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A geographical survey of Iranian Baluchistan highlights the modern transformation of the desert/oasis dichotomy, and the socioeconomic impact of this evolution upon political and religious authority within the Baluch world. Examining the discourses of different categories of primary sources on the Baluch, the chapter highlights the changing perception by diverse observers of Baluch religiosity and religious identity since the early twentieth century. It also shows, notably, how Iranian anticolonial discourse in the 1960s-70s exposed the impact of Shia migration to the country’s Sunni-peopled periphery upon the consolidation of an ethno-social Sunni minority identity. Dealing with Baluch historiography, the chapter discusses how Baluch chroniclers have promoted, since the 1960s, a typology of heroes and values in which the ulama and Islamic discourse tend to replace tribal leaders and pastoral ethics of previous centuries. The chapter underlines the role played in this discursive change and the contest of the tribal chieftains’ power, by representatives of the oases world and of minor tribal groups of landowning status.

This chapter studies the consolidation of the Punjab, starting with the capture of Kangra and the removal of the Gurkhas. It is followed by an account of how the Punjab was unified, including the reduction of the Baluch tribes. It also mentions that Maharajah Ranjit Singh's generals busied themselves with bringing the scattered territories under the authority and protection of the Dunbar. One section looks at the arrival of Shah Shuja, and provides some information on the politics of Afghanistan. The chapter includes discussions on the Koh-i-noor episode, which involved the maharajah demanding the Koh-i-noor diamond from the Afghans, and the battle of Attock. This battle is significant, since it marks the first victory of the Punjabi over the Afghans.

Touching on the guerrilla activity of the 2000s and early 2010s on Iran’s eastern (Baluch) and western (Kurdish) borderlands, the introduction discusses early-twenty-first-century Western, (particularly U.S.) geopolitical views of the Sunni minority issue in the country, and of its possible political and military instrumentation against the Islamic Republic. The author skims through the gradual rediscoveries, by domestic and international research, of the transformation of tribes and tribal might as a political factor in Middle Eastern societies, and of the emergence and progressive politicisation of Sunni identity within a Shia-majority Islamic Republic. The author especially sheds light on the particular political pragmatism that was developed by Tehran and the Sarbazi ulama, since 1979, in their mutual relations.

The chapter analyses the chrestomathies (tadhkiras) of Persian-language Sunni religious poets have published in Iranian Baluchistan since the late 1990s. It demonstrates how the ulama of the Sarbaz nexus, and their centralised transregional madrasa network, have managed to impose their discursive hegemony in Easternmost Iran, with the assistance of local Shia-background institutions and NGOs patronized by Guide Ali Khamenei. This triumph of the Islamic discourse of the Deoband School in Iranian territory, and the eclipse of tribal authority from Baluch memory, are explained here as effects of the anti-tribal modernisation policy implemented by the Pahlavi monarchy and its encouragement of Shia migration to the country’s Sunni-peopled peripheries – which had been exposed, already, by Iranian anticolonial discourse of the 1960s-70s.

This chapter deals with the history of the emergence, development, triumph and present-day challenges of Deobandi madrasa teaching and of the politicisation of Sunni identity in Iran’s Baluch society, against the socioeconomic backgrounds reconstructed in the volume’s previous sections. It relates, notably, the origins of the Sarbaz nexus. It explores the centrality of the Sarbaz oasis in early modern Iranian Baluchistan; its connexions with the Baluch transnational labour emigration; British and Iranian support to Deobandi teaching during the Interwar period, as a bulwark against Soviet influence and communist ideology; the decisive role played after WWII by intermediary agents in Karachi and Pakistani Baluchistan for the propagation of Deobandi teaching in Iranian territory; and the special connexion of the Sarbazi nexus of ulama with the Isma‘ilzayi tribe and its allies in Baluch society.

The purpose of this chapter is to show how the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-79) has reacted to the creation of the Islamic University of Medina, in 1961, by allowing in Easternmost Iran the development of Deobandi madrasa teaching and reformed Sufism. It suggests that since then, the Hanafi School of Islamic law and jurisprudence has begun to re-emerge during those years as a specifically Persian if not Iranian, tradition that contested Shia hegemony within Iran while opposing cross-border Wahhabi influence. Reconstructing the demographic change and interethnic cum inter-confessional violence that preceded and went with the revolution of 1979 in Iranian Baluchistan, the author shows how, thanks to the region’s Deobandi Sunni religious establishment’s ultimate acceptance of Khomeini’s rule, the new regime paved the way for the Sarbaz nexus to assess their position as guarantors of social peace and intermediaries between the state and a new-brand ‘Sunni community of Iran’.

In the decades after Khomeini’s death, the oases world’s middlemen class of Iran’s Baluch society has produced political figures able to wield nationwide influence. While maintaining pressure on Tehran from within, the Iranisation of Deobandi religious schools (and of the Kurdish-born Muslim-Brother militant networks) helped reinforce Iran’s national cohesion despite periods of sharp tension. This permitted Deobandi leaders and their Muslim-Brother allies to obtain, under Reformist presidents Muhammad Khatami (1997-2005) and Hasan Ruhani (since 2013), concessions in terms of local government and representation of the minorities. At the same time, the underdevelopment of Iran’s Sunni-peopled marches, the continuous degradation of their ecological situation, the confiscation of the revenues of cross-border smuggling by the Islamic Republic’s paramilitary bodies, the limited reforms implemented since 2013 by the Ruhani administration, the June 2017 ISIS/Daesh-claimed attacks in Tehran and the anti-Sunni repression that followed have fuelled new waves of ‘tribal feud’. This growing violence highlights the contrast between the ability shown by the Sarbaz nexus of Deobandi Sunni ulama to develop nationwide influence, on the first hand, and, on the other hand, the limits of these middlemen’s leadership on Baluch society.