Zār

The Wind Believers

Spirit as Wind

In Zār cosmology, spirits are not static beings — they are winds (bād) that travel, settle, and speak through bodies.

People say, “The wind has taken her,” or “He is under the wind.”
Possession is not necessarily stigmatized; it marks a spiritual relationship that must be maintained through ritual care.
This ontology of the wind collapses the boundary between natural and supernatural, body and environment — a concept deeply relevant to your focus on the ethnography of spirits.

For the past two years, I’ve been working in southern Iran as a teacher and social worker.
During this time, I’ve had some very unusual experiences — things that can’t really be explained logically.

For example, I sometimes notice mysterious bruises appearing on my body after visiting certain areas or beaches.
Because of that, I decided to describe my observations with seek help from my students, who are locals from these regions ( Qeshm Island), to describe and explore this strange situation together.

Salakh Beach — one of the well-known habitats of the Zar (spirit possession cult) on the southern coast.photo by the author

Me and my students in Salakh Village, Qeshm Island- 21 November 2025.

The book of Ahl-e Hava (The Wind Believers), by Gholam-Hossein Saʿedi

Ahl-e Hava (The Wind Believers)

By Gholam-Hossein Saʿedi

First published by Amir Kabir Publications in the 1970s, Ahl-e Hava stands as one of Gholam-Hossein Saʿedi’s most powerful ethnographic works — a haunting exploration of spirit, culture, and belief along Iran’s southern shores.

Saʿedi divides his study into two vivid parts.
The first is drawn from his fieldwork among the coastal people of southern Iran — in Minab, the villages between Bandar Lengeh and Bushehr, and the island of Hormuz.
The second delves into the winds themselves — mysterious, invisible forces through which the Ahl-e Hava, the People of the Air, encounter the supernatural.

Along these humid coasts, locals believe that spirits and jinn travel in the wind.
Each wind carries a jinn — slipping into human bodies, possessing, enchanting, or afflicting them.
The perilous winds are called Mozarrāt — the harmful ones.
Those struck by them are wind-touched, caught between madness and revelation, suspended in a fragile state between worlds.
The Ahl-e Hava call these afflicted souls Havā’i — the people of the air — or in Swahili, pe-pe, and in Arabic, Hoboob.

Where Myth and Faith Collide

In Ahl-e Hava, Saʿedi uncovers an ancient thread woven through Iranian belief: the sacred duality of the wind.
In Indo-Iranian mythology, Vāyu, the god of wind, was both giver and taker — life-bringer and death-bearer.
Zoroastrian texts like the Rām Yasht and Vendīdād describe two faces of Vāyu: the divine protector and the demonic destroyer.

This dualism of good and evil, central to early Iranian thought, endured across centuries, and when Islam arrived, it fused with Qur’anic ideas of jinn and possession.
Even Islamic scholars such as Allameh Majlesi wrote of wind-jinn, linking mysterious illnesses (Reeh al-Sabiyān, “the wind of jinn”) to the movements of unseen spirits.

Among the southern Iranians, these myths and Islamic ideas merged into a single living cosmology.
Here, the wind breathes, the wind listens, and the wind chooses.
Each gust carries intention, each storm a will — capable of seizing a human soul and making it part of its own tempest.

Ahl-e Hava is not just a study of folklore; it is a mirror held up to the borderlands between body and spirit, myth and medicine, faith and fear.
Through Saʿedi’s eyes, we glimpse a world where the wind itself becomes divine conversation.

A Note from Me

This extraordinary book has never been translated into English — a silence that I hope to change.
Translating Ahl-e Hava is one of my upcoming projects, an effort to bring Saʿedi’s rare ethnographic masterpiece to global readers and share the living breath of Iran’s southern People of the Air.

The ceremony of feeding the zar by playing music

In this documentary, produced in 1963 (1342 SH), you can observe the full process of how this ritual is performed.

Unfortunately, aside from the book mentioned above, no other written ethnographic work on this subject has ever been published.

Masoumeh and her friend Fatemeh, Salakh, Qeshm Island — 21 November 2025

What is happening to a person who is dancing beneath a cloth?

A narration by my student, Masoumeh, about her 5-year experience of hosting three different characters within her body.

Masoumeh, my very cheerful and lovely student, spent her 19th birthday last week in a state where she was experiencing some of the most terrifying fears a human being can face—whether asleep or awake.

On November 20th, she called me and asked me to pray for her.

She said: “My Zār has returned! It’s hurting me. It’s pulling my hair—my head is aching so much, and a coin-sized bald spot has appeared. My chest and neck are covered with scratches.”

The next day, I traveled to Qeshm Island and headed straight to their village. She clearly was not well. I asked her to describe what she was feeling so that I could understand how to help her.

My body has three spirits

She said:

“When my Zār comes, I’m no longer myself. First, I feel tingling in my toes, then numbness. This feeling rises upward until it reaches my neck. At that moment, I only manage to say my last few words so that anyone near me would understand what’s happening to me. I say: ‘My Zār is here,’ and then I faint.

But my family does not see a motionless, unconscious body; they see someone speaking in Arabic at times … someone who harms herself like a mad person—and if they get close, I might hurt them. If they recite the Quran near me, I might attack them as if to kill them. (She means the body that, at that moment, is being controlled by the Zār.)

I have two Zārs who dislike me.
The only way to free myself is for Baba Zār (Baba Qolam) to come one night after 24 hours that I rubbed jasmine oil on my body. He must stay in our house and play music so that my Zār calms down and speaks. A Zār only speaks to Baba Zār or Mama Zār.

It tells them what it wants so that it will leave me alone for a while and stop hurting me. Each Zār demands a calling object—for example, mine asks for a green sheet to be placed over me. Then it wants an extra item—like a gold ring, a piece of clothing, or something else for the body (which is my body).

If it continues hurting me and refuses to leave after the music ritual, Baba Zār hits it with a stick—he hits the dancing body.
I don’t remember anything. I don’t even feel the pain of being beaten. Others just tell me later what I did last night… but it wasn’t me, it was my Zār. I was asleep, and it was awake.

My body has three spirits… sometimes it’s me, and sometimes it’s my Zārs.”

How it started

When I spoke with Masoumeh between her “episodes” or Zār attacks, she had not eaten for a week. Her hands were trembling. She told me:

“I’m very scared of them. I constantly feel like I’m in a grave and they’re burying me with soil. I always feel someone is in the house. I have so much fear. I didn’t do anything to them. The first time was when I was 14, at school, in between classes, I was sitting under a tree with my friends. I was talking when suddenly I felt something—like dense energy—enter my mouth. I felt it instantly spread through my whole body, and that was the attack of the Zār… and it hasn’t left me since.

My friends are afraid of me. Because of this, I’ve become very lonely… they’re scared to come to our house. And I have no way to free myself from them.”

The Zār Ceremony

Healing Ceremony of Zar

IMG_9072.MP4

IMG_9071.MP4

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