218 Between Private and Public
the Qajar monarchy and the merchants came to a head in 1905 when the
governor of Tehran bastinadoed two prominent merchants for protesting
against orders to lower the price of imported sugar. The Tehran bazaar
responded by closing its stores, after which hundreds of bazaaris of all
standings along with clerics, seminary students, and Western-trained
intellectuals took sanctuary in a shrine in Southern Tehran where they
called for the establishment of a House of Justice.^44 This event in fact
sparked the Constitutional Revolution.
final spatial repertoire is the use of the bazaar as a starting point A
for marches. This was particularly the case during the 1953 protests and
the 1979 revolution.^45 Between 1952 and 1953, bazaari organizations
supported Mosaddeq by organizing rallies and demonstrations, most of
which set out from the Tehran bazaar and ended at Baharestan Square,
in front of the Parliament. Similarly, during the 1978–79 revolution many
rallies began at the Tehran bazaar—but rather than culminating in front
of the Majles, they typically ended at Tehran University. The shift from the
Parliament to the university, which was surrounded by well established
high schools and technical colleges, reflected the demise of public delib-
erative institutions during the last two decades of Pahlavi rule, the emer-
gence of a politicized middle class largely based in modern institutions of
higher education, and a northward shift in the city center. These rallies
literally drew connections between the bazaar and other symbolic places
with their emerging publics.
olitical entrepreneurs among the P bazaaris were able to tap into
existing expertise in collective activities such as commercial and religious
events to pool and distribute financial resources. Mosque associations
and religious circles were critical in smoothly coordinating the rallies that
reached tens and even hundreds of thousands of participants.^46
e multifaceted nature of the bazaar, its crosscutting networks, and Th
the population density it engendered were essential for facilitating social
mobilization. They did this in part because of the location of the bazaar
in the larger economy. The bazaar’s commercial relations integrated mul-
tiple cities across the country into an expansive web of relations between
importers, exporters, wholesalers, brokers, and retailers. Bazaaris and
their families enjoyed ties to a variety of social groups (e.g., clerics, indus-
trialists, and workers in the service sector), and their own socioeconomic