The As Salamah Archipelago is at the center of an old Gulf tale about Salama and her daughters and a modern controversy over Iran’s efforts to charge ships crossing the strait.
Three islands lie in the heart of the Strait of Hormuz, known as the As Salamah Archipelago known in Arabic as “Salama and Her Daughters”. For those who may wonder about the feminine possessive pronoun in the word “daughters,” in the UAE, Oman, and Qatar, and perhaps in other parts of the Gulf, Salama is used as a feminine name.
Generally speaking, legend has it that Salama and her daughters were angry jinn who lived at the bottom of the Gulf in the Strait of Hormuz, near the islands attributed to them. They were said to be responsible for creating the dangerous whirlpools in the strait, which caused ships to crash and their passengers to perish. The legend insists that there was no escape from the hostility of Salama and her daughters except by throwing food into the water when passing through that spot, which came to be known as “Salama’s Deep.” In our local dialect, ghubba refers to the deep waters of the sea. Some people would even carry live livestock with them, slaughter them, and throw them into the water to appease the jinn.
Another legend claims that Salama was the wife of a cruel fisherman who beat his two daughters every day. One day, Salama threatened to report him, so he took her and their two daughters aboard his boat and threw them into the Gulf. But they did not drown. Instead, they emerged as islands, taking revenge on humans or men in particular?by destroying their ships.
Today, we know that the angry, feminist Salama and her daughters were merely figments of the imagination of ordinary people at the time. The scientific explanation for the water whirlpools is that they form when waves collide in the Strait of Hormuz with the towering mountains surrounding it. As for the survival of those who won over Salama with dates, meat, and other offerings, it was simply because they lightened the loads of their ships, making them easier to maneuver through the strait.
We left the nightmare of “Salama and Her Daughters” behind long ago, and with it our need to placate them. Yet it seems that the Iranian regime has still not grasped just how much we have changed.
Since March, Tehran has been seeking to impose fees on ships using the Strait of Hormuz. Like an overbearing jinn, the mischievous Iranian regime wants to sow fear of death in the hearts of sailors who are navigating safely, so that they will hand over part of their wealth to it, after which it will allow them to pass. Although it has not dared impose its fees directly, it has resorted to collecting “navigation service charges” of $1.5 million to $2 million per ship. Regime officials have even gone so far as to boast that this would bring between $40 billion and $100 billion a year into their treasury.
Unfortunately, the Iranians imagine that the Arabs who once lived with the “bullying” of a supernatural power in the Strait of Hormuz, when they were less powerful, less well-equipped, less advanced, less knowledgeable, and less confident in their own abilities, and who eventually learned how to deal with it, will now submit, trembling with fear, to a dying regime that cannot even provide gasoline for its own citizens!
Perhaps that is why media outlets affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are desperately promoting the prospect of an “imminent agreement” with the Sultanate of Oman to share the purported transit fees.
But Oman’s rejection of the proposal, as confirmed by the New York Post, clearly expresses the position of the Arab Gulf states: “Salama and Her Daughters” have already drowned as far as we are concerned, and they will never emerge again.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the writers are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Annahar
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