War of Water: Strait of Hormuz and Principle of ownership
It was a warm evening in late June. “foxy” — my mustard-coloured Volkswagen — and I were returning from our customary drive along the Margalla Road, where the hills rise like ancient guardians above Islamabad. “foxy” was not merely driving; she was gliding, as though an old princess who had seen too many empires come and go were crossing a carpet of fading light. As I turned towards the F-10 Markaz, a sound reached me before any shape appeared — a chiming, faint at first, then gathering, as though the wind itself had learned to ring.

It was the bells of “Baba Tal” — the Bell-man.

He appeared beside the roadside as he always does: suddenly, without footstep, without warning, as though the chiming had conjured him from the air. Around his navy blue robe — the colour of deep water at midnight, faded at the edges where sun and dust had worked their patient erosion — hung brass bells of different sizes, stitched not in pattern but in the randomness of a man who collects sounds the way others collect memories. Small bells near his collar that chimed like morning birds. Medium bells at his waist that rang like distant temple calls. Larger bells near the hem that tolled like the voice of valleys calling to valleys. They did not clang. They did not jangle. They chimed — each size finding its own note, its own resonance, its own place in the music that announced him before his face was seen and lingered after his form had gone.

He wore his usual blue jeans beneath the robe — the same pair he had worn for as long as I had known him — turned up at the knees, the threads hanging loose like the frayed ends of stories he had never finished telling. On his feet, a pair of joggers that had walked through deserts and valleys, through streets and bazaars and jungles, through the ruins of cities that had once called themselves eternal. He walked, always walked. He did not own a home, a car, a telephone. He owned the road, and the road owned him.

But it was his eyes that stopped you. OMG, as the young ones say, but in his case the letters might stand for something older — Ocular Memory of the Grave. His eyes were deserted. Not empty, not blind, but evacuated — as though they had witnessed so much cruelty dressed as history that they had finally refused to register any more. They had seen empires rise on the backs of the innocent and fall on the swords of the arrogant. They had watched water sources seized, treaties signed in blood and broken in convenience, mothers burying sons and sons burying mothers while the bells of power rang on, indifferent. He was not merely old. He was ancient — not in body, but in witness. He had been there, somehow, for all of it. And he had never looked away.

As “foxy” slowed beside him, he did not speak immediately. He never does. He leaned towards me — close, as a rabbit nestles against warmth, as though the words were too heavy for ordinary volume and too precious for ordinary distance. His whisper carried the weight of centuries — the accumulated silence of every victim who had ever been told that their suffering was merely politics. Around us, the bells stirred gently with every movement, as though even the evening breeze wished to announce his presence.

Then he looked towards the west — towards the distant Gulf whose waters he had never seen but whose history he had absorbed through centuries of whispered memory — and said quietly,

“A strait that forgets it is a bridge will soon become a wall. And a wall, my friend, is merely a bridge that has lost its purpose.”

Before I could reply, he lifted his hand in farewell. The chiming faded gradually into the air, as though the bells were returning to the silence from which they had come. He walked away — his joggers carrying him onward to whatever road awaited, the navy blue robe swallowing the last light, the bells growing fainter until they were not gone but merely elsewhere, waiting to chime for the next ear that knew how to listen.
Yet his whisper travelled with me, as it always does, back through the streets of Islamabad, up to my rooftop studio where the Margalla Hills stand witness to every thought that dares to climb so high.

And as the night settled over the city, my thoughts travelled not fourteen centuries this time, but merely five decades — to a boundary agreement signed in 1974 between Iran and Oman, when two nations whose shores touch across twenty-one nautical miles of water recognized what geography had already decided: that the Strait of Hormuz is not a passage to be administered by distant powers, but a joint property to be stewarded by those whose mountains descend to its edges.

But then, something older stirred. A memory that Baba Tal had planted weeks ago, on another evening, in another silence.

