Protests began last Sunday as merchants in major commercial and electronics centers in Tehran—including the Alaeddin and Charsou complexes downtown—closed their shops and took to the streets following the rial’s sharp and rapid decline. Reports also emerged of similar closures in other markets across several cities.
Once again, the bazaar has moved to the forefront—an indicator of the depth of Iran regime’s crisis.
In Persian, “bazaar” simply means market. But it has long played an active role in Iran’s political life and retained a measure of independence that successive authorities have never fully managed to contain.
By the mid-1970s, Fahmi Huwaidi writes in Iran from the Inside, the bazaar had grown to include about 250,000 shop owners and controlled nearly two-thirds of the country’s retail trade. Tehran’s bazaar alone covered an area of three-square miles and contained around 10,000 warehouses and workshops. The scale of these markets expanded even further in the decades that followed. More significant, however, was the enduring close relationship between traders and Iran’s religious establishment. As Huwaidi notes, “this broad sector of large and small merchants and craftsmen remained the primary financier of the religious institution.”
Through its alliance with the clerical establishment, the bazaar became a pillar of the revolutionary camp, helping to destabilize the Shah’s regime and ultimately bring it down. In the aftermath of the revolution, the bazaar emerged politically empowered and expected reciprocal loyalty from the religious establishment now in power. Instead, it was taken aback when the Revolutionary Leadership Council, within its first year, enacted policies imposing sweeping restrictions on foreign trade and land ownership—measures that directly undercut the economic autonomy of bazaar merchants.
In his study of public policymaking in Iran after 1989, How Is Iran Governed?, researcher Abdulazim al-Badran underscores the bazaars’ importance as one of Iran’s largest economic pillars. They are also among the most capable of paying zakat and khums and funding religious endowments, reinforcing ties between clerics and bazaar merchants. After the 1979 revolution, the political system succeeded in drawing prominent bazaar actors into its orbit, incorporating many of them into official political institutions. While merchants were keen to preserve their relationship with the religious establishment, al-Badran argues that their overriding concern was economic self-interest—prompting early battles to defend those interests against clerical authority from the revolution’s first days.
According to al-Badran, the bazaar remains largely dominated by conservative currents, even though several prominent reformist figures have emerged from influential trading families—notably former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and reformist presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
The bazaar occupies a place in Iran’s political imagination that extends well beyond its role as a commercial hub. As Michael Axworthy writes in A History of Iran, it functions as an “informal network that reaches into every social class,” and a “countervailing force to state authority.” While the bazaar experienced a period of prosperity under Rafsanjani—often described as the era of the “commercial bourgeois republic”—the protests unfolding in Tehran today point to a deep fracture in this historic alliance. Merchants who once formed a cornerstone of clerical support now find themselves under severe economic pressure, evoking memories of the pre-1979 period, when the Shah’s regime sought to mask its economic failures by arresting those it labeled “profiteers and hoarders” in the bazaar—a pattern analysts argue is resurfacing amid the currency’s collapse.
Andres Ilves, Alhurra’s Iran affairs editor, notes that bazaari (merchant class of the bazaar) participation in protests carries exceptional symbolic weight. Tehran’s bazaar has long served as an economic and political bellwether, with strikes often signaling moments of regime vulnerability. So far, however, the movement has not coalesced into a full-scale, nationwide shutdown.
Rami Al Amine
A Lebanese writer and journalist living in the United States. He holds a master’s degree in Islamic-Christian Relations from the Faculty of Religious Sciences at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. He is the author of the poetry collection “I Am a Great Poet” (Dar Al-Nahda Al-Arabiya, 2007); the political pamphlet “Ya Ali, We Are No Longer the People of the South” (Lebanese Plans, 2008); a book on social media titled “The Facebookers” (Dar Al-Jadeed, 2012); and “The Pakistanis: A Statue’s Biography” (Dar Al-Nahda Al-Arabiya, 2024).
