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Although most “old” social institutions in Iran were destroyed or signi¤cantly weakened during the Pahlavi dynasty (1926–1979), the bazaar survived , even ®ourished, despite numerous challenges by central state authorities and shifting economic and political conditions. During the 1977–1979 revolution, the bazaar was a crucial component of the social movement that brought down the monarchy, providing both material and mobilizing resources . The bazaar’s close cooperation during the revolution with the ulama (Shi"a Islamic leadership) engendered scholarly claims of a historic “bazaar and mosque” alliance. Indeed, outside of the ulama itself, no group in Iran has been as consistently labeled “Islamic” as the bazaaris—the merchants, shopkeepers, employees, hawkers, and other urban Iranians who make their living inside the bazaar or depend upon it for a living (Thaiss 1971; Ashraf 1988; Keshavarzian 1996). Bazaaris have been nearly uniformly described as conservative, traditional, devout Muslims who joined the revolution either out of cultural-ideological af¤nity with the ulama or out of a sense of outrage at the late Pahlavi secular modernism. While it has been established that the bazaar-mosque alliance was central to the success of the revolutionary movement against the shah in 1978, this alliance is often used to make ahistorical generalizations about bazaari political behavior. Those generalizations often run afoul of the historical record, even as close to the revolution as 1977, during which time Iranian bazaaris were engaged in a series of collective protests with secular intellectuals rather than with their religious allies in the Shi"a clergy. In addition to questioning the bazaar ’s external alliance with the clergy, the 1977 protests suggest a strong internal capacity for mobilization in the bazaar itself and a set of motivations 185 Seven Collective Action with and without Islam Mobilizing the Bazaar in Iran Benjamin Smith for political action that are independent of any external alliances. The generalizations run into further trouble when the issue of bazaar-state relations under the Islamic Republic is raised, and the analytical response has often been either to neglect the changing relationship or to explain the changes in an ad hoc manner. In general, scholars have, with few exceptions (see, e.g., Parsa 1995), been willing to presume that the mobilization of the bazaar during the revolution could be explained by the ideological outcome of the revolution itself. In this chapter I argue, ¤rst, that we must be careful about assuming that the constituent social components of a broad-based Islamic movement like the Iranian revolution are uniformly motivated to action by religion. While there was certainly a segment of the bazaar in Iran that sided ideologically with Khomeini during and after the revolution, the evidence suggests that merchants joined the revolutionary movement for diverse reasons and through a spectrum of political organizations, from Khomeini supporters in the ulama to Marxist groups. Moreover, we must give greater attention to the fact that resources mobilized in support of the movement, like those of the bazaar, remain internal to the group, even though they may be “borrowed” by political entrepreneurs during movement periods. The bazaar’s Islamic activism during the revolution, then, was temporally contingent and does not necessarily de¤ne a trend. The ulama’s successful attempt to “reach into” and utilize bazaari social networks was crucial to the success of the revolution, but the temporary nature of that alliance becomes much clearer when bazaarmosque relations are traced into the Islamic Republican period. Second, as an important corrective to prevalent social movement theory developed from Western European and American cases, the mobilization of the bazaar highlights the importance of informal networks as mobilization resources in authoritarian settings. Whereas formalized organizational structures may increase the likelihood of movement success in a democratic polity, in an authoritarian setting they mark movements or groups as targets for state repression. In such environments, well-established informal networks are likely to be the most successful means of mobilization. Informal networks such as the ones in the bazaar in Iran are not inherently oriented to political action. They are primarily social and economic strategies of survival that have become institutionalized, and thus their potential as resources for political mobilization is secondary. In addition, networks like these make a strong sense of community identity possible for the bazaar, even in the face of serious ideological and cultural divides within the community itself, and suggest that what has been termed a sense of “shared fate” is the strongest communal bond between bazaaris of varying religious and class backgrounds...

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