IT TAKES a lot to unite the Iranians, but National Geographic magazine has pulled it off. Everyone from the most devout mullah to the most fervent moderniser is unanimous in a furious response to what was perceived as a perfidious attack on the country’s proud civilisation and long history.

The crime? The magazine added the words “Arabian Gulf” in brackets beneath “Persian Gulf” on a map to label the body of water that divides Iran from its Arab neighbours.

The American-owned magazine has been banned from sale in Iran pending a “correction” of the map and its reporters are barred from visiting the Islamic republic. “We will not accept the use of the term ‘Arabian Gulf’, which is contrary to United Nations documents,” Hossein Khoshvaght, the Iranian Culture Ministry’s head of foreign press affairs, said.

Under the headline “Persian Gulf Forever”, the hardline Tehran Times fulminated that National Geographic’s refusal to use only the waterway’s historic name was “an unscientific and politically motivated measure”. It detected the influence of “the US Zionist lobby and the oil dollars of certain Arab governments” behind the parenthetical aside.

The official outcry has been echoed in cyberspace, which has become a haven for liberal journalists and commentators after the hardline judiciary closed scores of reformist publications in the past four years. Keeping the world’s most vital oil waterway “Persian” is a national touchstone and a highly emotive issue.

Iranian bloggers at home and abroad orchestrated an eye-catching web action on the Google search engine. A search for the words “Arabian Gulf” triggers a spoof message: “The Gulf you are looking for does not exist. Try Persian Gulf.” In a parody of the text that usually appears when a webpage does not exist, it advises users to read “some history books”.

National Geographic refuses to back down. The publication recognises “Persian Gulf” as the “primary” name but says: “It has been the society’s cartographic practice to display a secondary name in parentheses when use of such a name has become commonly recognised. The society does not attempt to make judgments about the validity of such claims but accurately to acknowledge the existence of conflicting names.”

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