bandar-e Naseri). For a time Shoushtar benefited as the starting point of a caravan road to Isfahan, and in 1890 the Lynch company received a concession to build a road from Ahvaz to Shoushtar. Oil production at Masjed Soleyman from 1908 and the arrival of the Trans-Iranian Railway at Ahvaz in 1929 shifted the economic centre of the province southward. The seat of the provincial government was moved from Shoushtar to Ahvaz in 1926, and by the Second World War Ahvaz had become the leading town of interior Khuzestan. These changes encouraged migration of Shushtaris to Ahvaz, Masjed Soleyman and other growing towns of the province.

Language

The traditional language of the Shushtaris is the Shoushtari dialect. Linguist Colin MacKinnon, whose 1974 dissertation remains the principal description of the dialect, classifies Shoushtari and Dezfuli as closely related varieties of the Southwest Iranian type that diverge sharply from standard Persian in sound system, grammar and vocabulary, above all in the verb. They share features with neighbouring Lori dialects but are distinct from them, and the differences between Shoushtari and Dezfuli arise mainly from low-level sound changes; Shoushtari, for example, has a six-vowel system where Dezfuli has seven. Classifications differ: MacKinnon's Iranica entry calls them Persian dialects, his survey of the dialects of Khuzestan groups them with Lori, and Glottolog places them in a "Luric–Dezfulic" group.

Characteristic features described by MacKinnon include:

  • an unstressed prefix be- marking the present indicative and past continuous (bebīnom "I see"), whereas the present subjunctive has no prefix (bīnom);
  • an "inchoative" verb formation that expresses change of state and continues a Middle Persian suffix, used instead of Persian šodan "to become";
  • personal pronouns such as mo "I", amā "we" and šamā "you (pl.)";
  • distinctive Western Iranian vocabulary such as piā "man", zūna "wife", bua "father", sī "for", mì "in" and tar- "to be able".

Because Khuzestan was home to the Khuzi language in the early Islamic period, some local authors have suggested that Shoushtari preserves a Khuzi or Elamite substratum. Academic descriptions, however, derive the Shoushtari vowel system from that of early New Persian, and no Khuzi substrate in the modern dialect has been demonstrated.

No reliable count of speakers exists, and population figures for Shoushtar itself are an unreliable guide because many speakers have moved to other cities; in 1976 the city had 26,173 inhabitants.

Migration

Within Iran

Migration from Shoushtar accelerated with the city's economic decline in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many speakers of the dialect settled in nearby cities such as Ahvaz and Masjed Soleyman.

Shoushtari families abroad

Individual Shoushtari scholars and merchant families took part in the wider movement of Iranian elites to Mughal and post-Mughal India. The sources describe these as family and scholarly networks rather than as a distinct Shoushtari community that survives abroad today. The jurist Qazi Nurullah Shoushtari was appointed chief qadi of Lahore by the emperor Akbar. In the 18th century members of the Jazayeri–Shoushtari family built a trading and scholarly network linking Shoushtar, Basra and India: in 1730, after the fall of the Safavids, Sayyid Riza Shoushtari moved to Hyderabad, where he received land and patronage from the Nizam. His nephew Mir Abd al-Latif Shoushtari (1759–1806) sailed from Basra to Calcutta in 1788 and wrote the travelogue Tuhfat al-'Alam (1801) in Hyderabad, dedicating it to his paternal cousin Mir Alam, the Nizam's representative to the British in Bengal. The historian Juan Cole has described the networks of ulama immigration, pilgrimage and study that tied such Iranian families to Awadh and the Shia shrine cities of Iraq. The 18th-century Shoushtari merchant network also ran through Basra.

Religion and society

The Shushtaris are Twelver Shia Muslims. Shoushtar is among the towns recorded as divided between the Haydari and Ne'mati moieties, whose rivalry in Iranian towns was most visible during the processions and passion plays of Muharram.

Historically the city was also home to non-Muslim communities that were not part of the Shoushtari community in the narrower sense, notably Mandaeans, for whom Shoushtar was an important religious centre until the 19th century, and, in earlier centuries, Jews.

Culture

  • Music: Shoushtari is also the name of a standard system of Persian classical music in the Dastgāh-e Homāyun scale; the ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl notes that it is increasingly performed as an independent mode, alongside Bayat-e Kord.
  • Architecture and water heritage: the hydraulic works of the city, including the Gargar canal, the Salasel castle and the cascading watermills, remain a defining element of local identity and the basis of the city's tourism.
  • Crafts and textiles: Shoushtar was known in the Islamic period for its textiles, especially silks.

Economy

Historically the Shoushtari economy rested on irrigated agriculture made possible by the hydraulic system, on milling, and on trade and textile production. The city's role as a regional trading centre declined in the 20th century after administrative and commercial functions moved to Ahvaz.

Notable people

People from Shoushtar or of Shoushtari origin, in chronological order.

  • Sahl al-Tustari (c. 818–896), Sufi master and Qur'an commentator
  • Qazi Nurullah Shoushtari (1549–1610), jurist and author of Majalis al-Mu'minin, active in Mughal India
  • Nematollah Jazayeri (d. 1701), jurist and Shaykh al-Islam of Shoushtar
  • Nur al-Din Nimatullah al-Jazayiri (1677–1745), jurist, son of the above
  • Mir Seyyed Abd al-Latif Shoushtari (1759–1806), traveller and author of Tuhfat al-'Alam
  • Mir Alam (d. 1808), statesman in Hyderabad, cousin of Abd al-Latif
  • Mohammad Ali Mousavi Jazayeri (born 1941), cleric and politician

See also

  • Shoushtar
  • Shoushtari dialect
  • Khuzestan
  • Huzi People
  • Khuzi language
  • Shoushtar Historical Hydraulic System
  • People of Iran
  • Dezfuli dialect