Baloch, Western

The Western Baloch are the northern branch of the Baloch, an Iranian-speaking, largely tribal people of the Balochistan plateau that spans south-eastern Iran, south-western Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. They speak Western Balochi (Rakhshani), whose sub-dialects include Sarhaddi (the Iranian Sarhad and Sistan border), Kalati and Panjguri; it is the most widely spoken Balochi variety and is also used by Baloch in Afghanistan's Nimruz and Helmand provinces and in Turkmenistan's Mary region. Balochi is a Northwestern Iranian language that keeps many archaic features. Baloch tradition traces the people to migrations from the Caspian and Kerman regions into Makran and the Sarhad between the 10th and 14th centuries. Their tribal confederacies (in Iran the Rigi, Shahbakhsh, Ismailzahi, Gamshadzahi, Yarahmadzahi, Narui and others) were ruled by sardars and largely independent until Reza Shah's army defeated Dost Mohammad Khan, the self-styled Shah of Balochistan, in 1928. Afsharid and later rulers moved Baloch clans to Khorasan as frontier guards, the origin of the Khorasani Baloch.

Baloch culture rests on the code of Balochi or Baloch-mayar: hospitality, protection of guests and refugees (bahot), keeping one's word, and vengeance for wrongs, regulated by tribal councils and sardars. Men wear the long shirt and very wide trousers (shalvar) with a turban; women wear long dresses with heavily embroidered chest panels, cuffs and a pocket (pandol), sewn in suzan-dozi needlework, a craft passed between women and sold across Iran. Marriage is usually within the tribe and often between cousins, with bride-price (labb) negotiated by families; weddings feature days of music and the circle dance (chap or do-chap). Music is central: the sorud fiddle, dambura lute and benju accompany epic ballads (sheyr) of tribal heroes and love stories, and healing musical rituals such as gwati and damal survive. Food includes flatbreads baked on hot stones, sajji (spit-roasted lamb), dates and buttermilk; tea and tobacco are offered to every guest. Housing ranges from mud-brick compounds and palm-frond huts to black goat-hair tents among herders.

Western Baloch are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school. In Iran the leading clerics trained in Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan and India, and the Dar al-Ulum and Makki Mosque in Zahedan form the religious and increasingly political centre of Iran's Sunnis. Alongside mosque Islam, rural Baloch visit shrines (ziarat) of saints and pirs, wear amulets written by mullas, and use musical exorcism and healing rites for people believed to be possessed by spirits or winds. A minority of Khorasani and Kerman Baloch are Shia. Younger urban Baloch are more religiously observant and politically conscious than their elders in some respects, while others, especially online, express secular Baloch nationalism; the 2022 protests mixed both currents.

Portions of the Bible (the Gospels) exist in Western Balochi, published 1984-2020, including Institute for Bible Translation editions, and the JESUS film is available in Western Balochi in 61 segments. Global Recordings Network has audio recordings. Southern Balochi has a New Testament, which many Western Baloch can partly follow, and Persian scriptures are available to those literate in Persian. No sustained, publicly known church planting among Western Baloch exists in any country; in Afghanistan and Iran outreach is illegal, while small fellowships of Baloch believers are reported in Pakistan and in the Gulf.

During the nationwide Woman, Life, Freedom protests, worshippers leaving Friday prayers at the Makki Mosque in Zahedan protested the reported rape of a 15-year-old Baloch girl by a police commander in Chabahar. Security forces opened fire on the crowd and the prayer grounds, killing about 100 people, the deadliest single day of the protest movement. Weekly Friday protests in Zahedan followed for months, and the Makki Mosque's leader, Molavi Abdolhamid Ismailzahi, became the country's most prominent Sunni critic of the government.