Bazaari

Bazaaris are a merchant class in Iran, who have had a significant political role in the current State of Iran. They depend on informal but extensive financial systems outside formal banking institutions and consistent with Islamic financial doctrine. As a result, they have been generally opposed to globalization and modernization that would bring them into competition with organizations backed by international economics.

Bazaaris have not typically been the subject of Marxist analysis, but they are recognizably a class, although "Marxists see classes only as they relate to the means of production, not as they actually function. As Nikki R. Keddi has pointed out, in Roots of Revolution, bazaaris don't fall into any of the usual categories.The worker in a hole-in-the-wall shop in the bazaar is certainly in a position different from that of a big moneylender in the bazaar." In class terms, they have been described as traditional petit bourgeoisie. The Pahlavi regime threatened that role with modernization, which would have made the upper bourgeoisie, linked to world finance, at the top of the social system. "the priority of the new regime was to protect the Tehran Bazaari from international competition and to provide state support. Moreover, the major industrial plants of the bourgeoisie were expropriated and ownership in the finance sector was transferred to the state. Thus, Iran became the model for a kind of state capitalism, and the economic voids that were left by state were occupied by Tehran Bazaari. No other class apart from the state and the Tehran Bazaari class was allowed to take part in the sector of finance. The absence of an upper bourgeoisie became one of Iran’s distinctive characteristics. The state that supported the dominance of the Tehran Bazaari class began to transfer a great deal of the budget directly, or in subsidies, to the lumpenproletariat, and to villagers, since it had tax free budgeting (rentier state). Thanks to this, while the villages and suburbs in which the great majority of the country population lived  were struggling with hunger in Pahlavi's day, they suddenly met the “benevolent state” and were transformed into the loyal supporters of the regime. "

In other words, bazaaris constitute a sort of newly established Islamic petty bourgeoisie. They must compete with more-experienced Christian and Jewish merchants, both in and outside the bazaar. This competition quickens the bazaaris' resentments, which are often similar to those that were in evidence among the petty bourgeoisie in Europe during the age of industrialization.

As a group, the bazaaris had joined with large landowners to support the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution, after having been displaced by the Iranian White Revolution in control of the peasantry.

Traditionally, bazaari families are religious and closely linked to the clerical ulama in Iran.

As of 1999, a bazaari who had been head of Ruhollah Khomeini's personal security detail, Mohsen Rafiqdoost controlled the Bonyad-e Mostazafan (Foundation of the Oppressed), Iran's largest holding company. Kaplan observes that while bazaaris may hold an ancient historical and economic niche, they are relatively new in political activism, especially in the Middle East. Beyond Iran, he points out that the archetype of the bazaari forms much of the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood. "Although that organization, so dangerous to pro-Western regimes in the Near East, consists largely of narrowly educated men of peasant background, it is the better-educated sons of traditional bazaaris, like Rafiqdoost, being a slight step up on the social ladder, who often lead the narrowly educated men in trying to topple an established order."