He had appeared at my rooftop studio as he always does — the chiming reaching me first, then his shape materializing against the railing, the navy blue robe catching the kitchen light. He was fond of hot coffee and hot tea, just like me. We shared this small conspiracy against the cold that the hills bring down after sunset. I brewed in my old brass kettle — the one that whistles when it senses the water is ready, as though it too has something to announce. The Margalla Hills were dark behind him, and the city below was a constellation of ordinary lives being lived.

He leaned close, as he always does, his whisper warm with the steam rising from his mug.

“Bacha,” he said, “I am witness to a moment that the world has forgotten, but the desert remembers.”
He spoke of a valley — the Valley of Abu Qubais in Makkah — where a caravan of the tribe of Jurhum, travelling with their goods and their thirst, discovered water in the sand. A spring bubbling where no spring should be. They thought to camp around it, to claim it, to make it theirs by the right of discovery and the power of numbers.

But then they learned that the water had a custodian. A woman — alone but for her young son — who had been left in that barren valley by a command she did not question and a trust she did not abandon. Hajarah the mother of Ismail [ Blessings upon him]. The lady of Zamzam.

The tribe of Jurhum was many. She was one, with a child at her side. They had the swords, the camels, the numbers. She had nothing but the water and the dignity of one who knows that ownership is not a gift from the strong to the weak, but a fact that the strong must recognize.

And here, Baba Tal had paused. His fingers tightened around the mug. The brass kettle whistled softly in the background, but he did not move. When he spoke again, his whisper had become something heavier — not louder, but deeper, as though the earth itself were lending its voice.

“They did not seize the water, Bacha. They asked permission. They — a tribe, a caravan, a force — asked permission of a solitary woman and her son. And when she granted it, she granted it with a verdict: the ownership of Zamzam shall remain with me and my descendants. They did not merely agree. They honoured it. For centuries.”

He took a breath then, and the bells around his robe stirred, as though even they were listening.

“It was the dignity of a woman, yes. But it was something larger. It was the following of the law of nature about ownership. The water was hers not because a treaty said so. Not because an army defended it. Because the law of nature says: what the land gives to those who dwell upon it belongs to them. And those who come after must ask, or they become thieves.”

He had fallen silent then, and we had drunk our coffee while the hills watched. The chiming faded gradually as he walked away, leaving me with the warmth of the mug and the weight of the whisper. But now, as the 2026 crisis unfolded and the world shouted about Hormuz, his whisper returned with the weight of that ancient valley.

The Strait of Hormuz is not Zamzam. But the law that governed Zamzam governs Hormuz. The waters that touch Iranian shores belong to Iran. The waters that touch Omani shores belong to Oman. And where those waters meet, the ownership is not dissolved by overlap — it is doubled. Joint. Shared. Inseparable. Just as the tribe of Jurhum recognized Hajar’s ownership not by force but by the law of nature, so must the world recognize what geography has already .

Today, as the world watches the 2026 crisis unfold — as tankers wait at anchor, as oil prices convulse, as navies gather and threats multiply — Baba Tal’s quiet words deserve to travel with every diplomat who enters a negotiating room, every admiral who studies a chart, every citizen who wonders why the price of bread has suddenly become a question of foreign policy. For the true measure of this crisis will not be found in its missiles, its blockades, or its ultimatums. It will be found in whether those who claim ownership remember that ownership is not the end of obligation, but its beginning — and that ownership seized by force dishonors the very water it claims to protect.

And that journey begins not with politics, but with a geography that was carved long before empires learned to draw lines upon it.

The Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one nautical miles wide at its narrowest point. On one side, the mountains of Iran descend to the water. On the other, the Musandam Peninsula of Oman juts northward like a fist into the Persian Gulf. There is no “international waters” here. There is no corridor that belongs to the world by some abstract principle of maritime convenience. There is only the place where two sovereignties touch across a liquid border — a border so narrow that the twelve-nautical-mile territorial seas of both states overlap for fifteen miles, meaning every ship that passes is simultaneously in Iranian and Omani waters.

The world did not gift Hormuz to Iran and Oman. Geography did. And geography does not take it back because the tanker companies complain.

