Zār

Ahl-e Hava (The Wind Believers)

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.