212 Between Private and Public
over property rights has continuously hindered attempts to draw plans
and engage in (re)construction within the bazaar region. However, the
main thoroughfares of the bazaar were always de facto public prop-
erty, accessible to all and under the administration of the municipality.
Historically, scholars of Islamic law, who have developed a relational
understanding of public and private in general, recognized the market as
a public space that was to be monitored (although not regulated) by an
inspector [muh.tasib] to ensure that Islamic law and local custom would
be followed.^23
owever, as Asef Bayat reminds us in his discussion of the urban H
poor and political activism, sharing a common locale or being in close
proximity is not sufficient to transform a latent group into an active
group.^24 Spatial concentration matters to the extent that it generates
long-term, crosscutting, and multifaceted interpersonal relations, or the
characteristics of what may be described as community or what Arendt
would recognize as “a web of human connectedness.”^25 Bazaari ties are
reproduced by and within the bazaar’s stores, alleyways, warehouses, cof-
fee shops, restaurants, and mosques. To move from being a passive net-
work of actors sharing a common space to an active one where actors
consciously participate in group activities and mobilization, physical space
must become a social space through activities, rituals, and interdependen-
cies wherein individuals identify themselves as part of a group and as dis-
tinct from others and develop a semblance of generalized trust.
p through the 1970s, the bazaar was a functionally mixed space U
that helped engender interpersonal relations among bazaaris that
bridged the potentially divisive sectoral, hierarchical, ethnic, and politi-
cal differences that could have rendered the commercial concentration
socially insignificant and politically irrelevant. Within and surrounding
the Tehran bazaar there existed public baths, coffeehouses, restaurants,
zūrkhānehs [houses of strength], schools, mosques, and shrines. On a
regular, if not daily, basis bazaaris would eat together, gather in coffee-
houses, and hold meetings in their warehouses and at the entrance gates
to their alleys. Mosques and shrines, often founded and funded by guilds
and bazaaris, were places of routine interaction among pious merchants
or those who wanted to at least display a degree of public piety. Hence,
the bazaar had mixed uses—commercial, manufacturing, holy, hygienic,