This is not a legal argument. It is a fact that precedes law. The airspace above Iran belongs to Iran not because a treaty in Geneva says so, but because the sky begins where Iranian soil ends. The waters that touch Iranian shores belong to Iran for the same reason. The waters that touch Omani shores belong to Oman. And where those waters meet and overlap, ownership is not diluted — it is doubled. Joint. Shared. Inseparable.

The 1974 Continental Shelf Agreement between Iran and Oman recognized this. Signed on July 25, 1974, it drew a boundary of 124.8 nautical miles across the Strait and the Sea of Oman, using the equidistance method but with a critical exception: in one area, the boundary follows the twelve-nautical-mile arc drawn from the Iranian island of Larak. More importantly, the agreement contained a security protocol that granted both nations the right to patrol each other’s territorial waters for the maintenance of security in the Strait. This was not a surrender of sovereignty. It was a recognition that sovereignty here is not divisible — that the Strait is too narrow, too vital, too intertwined to be governed by one hand alone.

And then, in 2015, after four decades of negotiation, Iran and Oman completed what the 1974 agreement had begun. They signed a second maritime boundary agreement for the Sea of Oman — a 450-kilometer section that had remained undefined since the British withdrawal. It entered into force on September 4, 2016, and was registered with the United Nations. The two nations whose shores create the Strait had, quietly and persistently, built the legal architecture of joint ownership.

Yet the world has forgotten this. Or perhaps the world never knew. Maritime powers speak of “freedom of navigation” as though it were a universal law carved into the bedrock of creation, when in fact it is a convenience invented by those who needed the oil and lacked the honesty to pay for passage through another nation’s property.

But let us not be seduced by simplicity. Ownership is real, but ownership without wisdom is not sovereignty — it is extortion. And what Iran has done since March 4, 2026, is not the exercise of ownership. It is the betrayal of it.

On that day, Iran declared the Strait “closed.” Not closed to all — that would at least have been consistent. Closed selectively. Discriminatorily. On March 26, 2026, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that vessels from China, Russia, India, Iraq, and Pakistan would be permitted transit. Later, Malaysia, Thailand, and Philippines were added to the list. The criterion was not tonnage, not flag registration, not international mandate. It was, in the words of the announcement itself, “the nature of each country’s relationship with Iran.”

Daily transits collapsed from 129 to four. Twenty thousand mariners were stranded. Six hundred ships trapped inside the Gulf, two hundred forty waiting outside. The global economy convulsed. Oil prices skyrocketed. And Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — the Pasdaran, who had bled through eight years of war to preserve their nation — found themselves not defending Iran’s borders but running a protection racket at the world’s most important maritime chokepoint.

This is not sovereignty. This is the weaponization of geography.

And here, the whisper of Baba Tal meets the whisper of something older and weightier. For there is a law above the laws of conference rooms, a justice above the convenience of maritime powers, and it speaks with a clarity that no blockade can silence.

“O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives. Whether one is rich or poor, Allah is more worthy of both. So follow not [personal] inclination, lest you not be just. And if you distort [your testimony] or refuse [to give it], then indeed Allah is ever, with what you do, Acquainted.”— Surah An-Nisa (4:135)

The command is absolute. “Be persistently standing firm in justice” — قَوَّامِينَ بِالْقِسْطِ — not occasionally, not when convenient, not when it serves your allies, but persistently, relentlessly, as witnesses for Allah even when the witness wounds the self. “Even if it be against yourselves” — وَلَوْ عَلَىٰ أَنفُسِكُمْ — the justice that does not flinch when it must turn inward. “Follow not [personal] inclination” — فَلَا تَتَّبِعُوا الْهَوَىٰ — do not let diplomatic convenience, economic interest, or political alliance become the measure of what is right.

Iran’s blockade is not merely bad policy. It is the abandonment of the very principle that gave the Islamic Revolution its moral claim. The Pasdaran did not fight Saddam Hussein’s armies to make Hormuz a toll booth for Beijing and Moscow. They fought for an Iran that would stand for justice — even against itself. And when a nation uses its geography not to serve the world but to hold it ransom, it has forgotten that the earth and all that is upon it belongs not to any state, but to the One who created both the strait and the ships that pass through it.

