Persian Gulf naming dispute
[6][7] According to authors Philip L. Kohl, Mara Kozelsky, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda in their work Selective Remembrances, Sir Charles Belgrave (British adviser to the ruler of Bahrain) was "the first westerner to use and advocate the name 'Arabian gulf', first in the journal Soat al-Bahrain (Voice of Bahrain) in 1955.
"[8] Mahan Abedin of The Jamestown Foundation agrees with this, noting that Arab countries used the term "Persian Gulf" until the 1960s.
Teymoor Nabili (a senior presenter for Al Jazeera English) said "ironically, among the major drivers of the movement for change were Arab perceptions that Iran, driven by Washington, had supported Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973".
[13] The capture of Baghdad by the Ottoman Empire in 1534 gave Turkey access to the Indian Ocean via the port of Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf.
This coincided with the early mapmaking efforts of Gerard Mercator, whose 1541 terrestrial globe attempts to give the most up-to-date information, naming the gulf Sinus Persicus, nunc Mare de Balsera ("Persian Gulf, now Sea of Basra").
[14] However, on his world map of 1569, the name is changed to Mare di Mesendin (after the peninsula Ra's Musandam, in modern-day Oman),[15] while his rival Abraham Ortelius, for the world atlas of 1570, opted for Mare El Catif, olim Sinus Persicus (after the Arabian port of Al Qatif), but labelled the entrance to the gulf – the present-day Strait of Hormuz – as Basora Fretum (Strait of Basra).
Following British attempts to establish control over the seaway in the late 1830s, the Times Journal, published in London in 1840, referred to the Persian Gulf as the "Britain Sea", but this name was never used in any other context.
[19] The idea was quickly abandoned after Iran was invaded by its predominantly Muslim neighbor, Iraq, in the Iran-Iraq War.
The date coincides with the anniversary of Abbas I of Persia's successful military campaign when the Portuguese navy was driven out of the Strait of Hormuz in the Capture of Ormuz (1622).
[35] In recent decades, prominent scholars and political and religious leaders, including Professor Abdelhadi Tazi, Ahmad al-Saraf, Abdelilah Benkirane (Prime Minister of Morocco from 2011 to 2017), Abdul Monem Saeed, Abdul Khaliq al-Janabi, Qaradawi, and Gen. Majdi Omar, Former First Deputy of the Egyptian National Defense Council have supported the use of "Persian Gulf" and believe there is a lack of justification for changing the name.
[37] The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), an international body for provision of hydrographic information for worldwide marine navigation and other purposes, uses the name "Gulf of Iran (Persian Gulf)" for this body of water, in the third edition of its standard S-23 (Limits of Oceans and Seas), section 41, published in 1953.
In 2004, the Persian Gulf-naming dispute was the subject of a Google bomb by an Iranian blogger named Pendar Yousefi.
[51] The magazine repeated this act in its 18 February 2010 article titled "Iraq, Iran and the Politics of Oil: Crude Diplomacy".
[57] The name change has been viewed as a revival of the Persian Gulf naming dispute[58] with Iran accusing the United Arab Emirates of racism,[59][60] and the Football Federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran barring the transfer of Javad Nekounam to a UAE club.
