Keshavarzian 209the market and the private sphere.^12 Normative political theorists, there-
fore, may not recognize the bazaar as a public sphere, especially since
many of the issues discussed and debated within the bazaar’s physical
space or through its channels of communication can hardly be construed
as constituting “the common interest.” However, this narrow under-
standing of the public sphere and strict dichotomy between private and
public, or personal and political, would preclude a full understanding of
Iranian politics and of the bazaaris’ political power. It is useful to think
of degrees of publicness, as recent scholarly work tends to do, rather than
approach “the public” in stark dichotomous terms juxtaposed to “the pri-
vate.”^13 Publicness has “the quality of wholeness, openness, and availabil-
ity,” writes Setrag Manoukian.^14 “Public is something whole, that is shared
and total, encompassing everything, or having the possibility to do so.
It is open and available in the sense that it is ‘in view’ and at somebody’s
disposal. The actualization of these characteristics is a matter of degree
and depends on the particular situation and its means of implementation.”
Defined as such, Manoukian situates publicness at one end of a contin-
uum, whose opposite end is secrecy, which is associated with “partiality,
unavailability, and closeness.” Similarly, in his more sweeping discussion
of “Arabo-Islamic society,” Nazih Ayubi restructures the public-private
dichotomy as one between “sociability” and “domesticity” with the former
being characterized as “open, revealed, [and] expressed” and the latter
“hidden, covered, [and] withdrawn.” He claims that in Muslim and some
Mediterranean societies “life is often ‘lived in public,’ and all things in life
acquire a certain cruel publicity.”^15
nfortunately forgotten in discussions of public/private and secrecy U
is Georg Simmel’s work, which develops a more general sociological
account of the public and secrecy as inversely correlated and as an essen-
tial attribute of social evolution. “The historical development of society
is in many respects characterized by the fact that what at an earlier time
was manifest, enters the protection of secrecy; and that, conversely, what
once was secret, no longer needs such protection but reveals itself.”^16 For
Simmel, society is composed of individuals connected to one another
through interaction, with lies and secrecy being one such form of interac-
tion that requires social distance.^17 “The secret is a first rate element of
individualization. It is in a typical dual role: social conditions of strong