Bazaari is the name given to the merchants and workers of bazaars, the traditional marketplaces of Iran. Bazaaris are involved in "petty trade of a traditional, or nearly traditional, kind, centered on the bazaar and its Islamic culture." Bazaari have been described as "the class of people who helped make the 1979 Iranian 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 of A Thousand and One Nights and that of the suburban shopping mall." An example being traditional merchants (also Muslim) who back the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.[1] However, it has also been noted that merchants in other Middle Eastern countries are predominately minority non-Muslim populations without the political influence of bazaari in Iran.[3]
Bazaaris differ from a social class as usually defined in that they include both "rich wholesalers and bankers" and lower income workers.[4] They are united not in their relation to the means of production but "in their resistance to dependence on the West and the spread of Western ways," their "`traditionalist` attitude", and their "close family, financial, and cultural ties" with the Shia ulama (clerical class).[5]
Bazaari, "led by its large merchants", in alliance with ulama clergy "or important parts of the clergy", have played an important part in recent Iranian history. The alliance was "central" to the successful Tobacco Protest against a British monopoly tobacco concession in 1891-92, to the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11, and especially to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran.[3] Bazzari supported "families of victims" of the anti-Shah struggles in 1978 and 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] In Iran the bazaari have formed the "underpinning of the ruling elite until today,"[3] an example of a politically connected and successful bazaari in Iran being Mohsen Rafighdoost, director of the Noor Foundation, who American journalist Robert D. Kaplan describes as "in all probability" being worth "tens or hundreds of millions of dollars".[1]