2026, Qeshm Island: Omani Legacy, Afro-Iranian Presence, and the Geostrategy of the Strait of Hormuz

Qeshm is the largest island in the Persian Gulf and occupies a position of singular historiographical ambiguity. Administered today as part of Iran's Hormozgan province, the island belonged for close to a century to the Omani sphere of authority projected across the Persian coast by the Al Bu Said dynasty. This layered political history has left Qeshm with an identity that resists a single national narrative. The island's past as an Omani dependency, its long function as a node of the Indian Ocean slave trade that produced a distinct Afro-descendant population, and its present role as the fulcrum of Iranian military strategy in the Strait of Hormuz together make Qeshm a case study in the entanglement of Gulf history and contemporary geopolitics. Despite this significance, the island remains one of the least studied territories of the Western Indian Ocean world, a gap this article seeks to outline alongside the historical and strategic dimensions that make Qeshm worthy of far greater scholarly attention.