Luri, Southern

The Southern Lurs are the Lur tribes of the southern Zagros: the Boyer-Ahmad and the Kohgiluyeh tribes (Bahmai, Tayyebi, Charam, Bavi, Dushmanziari and others), together with smaller Lur communities in eastern Khuzestan (Behbahan, Bagh-e Malek, Ramhormoz) and western Bushehr (Deylam, Genaveh). The closely related Mamasani confederation of northwestern Fars has its own entry (mamasani). With the Bakhtiari they form the 'Greater Lurs' (Lur-e Bozorg) of Persian historiography. They speak Southern Luri, the southernmost section of the Luri continuum, a Southwestern Iranian language descended from Middle Persian, in dialects such as Boyer-Ahmadi (around Yasuj), Kohgiluyei (Dehdasht), Liravi and Mamasani (Nurabad). The Boyer-Ahmad are the largest Lur tribe after the Bakhtiari. Historically the tribes were semi-autonomous under their own khans, practising transhumance between the high summer pastures (sardsir) around Mount Dena and the low winter pastures (garmsir) toward the Gulf. They resisted the Pahlavi state repeatedly: Reza Shah's campaigns of the late 1920s and 1930s disarmed and forcibly settled them, and the Boyer-Ahmad and Mamasani rose again in the southern tribal rebellion of 1962-63 against land reform and the nationalisation of pastures and forests.

Southern Lur life is shaped by the tribe (il), section (tayefeh) and lineage, by transhumant pastoralism and by the oak forests of the Zagros. Villagers and the remaining nomads keep sheep and goats, make clarified butter (rughan) and yogurt products in spring, gather wild almonds, pistachios, plums and acorns (acorn flour was once a famine food), and weave black goat-hair tents, kilims, saddlebags and gabbeh-like rugs. Women traditionally enjoy more freedom than in many neighbouring societies: they work in the open, wear bright layered skirts, long tunics and a loosely tied scarf, and men and women dance together at weddings in the circle dance and the handkerchief dance (dasmal-bazi) to the sorna and dohol, a practice that sets Lurs apart from many Muslim neighbours. Weddings last several days and include the bride's ceremonial procession on horseback in some areas; funerals bring sung laments and, in neighbouring Mamasani, the saz and naqareh. Hospitality, honour (gheyrat) and tribal solidarity are core values; Erika Friedl's long ethnography of the Boyer-Ahmad village of Sisakht documents how marriage moved from arranged unions with bride-price toward later, chosen marriages between 1900 and 2015, and how schooling transformed women's lives.

Southern Lurs are Twelver Shia, but village religion as documented by the anthropologists Reinhold Loeffler and Erika Friedl in Boyer-Ahmad combines formal Islam with a dense local tradition: vows and votive meals, visits to the tombs of saints and imamzadehs, amulets and prayer-writers, beliefs about spirits, fate and healing, and a vivid eschatology of the grave and the afterlife. Before the 1970s few villages had a resident mullah, and religious knowledge passed through elders and occasional itinerant preachers; Loeffler's 'Islam in Practice' shows wide individual variation in belief, from piety to scepticism, within a single village. Since the revolution state religious institutions, seminaries and Basij networks have grown in Yasuj and the towns, while among educated youth religious observance has weakened. Muharram mourning, with processions and sorna-accompanied laments, is the high point of the religious year.

Southern Luri has Scripture portions (2024 according to Joshua Project's language data) available on YouVersion ('Southern Luri Bible') and Bible.is, and Global Recordings Network audio. No JESUS Film exists in Southern Luri, though the Northern Luri ('Luri (Iran)') and Bakhtiari versions are partly intelligible, and nearly all Southern Lurs understand Persian, in which Bibles, satellite television and online ministries are available. No church or fellowship among Southern Lurs is publicly known; Joshua Project lists 0% evangelical.

The Boyer-Ahmad, divided into highland (sardsir) and lowland (garmsir) sections, were the most powerful tribe of Kohgiluyeh and long resisted central control. When the Shah's land reform and the nationalisation of forests and pastures reached the south in 1962-63, Boyer-Ahmadi, Mamasani and Qashqai khans led an armed uprising that the army suppressed. Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad was afterwards detached from its neighbours as a separate administrative unit with its capital at Yasuj, and it is now a full province in which Southern Luri is the majority language (71.5% in 2016).

The Mamasani (a contraction of Mohammad-Hasani, after a putative founding ancestor) are a confederation of Lur tribes in Mamasani and Rostam counties of northwestern Fars, between Kohgiluyeh and Shiraz. They migrated into Greater Lorestan after 1203-04 and, late in the Safavid era, moved south from Kohgiluyeh to conquer Shulestan, the territory of the earlier Shul Lurs, which then took the Mamasani name; their historic seat was Fahliyan. The confederation comprised four tribes: Rostam (about 800 families in 1918), Bakesh (1,200 families in 15 clans), Javidi (700 families) and Doshmanziari, which was weakened after its chief Mohammad-Reza Khan was executed in 1840 and had separated by 1945. Safavid shahs recruited Mamasani musketeers, Zand and Qajar governors fought them, and they rebelled against Reza Shah in 1928-29 before the region was pacified in 1934; they joined the southern tribal revolt of 1962-63. Mamasani County had 117,527 people in 2016 and some 20,000 Mamasani were still nomadic in the late 1990s. They speak the Mamasani dialect of Southern Luri, with Persian as a second language, share Shia Islam and Lur culture with the Boyer-Ahmad and Kohgiluyeh tribes, and are known for the handkerchief dance and saz and naqareh music. They are close kin of the Southern Lur tribes described here and have their own entry as a separate people group (mamasani).