CommentaryIn Iranian family gatherings, geopolitics rarely arrives through academic language. It emerges through instinct, irritation, memory, and the peculiar intimacy with which ordinary people discuss the fate of nations while passing tea across a crowded room.
That evening had begun like many others: fruit on the table, the television murmuring in the background, someone complaining about inflation, someone else speaking about emigration. Then the news shifted to the Persian Gulf. Oil tankers appeared on the screen, moving slowly through the narrow waters of the Strait of Hormuz beneath dramatic music and headlines about global energy markets. My father looked up and said with complete certainty: “Iran and Oman should charge every ship that passes through Hormuz. Why should the whole world use it for free?”
My uncle immediately agreed. “Exactly. The world benefits from it, but we carry the danger. Who protects the strait? Who pays for the security?” I answered carefully: “But Hormuz does not entirely belong to Iran.” My father frowned. “Then whose is it?” Before I could respond, another relative interrupted from across the room: “What about the Suez Canal? Or Panama? They charge ships.” I shook my head. “Those are artificial canals built by human beings. Hormuz is different. It existed before modern states, before maritime law, before these governments. It is not infrastructure in the ordinary sense. It is geography itself.”
For a moment, the room fell quiet. Then everyone began speaking at once. Sovereignty. Oil. America. Trade. Security. National pride. Yet beneath the noise of that ordinary family argument, another question slowly emerged in my mind — one deeper than the familiar rhetoric of nationalism or maritime strategy. The issue was not simply whether ships should pay to cross Hormuz. The issue was more fundamental: what exactly is the Strait of Hormuz? Is it property? Territory? A strategic weapon? Or is it something closer to an entrusted space — an amanah?
The modern international order struggles to classify places such as the Strait of Hormuz because they exist simultaneously within multiple legal and political categories. The strait is geographically local yet economically global; territorially bordered yet internationally indispensable. Iran and Oman exercise sovereignty over surrounding territorial waters, yet the strategic function of Hormuz transcends the authority of either state individually.
Nearly a fifth of globally traded oil passes through this narrow maritime corridor. The stability of international markets, industrial production, and energy systems depends heavily upon its uninterrupted openness. Hormuz therefore occupies an ambiguous position within international law: neither fully national nor fully international, neither entirely sovereign nor entirely common.
Under the contemporary law of the sea, uninterrupted transit passage through international straits constitutes a foundational principle of global navigation. Strategic waterways cannot simply become instruments of arbitrary sovereign control. From this perspective, any attempt by coastal states to transform Hormuz into a source of unrestricted political rent appears legally suspect. The strait cannot become the private toll road of any government.
Yet this principle is often misunderstood in overly simplistic terms. There exists an important distinction between imposing a sovereign tax upon passage itself and recovering costs associated with maintaining the conditions that make safe passage possible. Ships do not move through an abstract legal principle called “free navigation.” They move through environmentally vulnerable and militarily sensitive waters requiring permanent systems of surveillance, navigational coordination, ecological protection, emergency response infrastructure, anti-smuggling operations, search-and-rescue mechanisms, and maritime security. Stability is not naturally free. It is continuously produced through institutions, labor, infrastructure, and political responsibility.
The global economy nevertheless tends to imagine geography as costless. International markets benefit immensely from the stability of Hormuz, while the environmental vulnerability, militarization, ecological risk, and geopolitical instability generated by that same circulation remain concentrated within the Gulf itself. This asymmetry creates a form of structural imbalance in which global benefit and local burden become unevenly distributed.
From this perspective, the distinction between a “toll” and a “functional contribution” becomes crucial. Coastal states cannot legitimately demand payment merely because ships happen to cross waters adjacent to their territory. Yet it is far more difficult to deny the legitimacy of non-discriminatory contributions dedicated specifically to maritime safety, environmental preservation, navigational infrastructure, and emergency response systems. The issue is therefore not whether Hormuz may generate financial obligations at all, but rather the moral and legal basis upon which those obligations are justified.
It is precisely at this point that Islamic jurisprudence becomes intellectually relevant in an unexpectedly modern way. Modern political thought frequently understands sovereignty through the language of ownership. States are imagined as proprietors exercising near-absolute authority over territory and resources. Yet both Sunni and Shi‘i traditions of Islamic jurisprudence often approached authority differently. The distinction between milk — unrestricted ownership — and amanah — entrusted responsibility — occupied a central role within Islamic legal and ethical thought. Certain things, especially those connected to collective welfare, could not legitimately become objects of unrestricted domination.
The Qur’anic notion of amanah offers a striking alternative to modern ideas of sovereign possession. In Qur’an 33:72, responsibility itself is described as a trust carried by humanity:
Indeed, We offered the Trust (al-amanah) to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, but they declined to bear it and feared it; yet man undertook it.
Classical Muslim scholars did not interpret amanah merely as personal honesty or private morality. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali understood entrusted responsibility as inseparable from accountability before both God and society. Al-Qurtubi, in his Qur’anic exegesis, interpreted amanah broadly as encompassing obligations tied to governance, justice, public duty, and social responsibility. In Shi‘i political jurisprudence, the idea of wilayah over public affairs was likewise never meant to imply unrestricted ownership over collective resources. Authority existed conditionally, tied to preservation of maslahah — the public welfare — and constrained by accountability before both society and God.
This distinction becomes especially important in relation to public resources and shared spaces. A widely cited Prophetic narration states:
People are partners in three things: water, pasture, and fire.
