University of Bucharest

The present article is intended to give an inkling of this continued work on
the H~ūzistāni dialects. For the sake of brevity, only some examples from these
poems will be shown and a set of peculiarities will be discussed that can be
discerned from them. The chapters of the above-mentioned book are divided
according to the townships of H~ūzistān, and under each township (šahristān in
Persian) the poets living there are discussed in detail. Any of the townships could
have been chosen for the above-mentioned purpose, but what struck the eye in
connection with the township of Dašt-i Āzādagān is that many of its poets had
composed panegyrical poems in which they praised any of the twelve Šī‗ī Imams.
This topic is not to be found so frequently in any other region of the province. The
reason for this phenomenon remains yet unclear, although it is correct to ascertain
that many ‗Alids, the descendants of Imam ‗Alī, have been living for centuries in
this area. 3
2. The locality and its population
Dašt-i Āzādagān means in Persian the ‗field of the free-born‘. It is situated
to the west of the provincial capital Ahwāz and has a common border with Iraq.
To the north lies the township of Dizfūl and Šūš, to the south H~urramšahr with the
Iranian Gulf region. In Iran, in general, the changing of town names and township
names are never easy to follow, the changing of names in the Arabic-speaking
areas has particularly been complex throughout the history of the country. A fact
behind this may well be the constant efforts of consecutive regimes to Persianize
the indigenous Arabic-speaking population.
The region in question was first known in modern times by the name of
the most numerous Arab tribe inhabiting it, the Banī T}uruf. 4 Its name was
subsequently changed to H}uwayza, while in 1935 it was again changed to Dašt-i
Mīšān by the then ruling Rid}ā Šāh. This reflects the Middle Persian form Mēšān,
the name of the whole of lower Mesopotamia and parts of H~ūzistān, that was used
until the late Middle Ages. 5 Until 1944 when it became an independent
administrative unit, it had formed a part of the township of Ahwāz. After the
3
Pūr-Kāz}im 1378/1999, 334.
4
See under Dašt-i Mīšān in Dihh~udā 1377/1998, 10905. See also the map showing the names of
tribes in Ingham 1982, 18.
5
Ingham 1997, 47 (Footnote 22). The area has been known under different forms of this name in
various languages such as Greek, Syriac, Armenian and Hebrew. Even Yāqūt mentioned it under
the name Dast-i Maysān. For a list of these forms, see Pūr-Kāz}im 1378/1999, 334., Streck-Morony
1991, 918f and 920f. For Dast-i Mīsān, see also Dihh~udā 1377/1998, 10878.
40