Bio: Ali Gheissari

Ali Gheissari is professor of history at the University of San Diego specializing on the intellectual history of modern Iran. He studied at the Faculty of Law and Political Science, Tehran University, and at St Antony's College, Oxford. He has held visiting appointments at Tehran University, the Oriental Institute at Oxford, and UCLA. Selected publications: Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century (University of Texas Press, 1998); "Poetry and Politics of Farrokhi Yazdi," Iranian Studies 26:1-2 (1993); "Truth and Method in Modern Iranian Historiography and Social Sciences," Critique 6 (1995); "Critique of Ideological Literature: A Review of Intellectual and Doctrinaire Writings in Iran," Iran Nameh 12:2 (1994); "Modernity and Nationalism in the Literature of the late-Qajar and early-Pahlavi Iran (1921-1941)," Iran Nameh 18:3 (2000); "Iran's Democracy Debates," co-author Vali Nasr, Middle East Policy 11:2 (2004). "Despots of the World Unite! Satire in the Persian Constitutional Press: Introducing Majalleh-ye Estebdad, 1907-1908," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24:1 (2005).

Abstract

Merchants and their Life-World in late-Qajar Iran

Merchants were important players in Iran¹s early 20th century Constitutional movement and a force for pushing it forward. But apart from a few exceptions, not much systematic attention has been paid to the role of individual merchants and their public or private lives at least not on par with the court and government officials, or the intellectuals, or the ulama. The social history of the Constitutional period and the role of merchants in it can be told with the help of private papers, memoirs, archival reports and other documentary material which gradually appear in print form for a wider use by students of Iranian history. This paper provides a survey of the Memoirs of a Tabirzi merchant, Hajj Mohammad-Taqi Jourabchi, during the period of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran. The time span of the Memoirs corresponds roughly to the years 1907 to 1911. The original manuscript of these Memoirs was among Jourabchi family papers. One half of the text first appeared in Tehran in 1984. Another half of the manuscript was found more recently, and a complete edited text with additions is forthcoming. The text offers valuable observations on private and public life of Tabriz and Rasht, and on the cultural climate of the country in general. It contains additional information on the Caucasus, trans-Caspian travel, Mashad, and Tehran, where the author visited and lived in this period. It also provides information on Istanbul, Izmir, Port Said and the pilgrimage rout to Mecca, and especially on the Shi¹a points of pilgrimage in Mesopotamia (including Najaf, Karbala, and Kazemain) which were also visited by the author. The memoirs contain valuable information on trade and travel. It is important to understand the ideals and motivations of the merchants who were a significant part of the Constitutional movement but whose values were not necessarily echoed by officials or by intellectuals or by the ulama this space deserves to be studied on its own, relying on such rare source material (as these Memoirs) when merchants voice their own lives.