From earliest times, religion has always been one of the most important factors in social cohesion and at the same time a major cause of urban factionalism and strife. The existence of opposing sects in the same city has invariably provided a breeding ground for economic, social, and political differences in the guise of sectarian disputes.

The basic elements of urban organization in the Islamic period were local government (ḥukūmat), religious solidarity (ummat), professional associations (the craft guilds, aṣnāf), and the city wards or quarters (maḥallāt). Occasionally, other social organizations rose to prominence such as esoteric fraternities, mystical and dervish orders, and chivalrous and paramilitary associations (futuvvat, Cayyārān); these too formed part of the overall social life of the city. The wards or city quarters were the centers of group activity based on kinship, or ethnic or sectarian affiliation. Iranian cities during the Islamic period saw political and social activities by the followers of the four rites of the Sunna--Shāfiᶜī, Ḥanbalī, Ḥanafī, and Mālikī--and by Shi'ite and other dissident sects such as the Zaydīs, Carmathians, Mu'tazilites, and Ismāᶜīlīs.

In this paper I shall describe briefly the background and setting of professional storytelling (naqqāli) in present-day Iran. Then I shall examine some aspects of how the craft of storytelling is transmitted, particularly with respect to how a young man becomes a storyteller and what aspects of storytelling are seen as important. Finally, I shall examine how this transmission relates to the way in which storytellers actually construct their performance.

There are two separate, but related, aims in the paper. Through a comparison of the stories told and the literary works used as their source, I shall demonstrate that the Iranian national legend remains creative today. More generally, I shall demonstrate that the abstract values expressed as important to a craft may disregard those very elements which make a craftsman successful and which breathe life into the craft.

Iran has often been the subject of many nonfiction films and television programs produced by Western countries, particularly Britain and the United States. Although these films about Iran were made by a diverse group of private and governmental agencies, overall they have tended both to emphasize the supremacy of West over the ancient, backward East and to support the evolving policies and ideologies toward Iran held by the Western governments and their multi-national corporations.

Western audiences who viewed these films and programs as enployees of corporations, members of armed forces units, students in schools or the general public, must have experienced a certain self-congratulatory gratification with their own ideological and material conditions and a confidence in the policies espoused by their governments toward underdeveloped countries such as Iran. From the scant information available, it seems that the responses of the Iranian audiences (especially of those educated in the West and whose views of Iran, as we shall see later, partially coincided with those of Westerners) to these films were composed of a mixture of shame for their failure to modernize, and exasperation at being incorrectly or insufficiently represented.

Mirza Muhammad Farrokhi Yazdi suffered a long series of persecutions, imprisonments, and exile during his rather short life (1889-1939). At the age of 16, two years before the Constitutional Revolution, Farrokhi showed his national and Islamic zeal by writing poems against the authorities of the British missionary school at Yazd, where he was a student. Following the circulation of one of these poems, in which he had defended the cause of Islam against the “devilish designs” of the Christians, the headmaster expelled him from school and thereby ended his formal education. This was the first and by far the lightest punishment the poet was to suffer for his beliefs.

As he himself proudly testifies, Farrokhi was a dehqān-zādeh, a peasant's son. When he was forced out of school, the peasant's son became a laborer. His family background and his own experience as a laborer greatly influenced the direction of his thought in later years.

The argument proposed by Professor Leonard M. Helfgott in a recent article in Iranian Studies (Vol. X, Nos.1-2, 1977) cannot be accepted as an accurate evaluation of the social and economic structure of tribalism in Iran. The picture presented in his article portrays the situation almost solely in terms of theoretical considerations, with relatively little attempt to substantiate the theories with fact. As a result, a monolithic view of tribal society is put forth. The most objectionable theoretical approach proffered in his article is expressed in the following statement: “Tribal societies contain neither a concrete superstructural entity such as the state nor a separate economic sphere….But that is not to say that these functions do not exist or are not necessary for the production of pre-state societies. Rather superstructural functions appear as embedded within the kinship system.” Traditionally, tribes throughout Iranian history existed above and beyond the reach of the various kinship entities that they governed or controlled; indeed, they provided formal superstructures by which they exploited the various sources of wealth, and maintained order.