Yet let us not pretend the West is innocent. The hypocrisy here is as wide as the Strait itself.

The United States demands that Iran comply with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea — UNCLOS — while itself refusing to ratify that same convention. France closes its airspace to any aircraft it chooses, without explanation, without appeal, without the world calling it “against humanity.” The principle of “freedom of navigation” is not a universal law. It is a convenience for maritime powers who need the oil and lack the honesty to pay for it.

Consider the symmetry. If Iran has no right to close Hormuz, then France has no right to close its airspace. If France’s airspace sovereignty is absolute, then Iran’s maritime sovereignty is equally absolute. You cannot have one principle for the sky and another for the sea without revealing that the principle is not principle at all — it is interest dressed as law.

Ambassador Mike Waltz, the United States representative to the United Nations, declared: “No country gets to hold the world hostage for leverage just because they happen to sit next to a strait.” A fine sentence. But turn it back: No country gets to demand passage through another’s property while denying overflight through its own. The United States has never accepted that Iranian aircraft possess a “freedom of overflight” across American territory. Why, then, should American tankers possess a “freedom of navigation” through Iranian waters?

The answer is not legal. It is strategic. Maritime powers invented “transit passage” because they could dominate the sea. They did not invent “transit overflight” because they could not dominate the sky. The law followed the gun, not the principle.

And then there is Oman. The forgotten co-owner. The silent partner whose shores create the Strait as surely as Iran’s.

Musandam is not a footnote. Without that jutting peninsula, there is no Strait of Hormuz. The 1974 agreement granted Oman reciprocal patrol rights in Iranian waters — a recognition that ownership here is joint, not unilateral. Yet Oman has been so careful, so quiet, so determined to be “neutrally positioned between belligerent actors” that it has surrendered its voice. Dr. Andreas Krieg of King’s College London described Oman’s stance as “active, lawful neutrality” — “neither pro-American nor pro-Iranian, but pro-lawful navigation.” But neutrality between a thief and a victim is not virtue. It is cowardice dressed as diplomacy.

Oman ratified UNCLOS in 1989. Iran did not. Oman made a declaration asserting sovereignty over warship passage — a declaration that is legally invalid under UNCLOS, which explicitly prohibits such reservations. So Oman too lives in contradiction: a UNCLOS party with an invalid reservation, sharing a border with a non-party that rejects the treaty entirely. Yet both states share waters that overlap. Both states share a Strait that neither can control alone.

Muscat must choose. It is a co-owner, not a bystander. And co-ownership implies co-responsibility. If Oman does not assert its rights, it surrenders them by default — not to Iran, not to the United States, but to the chaos that follows when ownership is claimed but stewardship is abandoned.
So what is the honest position? It is this: Iran and Oman own the Strait of Hormuz. Not by UNCLOS. Not by the generosity of the “international community.” By the fact that their shores create it, their waters overlap across it, and their agreements since 1974 have recognized their joint stewardship of it. Ownership is not the question. The question is what kind of owners they will be.

And here, another whisper enters — older than Baba Tal, older than the 1974 agreement, older than the empires that have risen and fallen along these shores.

“And We have certainly honored the children of Adam and carried them on the land and sea and provided for them of the good things and preferred them over much of what We have created, with [definite] preference.”— Surah Al-Isra (17:70)

God did not carry humanity across the sea so that one nation could hold the passage ransom. The verse says “carried them on the land and sea” — حَمَلْنَاهُمْ فِي الْبَرِّ وَالْبَحْرِ — the sea as a divine conveyance, a trust, a means of connection between peoples, not a weapon to be turned against them. The “good things” — الطَّيِّبَات — include the Strait itself, but the “preference” — تَفْضِيلًا — implies responsibility, not license to withhold. The honor of ownership is the honor of stewardship.

Ownership without justice is not sovereignty. It is theft from the One who truly owns all things.

