A year after his fall from power, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, recalled, “I could not stop building supermarkets. I wanted a modern country. Moving against the bazaars was typical of the political and social risks I had to take in my drive for modernization.” Meanwhile, three years after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini stressed that “We [the Islamic Republic] must preserve the bazaar with all our might; in return the bazaar must preserve the government.” Given this drastic change in the state's outlook toward the bazaar, it is not surprising that the Tehran Bazaar had radically different experiences under these regimes. What is startling, however, is that the transformation is not as we would expect – the Bazaar survived and remained autonomous under the modernizing Pahlavi regime (in fact so much so that it was one of the leading actors in the Revolution), while it was radically restructured and weakened under the unabashedly “traditionalist” Islamic Republic.

By comparing how the last Shah of Iran sought to “move against the bazaar” and how the founder of the Islamic Republic “preserve[d] the bazaar,” it will be the burden of this book to depict these outcomes and to examine why they followed these counterintuitive trajectories.