Resistance to Revolution

When Muslim clerics won out in Iran's 1979 revolution, they inherited massive national unemployment but generated still more unemployment on their own. Many capitalists had fled the country or shut down their enterprises while revolutionary turmoil spread from October 1978 on; their departure left many employees out of work. As the clerics gained control, they began shutting down enterprises they deemed immoral – not only brothels and liquor stores, but also restaurants, theaters, gambling parlors, and other purveyors of what they regarded as un-Islamic goods or services. After checking the large movements of unemployed that challenged the government in 1979, officials began dealing with the street vendors who had multiplied in Tehran and elsewhere. Street vendors actually included many laid-off workers who had taken to retailing food and sundries. But they also included numerous sellers of politically dubious books, tracts, and other materials. Many political vendors were former students who had earlier joined the rising against the Shah but now opposed his clerical successors.

As the regime began major repression of its secular opposition in 1981, it also began a campaign to clear city streets of vendors – especially vendors of subversive publications. Its violent vigilantes, the official Pasdaran monitors and their fellow-traveling hizbullahi street toughs, began tearing down stalls and seizing petty merchants' goods. “Groups of thugs,” reports Asef Bayat, “often escorted by the Pasdaran, went around kicking down stalls and basaats [stands] and confiscating merchandise and other belongings.