I propose a Hormuz Charter — not imposed by the United Nations, not dictated by Tehran, not patrolled by American carrier groups, but negotiated by the two owners for the benefit of all who depend upon it.

First: Joint Administration. Iran and Oman must co-manage the Strait through a permanent bilateral authority, reviving the 1974 patrol arrangement not as a dormant clause but as a living institution. The owners must govern together, or they will be governed separately by those who have no stake in their waters.

Second: Service Fees, Not Transit Tolls. Charges for navigation aids, safety, environmental protection, search and rescue — these are legitimate exercises of sovereignty. But tolls for passage itself are extortion. Oman already supports this distinction. Iran must accept it.

Third: Non-Discriminatory Access. All flags, all nations, all cargoes, treated equally. No “relationship with Iran” criterion. No Chinese tankers sailing while American tankers wait. This is the red line that separates ownership from gangsterism.

Fourth: Revenue Sharing. Fees split between Iran and Oman proportionally, based on coastline length and services provided. Joint ownership must mean joint benefit.

Fifth: International Oversight — Not Control, But Transparency. An independent maritime observer mission reports on compliance, with no enforcement power. The owners enforce. The world watches. The Strait serves.

This is not a retreat from sovereignty. It is its fulfillment. The owner of a well does not poison the village and sell water by the cup. The owner of a strait does not hold the world hostage and call it dignity. Ownership is not the end of obligation. It is its beginning.

The pen is a sword. But it must cut in all directions — at the extortionist who claims ownership as a license to steal, at the imperialist who claims freedom as a license to trespass, and at the silent partner who mistakes fear for neutrality. The Strait of Hormuz does not need liberators. It needs owners who remember that the sea, unlike the land, connects rather than divides — and that the first duty of connection is to keep the channel open.

By the time “foxy” carried me back through the familiar streets of Islamabad, the night had settled deep above the Margalla Hills. Yet my thoughts remained beside that quiet roadside encounter.

Baba Tal had long disappeared from sight — his navy blue robe swallowed by the darkness, his joggers carrying him onward to whatever road awaited, the bells growing fainter until they were not gone but merely elsewhere, waiting to chime for the next ear that knew how to listen.

His bell, however, had not.

Some sounds travel farther than their echoes. Some whispers outlive the voices that utter them. His simple words had become the measure by which I viewed the crisis now unfolding far beyond these hills. A strait does not become stronger by asking whether it deserves to be closed. It becomes stronger by asking why any passage should ever be denied to those who come in peace — and by remembering that the tribe of Jurhum, though thirsty and many, once asked permission of a solitary woman and her son, and honoured what the law of nature had already decided.

More than a century ago, the philosopher-poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal expressed a truth that reaches across every border:

“From woman comes the colour and beauty of the universe; from her springs the melody that gives life its deepest music.”

Those words remain as relevant today as when they were first written. But they speak to a larger truth: that every gift of geography — every strait, every mountain, every stretch of water — carries within it a melody that can either connect or divide. The choice belongs not to the geography, but to those who stand upon it.

The future of the Strait will not be secured by resolutions alone. It will be secured in the negotiating rooms where Iran and Oman remember that they are not enemies but co-owners, in the councils where maritime powers accept that ownership is not a crime, and in the consciences where justice is measured not by convenience but by the willingness to stand firm — even against oneself.

May those who claim Hormuz return to their capitals carrying more than threats and ultimatums. May they return with the resolve to build a stewardship where talent is recognized before tradition, where justice is valued above prejudice, and where every ship that sails in peace is free to fulfill the promise that the Creator placed within the waters He made to connect, not to divide.

For then, and only then, will Baba Tal’s bell have fulfilled its purpose.

*□□□POETEARS□□□*
[coined by T. Hejazi — Where poetry becomes tears, and tears become poetry.]
When waters that were meant to bridge divide,
The strait becomes a wall where ships collide;

Let Hormuz teach what ownership must be—
Not chains upon the sea, but liberty.

Also Read: WHEN HALF THE MUSLIM WORLD WAITS