Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-9q27g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-25T01:34:56.787Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Toward a Theory of Iranian Urban Moieties: The Ḥaydariyyah and Niᶜmatiyyah Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

John R. Perry
John R. Perry*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The Haydariyyah and Niᶜmatiyyah were Widespread, Mutually Hostile urban factions of Safavid and post-Safavid Iran, sparsely documented and virtually unstudied. From at least the middle of the tenth/sixteenth century up until recent decades, a number of cities and towns of Iran were perceived as being divided into two groupings of adjacent wards (maḥallah), one grouping known as the Ḥaydarī-khānah and the other as the Niᶜmatī-khānah, the respective (male) inhabitants of which would profess mutual contempt and antagonism, and would periodically clash in massive public fights. The origin of the terms and the cause of the antagonism were not generally known to the participants; the topography and composition of the Ḥaydarī-khānah and the Niᶜmatī-khānah (which in some places extended into the adjacent countryside) was apparently irrelevant; and membership in either of these factions corresponded to no other social, political, or sectarian affiliation.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Winter 1999 , pp. 51 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. The first comprehensive account of the phenomenon was published in this journal twenty years ago: Mirjafari, Hossein “The Haydarī-Niᶜmati Conflicts in Iran,” IS 12/3-4 (1979): 135-162.Google Scholar The author, a member of the history faculty at the University of Isfahan, was visiting the University of Chicago as a research associate during 1978-79, when he and I discovered that we had each been researching the Haydari-Niᶜmati conflicts. Since Professor Mirjafari's materials were already in publishable condition, I translated them into English, supplemented them with my own notes, and submitted the result to IS. The present article, preliminary versions of which were read as papers at the Second Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies (Bethesda, Md.) and at SOAS (University of London) during 1998, represents part of a long-cherished project to examine the phenomenon from a comparative and theoretical standpoint. Other colleagues from whose input I have benefited (in addition to those acknowledged specifically below) include Camron Amin, Anne Betteridge, Rudi Matthee, Alexander Morton, and Marvin Zonis.

2. Mirjafari, 137-143,158 note 17.

3. Berchet, Guglielmo La Repubblica di Venezia e la Persia (Turin, 1865), 178-79Google Scholar; “Narrative of the Most Noble Vincentio d'Alessandri,” trans. Grey, Charles in A Narrative of Italian Travels in Persia, Hakluyt Society Series 1, Vol. 49 (London, 1873), 224.Google Scholar The names of the factions (and other data) are variously garbled: “Kamitai” and “Ermicai” in Berchet's Italian recension, “Nausitai” and “Himicaivartu” in Grey's translation; hindsight would suggest something like “Namitia” and “Emir-Caidaria.” Berchet's “trecento anni” (300 years) is “thirty years” in Grey.

4. Chardin, John, Voyages de monsieur le Chevalier Chardin en Perse et autre lieux de l'Orient., 10 vols, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: J. C. de Lorme, 1711), 316.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., vol. 8, 11-13.

6. Mirjafari, 154-55.

7. Tavemier, Jean-Baptiste, Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, vol. 1 (Paris, 1677), 396.Google Scholar

8. [Muhammad] Jalal al-din Munajjim [Yazdi], Tārīkh-i ᶜAbbāsī, ed. Vahidniya, S. (Tehran, 1366/1987), 131Google Scholar; Mirjafari, 147.

9. Delia Valle, Pietro Voyages, vol. 3 (Rouen, 1745), 42.Google Scholar

10. d'Alessandri, loc. cit.; Kaempfer, Engelbert Am Hofe des persischen Grosskönigs, ed. Hinz, W. (Leipzig, 1940), 110-11Google Scholar; Judasz Krusinski, Tadeusz The History of the Late Revolutions of Persia, 2nd edition (London, 1740) Vol. 1, 91-92.Google Scholar

11. Mirjafari, 155.

12. Mirjafari, 148.

13. Op. cit., 111.

14. Mirza Qajar, Nadir Tārīkh va jughrāfī-yi dār al-salṭanah-yi Tabrīz, 2d ed., ed. Mushiri, M. (Tehran, 1351/1972), 192.Google Scholar

15. Floor, Willem M. “The Political Role of the Lutis in Iran,” in Modern Iran, ed. Bonine, Michael and Keddie, Nikki (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981), 90.Google Scholar

16. Kasravi, Ahmad Tārīkh-i mashrūṭa-yi Īrān, 10th ed. (Tehran, 1353/1974), 195-97.Google Scholar

17. Hasan Husayni Fasa'i, Hajji Mirza Fārsnāmah-yi Nāṣirī II (Shiraz, 1313 Q./1895), 22.Google Scholar

18. Watson, Robert A History of Persia (London, 1866), 110.Google Scholar

19. Khan Tahvildar, Mirza Husayn Jughrāfiyā-ye Iṣfahān, ed. Sotuda, M. (Tehran, 1342/1963), 88-90Google Scholar; translation in Keyvani, Mehdi Artisans and Guild Life in the Later Safavid Period (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1982), 259-62Google Scholar; see also Omidsalar, M. “Šotorqorbani” Encyclopedia Iranica vol. 4, 737-38.Google Scholar

