Anthony Whitt, author of Hard Land to Rule, sent me an audio clip of his recent interview by a Texas radio station. After hearing the interview I ordered the book, but something he said in the interview stuck in my mind.
Anthony's novel is a story of competing interests clashing in the Texas hill country in the years following the American Civil War. In speaking of the conflicts with the native Americans, he framed those conflicts as nomadic people clashing with a sedentary, agricultural people with only one possible outcome.
History is on Anthony's side on this conclusion. Nomadic life has a certain appeal to many, with variety and freedoms we modern, city people may have lost. However, the fact is that agricultural cultures result in surpluses of food, and those surpluses result in a surplus of labor that in turn results in the growth of the arts and sciences. Unfortunately, this also results in the formation of armies and the technological advancement of weaponry. Except in those fringe areas where agricultural efficiencies are not possible, the nomads lose in the face of standing armies and modern weapons.
Is this a moral outcome? I don't know. The other side of the coin is that it can be argued that agricultural societies make more efficient use of land resources that grow more precious as the human population expands. Does this outweigh the possible damages to the environment and possibly to the human soul? I don't know that either, but it is how history has played out.
In the novel I am working on, A Strange Murder in the Persian Corridor, my protagonist, an OSS intelligence officer working in Iran, comes into contact with a nomadic group in southern Iran. The Qashqai were a nomadic people who migrated to the mountain pastures of the Zagros Mountains in summer to provide grazing lands for their sheep. A colorful, vibrant people, they were fiercely independent. In the early twentieth century the banditry, the extraction of tolls on roads passing through lands the Qashqai considered theirs, and their total disregard for individual property rights caused the Qashqai's conflicts with the sedentary people of Iran (Persia at the time) to fester and grow.
In the nineteen-thirties Reza Shah Pahlavi decided to crack down on the Qashqai, seeing them as an impediment to the new, modern Iran he envisioned. Using his modern mechanized army he tried to cut off the migration routes of the Qashqai and force them into a sedentary lifestyle. Predictably the Qashqai revolted - once more. As the American settlers found in their conflicts with native Americans, the Qashqai's ferocity, mobility and familiarity with the terrain made them a formidable enemy.
In World War II the British and Russians invaded Iran to ensure Iranian oil and the Trans-Iranian Railway did not fall into the hands of Germany and her Axis partners. By the time OSS officer Tom O'Brien - my protagonist - arrives in the Qashqai lands in late 1943, the Qashqai had essentially defeated the Iranian army and the British were loath to interfere in the conflict. Control of the Qashqai territory was informally ceded to the ilkhani, the supreme chief of the Qashqai, and an uneasy peace was in place.
After the war the Qashqai and the central government continued to clash as Reza Shah's son, Mohammad Reza Shah, continued to try to suppress the nomadic lifestyle of the Qashqai. In 1979 when the shah was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards, the new Islamic government took up the war against the Qashqai.
I have worked Naser Khan, the Qashqai ilkhani, and his younger brother Khosro into my story. They were real people who still led the Qashqai against the Revolutionary Guards in 1979. Following the Islamic revolution they were forced into the mountains of Fars Province where they held out against the Ayatollah's forces for two years. Eventually the Revolutionary Guards, equipped with helicopters and modern weapons, prevailed. Naser Khan fled into Kurdish lands while his brother Khosro negotiated an end to the tribal revolt with the new government. Despite his cooperation in ending the conflict, the Islamic Revolutionary Court sentenced him to death, probably because of allegations of his involvement with the CIA. On October 8, 1982, Khosro was hanged in Shiraz, Iran. Naser Khan died in 1984. He was the last ilkhani.
I am sure there are still Qashqai nomads roaming southern Iran. I have personally seen their cousins, the Koshi of Afghanistan, making their annual treks to the Hindu Kush Mountains, but they are all a dying breed, for better or worse. It wasn't too different in the Texas hill country in the late nineteenth century.