easonable to question the absurd assumption. Would it not be a distraction, given the loaded assumption, to ask if Firdausi would still have written the Shahnameh had Iran not existed? Equally counterfactually, where would Zoroastrianism be born?

Through which country would Alexander reach the Beas river to culminate his adventures of conquest? Who would Changez Khan turn upon in lieu of Iran? Who would dispute the Shatt al-Arab waterway with Saddam Hussein, assuming Iraq managed to dodge Zionism’s poisoned dart?

Without Iran where would the Safavids install the Shia beliefs as state religion? In which case who would Ayatollah Khomeini be plotting to overthrow and, without Iran, where? An Indian journalist wrote a play not long ago with a similarly absurd theme and titled it The Muslim Vanishes.

The thought was amusing and terrifying at once. Look up the pre-Islamic history of the subcontinent through Hindutva’s jaundiced eye (as is Netanyahu’s for Iran) and one would perhaps glean how in the absence of Mughal rule, currently being airbrushed from school curricula, Hindu chieftain Rana Pratap would struggle to locate the battleground of Haldi Ghati that would make him a hero with Hindu nationalists. Suppose the RSS and Narendra Modi have their way with their own ignorant and prejudiced agenda to undermine the role of Muslims in the evolution of India’s enviable syncretic culture.

The next step in conjuring a mythical golden past would involve hiding the endless internal conflicts, including caste-based exploitation and political power struggles between regional kingdoms — like the Rajput, Pallava, Chalukya and Chola — and frequent battles for dominance, and occasional sectarian disputes between religious factions including Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. The Iran war brings a totally new set of assumptions on board for any Perry Mason to grapple with. Therefore, leave Iran aside.

Focus instead on how colonialism shaped and created a parallel civilisation that worked as an American cantonment in the southern Gulf based on cheap imported labour in what a former Indian diplomat of Persian descent described as “desalinated water economies”. One of the more fascinating stories circulating but never allowed to be published during my journalistic outing in the UAE was about how oil became a great equaliser between Bedouin habitations and the Iranian and Mesopotamian civilisations to the north. And so came a defter version of the overthrow of Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh who was deposed in 1953 for nationalising a British oil company.

Had Iran not existed, colonialism would still be there, staging coups and assassinations in the Gulf. The story of Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan Al Nahyan instantly reminds me of one of my grandfathers who had a primeval fear of banks. Shakhbut was the ruler of Abu Dhabi when he was replaced on Aug 6, 1966, by his younger brother, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan.

As with Mossadegh, the Abu Dhabi coup was carried out with the direct support of Britain, which was the colonial power overseeing the Trucial States at the time. Sheikh Shakhbut was removed from power by a coalition of his own family and the British government for a strange reason. After the discovery of oil in 1958, Abu Dhabi began accruing significant wealth, but Shakhbut refused to spend the royalties to westernise the emirate.

He was so mistrustful of banks that he reportedly preferred keeping large sums of the state’s money in a box under his bed. His fate was promptly sealed. Sheikh Zayed went on to rule Abu Dhabi and became the founding president of the UAE in 1971.

The current president, who joined the Abraham Accords and has become the most ardent spokesman for the destruction of Iran, is his son. The six Gulf states — Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE and Oman — are often projected as Sunni rivals of the predominantly Shia Iran, which is a grossly misleading and inaccurate description. The six were welded into the Gulf Cooperation Council originally as a foil to the pro-Soviet Baathist Iraq under a Sunni ruling elite.

It was in 1990 that the seeds were first sown for the GCC to side with Israel against Saddam Hussein. The GCC members also went against each other one at a time. Saudis against Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE.

The UAE against each other that resulted in a failed coup in Sharjah in the 1980s. The primary target of Saudi Arabia was Kuwait, which had a nascent parliament that threatened the Gulf’s feudal satraps. It was made worse by an overwhelming presence in the country of Palestinian nationalists. Had Iraq not in