Both Sunni and Shi‘i jurists historically treated this narration as evidence that certain foundational resources necessary for collective life could not legitimately become subjects of arbitrary monopolization. Waterways, shared access routes, and collectively beneficial resources belonged within the domain of public benefit rather than absolute sovereign appropriation. In Shi‘i legal reasoning, discussions surrounding bayt al-mal — the public treasury — similarly reinforced the idea that rulers act not as proprietors of public wealth, but as trustees temporarily responsible for administering resources on behalf of the community.
The Strait of Hormuz can be understood through precisely this conceptual framework. Hormuz is not merely territorial property adjacent to Iran and Oman. It is entrusted geography: a globally consequential passage geographically administered by coastal states yet functionally tied to the welfare of the international community as a whole. Iran and Oman therefore appear not as unrestricted proprietors of the strait, but as custodians — amins — responsible for preserving navigational stability, environmental sustainability, and secure passage.
The significance of this distinction cannot be overstated. If Hormuz is understood exclusively through the language of ownership, then the strait inevitably becomes either a nationalist symbol or a geopolitical weapon. Under such a framework, charging ships appears either as sovereign entitlement or coercive extortion. But if Hormuz is approached through the framework of amanah, the logic changes fundamentally. A trustee cannot arbitrarily exploit what has been entrusted to them. At the same time, however, a trustee cannot reasonably be expected to absorb all burdens associated with preservation while others benefit freely from the existence of the trust itself.
Here Islamic jurisprudence and modern international law unexpectedly converge. The legal regime governing international straits already limits absolute sovereign control in favor of preserving a broader collective interest: global navigation. The Islamic concept of amanah similarly limits unrestricted domination over shared resources in favor of public welfare and responsible stewardship. Both frameworks, despite emerging from radically different intellectual traditions, arrive at a remarkably similar principle: strategic spaces that sustain collective life cannot legitimately become instruments of arbitrary extraction.
This convergence creates the possibility of a more nuanced legal and philosophical framework for Hormuz. Under such a framework, Iran and Oman could not legitimately “sell passage” through the strait in the manner of private owners monetizing personal property. Yet they may possess a defensible claim to recovering costs directly connected to preserving navigational safety, environmental protection, maritime rescue systems, ecological monitoring, and regional stability. Such contributions would derive legitimacy not from sovereign domination, but from custodial responsibility.
Hormuz therefore behaves less like passive geography and more like a political being. It shapes military doctrine, reorganizes energy markets, influences diplomatic alignments, generates global anxieties, and periodically destabilizes financial systems thousands of miles away from the Gulf itself. Entire economies react to its vulnerability. States speak about it as though it were an actor rather than a location. This is precisely why reducing it to the language of territorial possession alone feels conceptually insufficient. Hormuz does not merely belong to politics; it actively produces politics.
The environmental dimension of this argument is equally important. The Persian Gulf constitutes one of the world’s most fragile marine ecosystems. The dense concentration of oil tankers and commercial vessels crossing Hormuz generates continuous ecological risk: oil spills, marine contamination, habitat destruction, and long-term environmental degradation. Both international environmental law and Islamic legal ethics place significant emphasis upon the prevention of harm. Classical legal maxims such as “harm must be removed” and “there shall be neither harm nor reciprocating harm” acquire renewed relevance when applied to modern ecological vulnerability. Environmental protection therefore becomes not an external justification imposed upon the region from abroad, but an intrinsic obligation arising from the very logic of custodianship itself.
Yet the legitimacy of such a model ultimately depends upon a condition that cannot be ignored: political accountability. Trusteeship without accountability collapses into appropriation. This is the central weakness of the contemporary Iranian state. Any argument for functional maritime contributions immediately encounters international skepticism because the governing structure of the Islamic Republic lacks the institutional transparency necessary for credible custodianship. A state characterized by opaque financial institutions, militarization, ideological confrontation, and limited public accountability cannot convincingly distinguish between legitimate infrastructural contributions and geopolitical coercion.
This point is essential because it prevents the argument from collapsing into mere nationalism. The issue is not whether Iran can maximize profit from geography. The issue is whether a coastal state can legitimately act as trustee of a globally significant passage. Such legitimacy cannot emerge from military power alone. It requires transparent institutions, accountable governance, independent oversight, and a demonstrable commitment to public welfare rather than factional or ideological interests.
For this reason, the future of Hormuz is inseparable from political transformation within Iran itself. Only under a genuinely accountable political order could a system of non-discriminatory maritime service contributions become ethically persuasive and internationally credible. Under such conditions, revenues connected to Hormuz could be directed transparently toward environmental restoration, maritime infrastructure, coastal development, ecological monitoring systems, and navigational safety rather than militarized patronage networks or geopolitical confrontation.
The deeper significance of Hormuz therefore extends far beyond maritime law alone. It concerns the moral language through which humanity understands strategic geography itself. Modern politics has become accustomed to interpreting strategic spaces exclusively through sovereignty, possession, and domination. Yet certain places exceed the logic of ownership because their function sustains entire regions, economies, and populations simultaneously. Their significance cannot be contained entirely within the borders of any single nation-state.
Long after the conversation ended, the television continued showing tankers crossing dark water. My relatives gradually returned to ordinary subjects. Someone refilled the tea glasses. Someone else changed the channel. Yet the question remained suspended in the room long after the voices had faded: What does it mean to inherit a geography upon which the entire world depends, yet which no one can ever fully own? Perhaps that is the real tragedy — and responsibility — of the Strait of Hormuz.
AmirAli Maleki is a researcher specializing in international law and the philosophy of law, and the Editor of PraxisPublication.com. He works in the fields of political philosophy, Islamic philosophy, and hermeneutics. He is the recipient of JURIST’s 2026 David M. Crane Rule of Law award.
