A State of ‘Tribal Lawlessness’? Rural and Urban Crime in Fars Province (c. 1910–15)

Abstract

As has now been well established, Iran's modernizing elites in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw overcoming the country's supposed 'tribal problem' as crucial for national salvation. 2 Central to the 'myth of the saviour' built around the person of Reza Shah was his ability to suppress the tribes after a period of so-called 'disintegration ' between 1911 and 1921, following the Constitutional Revolution. 3 This was unquestionably partly due to the power possessed by the large tribal confederations that had the potential to undermine central authority. But it was also because on a more local level these pastoral nomadic groups seemed to represent the absence of authority, especially by virtue of their association with banditry on the country's main trade routes. 4 By their very nature, tribes were seen as a 'dangerous class' on the margins of society, culturally imbued with criminality. 5 Indeed, such perceptions shared many similarities with the concept of a 'criminal tribe' existing elsewhere, which assumed tribespeople were habitually or even hereditarily inclined to a life of crime. 6 Such a view has been reproduced in historiography, meaning banditry in modern Iran has often been explained away with culturally essentialist references to a supposedly traditional tribal culture of raiding, leaving little or no room for other contributing factors. For example, Mansoureh Ettehadieh, in her study of criminality in the late Qajar period, asserts:We see that most of the robbery and looting was done by tribes, which was probably as much a way of life as due to economic circumstances. The worst affected areas were not necessarily those suffering most from economic regression. 7 Granted, there had been a long-established culture of raiding amongst the tribes in Iran, as there had been across most of the Middle East and North Africa. Yet there are several problems with solely relying on this fact in explanations of banditry.