20. Kaempfer, 111; SirMalcolm, John A History of Persia vol. 2 (London, 1829), 429.Google Scholar

21. Krusinski, 92-93.

22. Malcolm, loc. cit.

23. Mirjafari, 153-54.

24. Mirjafari, 154.

25. Krusinski, 91, 94-95; Fasa'i, loc. cit.

26. Maybury-Lewis, David and Almagor, Uri eds., The Attraction of Opposites: Thought and Society in the Dualistic Mode (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1989), 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. See, e.g., Scott Littleton, C. The New Comparative Mythology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 153-54.Google Scholar

28. Krusinski, 91.

29. Cameron, Alan Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 126-30, 231-32.Google Scholar

30. Mirjafari, 154; Marsh, Peter “Understanding Aggro,” New Society, 3 April 1975, 9.Google Scholar

31. Buford, Bill Among the Thugs (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 114.Google Scholar

32. Cameron, 60-61.

33. Hole, Christina A Dictionary of British Folk Customs (Oxford: Helicon, 1995), 272-75Google Scholar; Dunning, E.G. “Football in its early stages,” History Today 13 (1963): 838-41.Google Scholar

34. Buford, 117.

35. Cameron, 40, 42, 75-77.

36. Herlihy, David “Some Psychological and Social Roots of Violence in the Tuscan Cities,” in Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities 1200-1500, ed. Martines, Lauro (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 129-30, 140, 143-4.Google Scholar

37. Voyages, vol.. 8, 13.

38. Circus Factions, 294.

39. Buford, 147.

40. Hyde, J.K. “Contemporary Views on Faction and Civil Strife in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Italy,” in Violence and Civil Disorder, 297.Google Scholar

41. Buford, 116.

42. Buford, 172.

43. Tavernier, loc. cit.; Chardin, vol. 2, 316; Ange de Saint-Joseph, dans le siècle Joseph Labrosse, Souvenirs de la Perse safavide et autres lieux de l'Orient, trans, and ed. Bastiaensen, Michel (Brussels: Université de Bruxelles, 1985), 186, 187Google Scholar; see also Perry, John R. “‘Artificial Antagonism’ in Pre-Modern Iran: The Haydari-Niᶜmati Urban Factions,” in The Final Argument: The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Kagay, Donald & Villalon, L.J. (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), 116-8.Google Scholar

44. Hyde, 293.

45. Davis, Robert The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1994).Google Scholar I am indebted to Nabil al-Tikriti for bringing this work to my attention, and to the author for further valuable discussion.

46. Berchet, 25, 38,43-9,192-94,196-97, 212-14.

47. Davis, 124.

48. Golden River to Golden Road (Philadelphia, 1962)Google Scholar: esp. chap. 7, “Dual Organization.”

49. Yarshater, E. “Čal,” Encyclopedia Iranica vol. ᶜ4 (1990), 651, and personal communication.Google Scholar

50. Floor, W. “The Political Role of the Lutis in Iran,” in Bonine, M. and Keddie, N. eds., Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Continuity and Change (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981), 85.Google Scholar

51. Barth, Fredrik “Segmentary Opposition and the Theory of Games: A study of Pathan organization,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society 89 (1959): 5-22Google Scholar; reprinted in Barth, Features of Person and Society in Swat (London: Routledge, 1981), 55-82.Google Scholar

52. See his “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” in Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, [1956] 1963), 132-63.Google Scholar

53. Valerio Valeri, “Reciprocal Centers,” in The Attraction of Opposites, 123.

54. Tom Zuidema, “The Moieties of Cuzco,” in The Attraction of Opposites, 255-75.

55. The following paraphrase is based on Turner's “Social Complexity and Recursive Hierarchy in Indigenous South American Societies,” in Journal of the Steward Anthropological Society 24, nos. 1-2Google Scholar (Structure, Knowledge and Representation in the Andes: Studies Presented to Reiner Tom Zuidema on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, Gary Urton, Guest Editor, 1996): 37-59, and on personal communication, 1998.

56. Davis, 26.

57. “Kayapo,” Chicago Reader (Oct. 3, 1997), sec. 1, 22.

58. Spector, Sally Venice and Food (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 1998), 183Google Scholar; cf. Davis, 118.

59. d'Alessandri, loc. cit

60. Nadir Mirza Qajar, 192.

61. “Justice for the Underprivileged: The Ombudsman Tradition of Iran,” JNES 37, no. 3 (1978): 206-7,212-15.Google Scholar

62. “Historische Wurzeln neuzeitlicher iranischer Identität,” in Studia semitica necnon iranica, ed. Macuch, M. Müller Kessler, C. and Fragner, B.G. (Wiesbaden, 1989), 79-100.Google Scholar