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Social Hierarchy in Provincial Iran: The Case of Qajar Maragheh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mary‐Jo DelVecchio Good
Mary‐Jo DelVecchio Good*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of California, Davis
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Extract

Social hierarchy in Iran, as in other modernizing nations, has undergone major changes in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, contemporary patterns of social hierarchy are rooted in the traditions of inequality that prevailed during the Qajar era. In provincial Iran, these traditions of hierarchy and inequality were structured in part by the form of political authority. In the nineteenth century, many provincial regions were ruled by local notables who maintained varying degrees of independence from the royal court. Along with leading landowning families, merchants, and clergy, they formed the elite of provincial society. The culture of social hierarchy was also shaped by traditional Islamic and Persian views of society and by the meaning attributed to the distribution of wealth, power, and prestige in Iran.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , Summer 1977 , pp. 129 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1977

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References

Notes

1. In the decades since World War II, studies of new states in the Near East, Asia, and Africa have frequently focused on two developmental trends that shape contemporary patterns of social hierarchy in these societies: (1) the strengthening of the state through bureaucratization and centralization of control; and (2) the emergence of a new middle class of bureaucrats, salaried men, technicians, professionals, and businessmen and industrialists, as a consequence of political and economic modernization. See Fallers, Lloyd Inequality: Social stratification Reconsidered (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Geertz, Clifford The Social History of an Indonesian Town (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965)Google Scholar; and Vogel, Ezra Japan's New Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. For a more complete discussion, see Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio “Social Hierarchy and Social Change in a Provincial Iranian Town” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1977).Google Scholar I wish to thank the Social Science Research Council for a Foreign Area Fellowship; it made the dissertation research possible. Field work took place in Maragheh from December 1972 to August 1974 in cooperation with my husband, Byron Good.

3. Ibid., p. 275.

4. Morier, James A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor (London: Paternoster-Row, 1818), p.293.Google Scholar

5. Bharier, Julian “The Growth of Towns and Villages in Iran, 1900-1966,” Middle Eastern Studies 8:51-61 (1972), p. 53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. One of Ahmad Khan's sons was sent to the Qaj ar court to serve the royal family. Members of this branch of the family remained in Tehran and were responsible for implementing various military policies of the Qajar Shahs. Several were prominent military figures in the Qajar court, and the family acknowledges that one of its Tehran members was responsible for the death of Amir Kabir. This information has been confirmed by Constance Cronin who interviewed members of the Tehran branch of the family.

7. “Moqaddam” is not a tribal name but means “chief.” It is unclear from what tribe the family originated. Some have suggested the Moqaddams were originally a branch of the Afshars. The data in this section are primarily drawn from the genealogy and family history of the Moqaddams as told to us by three family informants. It also included accounts by non-family members, particularly for the period from Samad Khan's rule. Family genealogies and histories of the landed and commercial elite and from bazaaris also helped to round out the picture for the late nineteenth century.

8. Morier, pp. 293-294.

9. Ibid., p. 297.

10. Many of the Moqaddam governors and other family members in the military branch of the family participated in various military battles throughout Qajar Iran. See, for example, Malik-e Sāsān, Khan siyasat-garān-e Dowreh-yi Qajar (Tehran: Tahuri, n.d. ca 1950s), p. 170.Google Scholar

11. One suspects that disputes were often resolved without recourse to government officials. The pattern is still common today. Within the town, parties to a dispute will frequently take their case to a religious scholar instead of to the government court. Within the village, disputes are often settled by village elders or younger men of influence. There is a desire to protect the community from unnecessary government interference.

12. The tree from which the Constitutionalists were hung still stands in the Nalband Bazaar. It is said to be a place for “fright,” that angels (firishtiler) and jinns frequent the place at night.

13. Browne, Edward G. The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909 (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1966), p. 265Google Scholar; also see Ch. 9.

14. Arfa, Hassan Under Five Shahs (London: John Murray, 1964), p. 48Google Scholar; and Avery, Peter Modern Iran (London: Ernest Benn, Ltd., 1965), pp. 157, 170.Google Scholar

15. Arfa, p. 48.

16. Ibid., pp. 119-120.

17. Browne, p. 355.

18. This notion of pilav is peculiar to the provinces. In Tehran and in sophisticated circles the third “p” is pur-ruyi or audacity. The Shah is said to have all three “p's.”

19. See Bill, James The Politics of Iran (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1972)Google Scholar for a discussion of parti in Iranian political networks. His notion of a personalistic web of influence networks is effective for analyzing Iranian politics at the national level and for contrasting mobility by merit versus mobility via parti.

20. I have used the term stratum instead of class to designate the unequal distribution of prestige, money, influence and power, which led to the pattern of traditional hierarchy portrayed in this section. The Iranian term tabagheh (stratum) is usually translated as “class”; its meaning is closer to the popular usage of class in American culture than to a Marxian notion of-class. The concept of “class” is fairly recent to Iran.

21. Bill, James and Leiden, Carl in The Middle East: Politics and Power (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1974), pp. 81-83Google Scholar, place bazaar craftsmen in the lower class in Middle Eastern societies. This is a distortion of the pattern of hierarchy in Middle Eastern societies such as Iran and Turkey (and probably most other Middle Eastern societies). It misrepresents the pattern of distribution of wealth, power and influence, and prestige and results from Bill's focus on the elite and the “new” bureaucratic and professional class. Bill also places bureaucrats and professionals in the same class, and further oversimplifies stratification of these societies.

22. Maragheh's mujtahids were unlike those families of religious scholars in Tabriz such as the alem family of Javadi who owned numerous villages and who monopolized high religious posts for generations.

23. In the early decades of the twentieth century strife between the landed families was not uncommon. One elderly notable recalled that his grandfather would always take a guard of troops with him when he went to visit his villages, and that struggles over land and water rights were not infrequent between landlords and their “troops.” However, no clear pattern of long lasting and formal factions emerged. This lack of formal factional groups seems to have persisted until today.

24. The bazaari families appear to have been less endogamous than the families of the elite.

25. Most workers or bazaaris who had working class origins had difficulty in relating their genealogies. Most of those we collected were only two generations deep.

26. Elderly peasant farmers in Rezaiyeh told us that they abandoned their villages and fled to Maragheh during the Kurdish revolts, Turkish invasions (early 1900s), and battles of World War I. They worked there as servants until the environs of Rezaiyeh were safe to return to.

27. Ann Lambton, K. S. The Persian Land Reform: 1962-1966 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 88.Google Scholar

28. Stories of oppressive landlords still abound, and the townspeople point out those ex-landlords who were known for their cruelty prior to land reform.

29. Ann Lambton, K. S. Landlord and Peasant in Persia (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 296.Google Scholar

30. The emergence of latent hierarchy after land reform is discussed by Adjami, Ismail in “Land Reform and Modernization of the Farming Structure in Iran,” in The Social Sciences and Development, ed. Farmanfarmian, K. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Program in Near Eastern Studies, 1976), pp. 189-207Google Scholar; his reference is to Fars province.