Bazaari (Persian: بازاری) is the merchant class and workers ofbazaars, the traditional marketplaces ofIran. Bazaari are involved in "petty trade of a traditional, or nearly traditional, kind, centered on the bazaar and itsIslamic culture". They have been described as "the class of people who helped make the 1979Iranian Revolution".[1][2]
A broader, more recent definition includes traditional merchants outside of Iran, "a social class...in places where the society is in the midst of an awkward modernization; where the bazaar is in some stage of transition between the world ofA Thousand and One Nights and that of the suburbanshopping mall", an example being traditional merchants (alsoMuslim) who back theMuslim Brotherhood inEgypt.[1] However, it has also been noted that merchants in other Middle Eastern countries are predominantly minority non-Muslim populations without the political influence of bazaari in Iran.[3]
Bazaari differ from a social class as usually defined, in that they include both "rich wholesalers and bankers" as well as lower-income workers.[4] They are united not in their relation to the means of production but "in their resistance to dependence on theWest and the spread of Western ways", their "traditionalist attitude", and their "close family, financial, and cultural ties" with the Shiaulama, or clerical class.[5]
Bazaari, "led by its large merchants", in alliance withulama clergy "or important parts of the clergy", have played an important part in recent Iranian history. The alliance was "central" to the successfulTobacco Protest against a British monopoly tobacco concession of 1891–92, to theConstitutional Revolution of 1905–11, and especially to the1979 overthrow ofMohammad Reza Pahlavi.[3] Bazaari supported victims of the anti-Shah struggles in 1978 and their families, as well as providing "financial support for the antiregime strikes that began in May 1978 among university students and teachers and in the fall [of 1978] spread to the workers and civil servants".[6]
The bazaari continue to underpin the ruling elite today,[3] one example being Noor Foundation DirectorMohsen Rafighdoost, whose wealth has been described by American journalistRobert D. Kaplan as likely to amount to "tens or hundreds of millions of dollars".[1]