The Qum Protests and the Coming of the Iranian Revolution
299
Table 2
Percent annual change in consumer prices, wages, and daily calorie intake,
Iran, 1971–77
Consumer
Manufac-
Construc-
Price
turing
tion
Calorie
Index
Wages
wages
wages
Intake
Year
%
%
%
%
%
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Sources: Consumer Price Index: Bank Markazi Iran [Central Bank of Iran] 1974: 166 (data for 1971–73),
1976: 74 (data for 1971–75), 1978: 158 (data for 1972–77). ( Jazayeri 1988: 170 reports similar figures from an
IMF source.) Wages: International Financial Statistics, April 1977, 186 (data for 1971–72), April 1979, 190
(data for 1972–77). Manufacturing and construction wages: Jazayeri 1988: 176 (reporting statistics from the
Central Bank of Iran). Daily calorie intake: Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations 1980:
467.
we do not observe widespread participation of workers from these fields in
the aftermath of the January 1978 Qum protests. Industrial strike activity
did not begin in earnest for another eight months, in September and Octo-
ber 1978 (Abrahamian 1982: 511; Bayat 1987: 77–89), after inflation had been
reduced significantly (Business Week, 11 September 1978, 86; Quarterly Eco-
nomic Review: Iran, 3d quarter 1979, 20). Rural migrants, who comprised the
majority of workers in the construction industry, also were slow to join the
revolutionary movement (Kazemi 1980a: 88–95, 1980b: 257–77; Bauer 1983:
157–60; Parsa 1989: 5) and constituted only 10% of the revolutionary casual-
ties in Tehran (Amra i 1982: 182). In one telling instance in the fall of 1978,
construction workers laughed as protestors in Tehran, fleeing security forces,
ran into a dead-end alley; the workers then refused to allow the protestors
to take refuge on the construction site (Gulabdarah i 1986: 41).
By contrast, the economic sector that took up the protest movement most
actively in January 1978—the bazaar, Iran’s traditional system of manufactur-
ing and commerce—was one that fared well in the 1970s and arguably better
in early 1978 than in mid-1975. By many accounts, the bazaar had enjoyed an
economic boom in the decade before the revolution. One traditional shopping
area in Tehran, for instance, added 40 shopping alleys in the 1960s and 1970s
300
Social Science History
(Ghandchi-Tehrani 1982: 36). In the mid-1970s, the bazaar controlled two-
thirds of domestic wholesale trade, one-third of imports, and one-fifth of the
credit market (Graham 1980: 224; Abrahamian 1982: 433; Euromoney [Lon-
don], June 1978, 117). In addition, bazaaris and their sons were increasingly
crossing over into the ‘‘modern’’ sectors of the economy: numerous indus-
trialists had their origins in the bazaar, and modern educators were opening
new career paths for the younger generation (Ashraf 1988: 563, 569; Bashi-
riyeh 1984: 40–41; Graham 1980: 47; Thaiss 1971: 196, 198). ‘‘I have no cause
for complaint [in terms of economic performance],’’ a carpet merchant from
the Tehran bazaar told an inquiring academic in November 1978.
44
‘‘We had
money,’’ one jewelry shop owner from the Tehran bazaar later recalled in
explaining, proudly, how he was able to shut his shop for months in support
of the revolutionary movement.
45
The bazaar, like other segments of society, had numerous grievances
against the state. Bazaaris had little access to government credit, the interest
ceiling for which was lower than inflation, thus generating billions of dollars
in subsidies for companies with royal connections (Salehi-Isfahani 1989).The
monarchy’s urban planning showed little respect for traditional markets—
new avenues cut through the bazaar in several provincial capitals, destroying
the bazaar in two cities (Ashraf 1988: 551). In addition, the bazaar was tar-
geted in the government’s July 1975 price-control campaign, when thousands
of meagerly trained inspectors were sent into the nation’s bazaars to root out
‘‘profiteering,’’ a campaign that one bazaari likened to the Cultural Revolu-
tion in China (Der Spiegel [The mirror {Hamburg}], 18 December 1978, 114).
Yet despite their historic alliance with oppositional clerics, bazaaris made no
move to protest the repression at Qum in 1975, while in early 1978 they mobi-
lized quickly. ‘‘After years of silence, a fire has once again been found in the
ashes of the bazaar,’’ one clerical revolutionary reported in mid-January 1978
(Dar-barah-yi qiyam 1978, 1:138).
46
On 11 January 1978, two days after the
casualties in Qum, the Isfahan bazaar began to shut down in protest, as did
bazaars in several other cities in the following days.
47
In sum, the different responses to the Qum protests of 1975 and 1978
cannot be clearly explained by changes in economic conditions. While the
economy had, by some measures, deteriorated marginally in the interim, by
other measures it had improved. Industrial and construction workers, who
suffered greater relative deprivation in 1978 than in 1975, were slow to join