The expansion of capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries evoked active colonial attempts to incorporate Khuzestan, a region in the southwest of Iran bordering Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The response of Arab communities in Khuzestan to this regional and global colonial encroachment has been overlooked in studies of colonialism in the Middle East. This paper aims to address this theoretical gap and to explore the modalities of resistance among Arab communities in Khuzestan in the 18th and 19th centuries. Through investigating historical records, I will argue that the main response of Arab communities to colonial encroachment was refusal expressed in various modes including armed resistance, flirting and repelling politics, and fighting the invasive infrastructures. In the 18th and 19th centuries, armed resistance was a major mode of refusal that Arab communities deployed to stop the colonial encroachments. Armed resistance against Turks and Europeans can be traced back well into the 17th century. In response to the ongoing refusal of the Arab people, the British entered a coalition with the Turks to attack the region. Between 1758-1766, for example, there were four Anglo-Turkish wars against Arab communities in Khuzestan. Similar militant confrontations were sparked between Arab communities and Persian dynasties that were encroaching southward. In addition to their armed resistance, Arab communities skillfully adopted what I call flirting and repelling politics to hamper colonial encroachment. By flirting and repelling politics, I mean the politics of playing the three colonial powers--Persian, Turkish, and European--against each other in order to retain and protect indigenous autonomy. Flirting and repelling politics, for example, are evident in the tribute payment that Arab communities were promising both Turks and Persians while avoiding payment to either unless there was real pressure. The flirting and repelling politic also involved creating alliances and coalitions between local Arab communities in Khuzestan and southern Iraq. The third mode of resistance that I will explore in this paper is what I call fighting invasive infrastructures. Seeing the infrastructure as a vehicle of colonial encroachment that would compromise their autonomy, I will argue, Arab communities tried to impede the colonial encroachment through obstructing the development of the invasive infrastructures.

This paper is a social and cultural history of Modern Iran, from the perspectives of criminals and rank and file police officers. Studying the everyday lives of non-elites, subalterns, and common folk in early Modern Iran is extremely difficult, because of the lack of useable primary sources. By using police reports, crime and law-enforcement curricula and periodicals, institutional “work products” such as budgets and crime statistics, memoirs, and a wide variety of other archive documents, this paper solves this problem by studying how one of the least “elite” institutions of the state (police constables) interacted with the lowest segments of society, such as criminals, the poor, beggars, slaves, transients, etc. while at the same time studying how they intervened in domestic disputes and conflicts between merchants, laborers, servants, tradesmen, women, children, shepherds, etc. As Iran was undergoing rapid change in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both crime and law enforcement rapidly evolved, and in many ways were completely transformed. Crime and punishment (and eventually incarceration), were redefined both conceptually and institutionally, including the replacement of earlier informal enforcement which was mostly characterized by mediation, acute coercion, negotiation, and “public spectacle” with such things as new scientifically based methods of detection and a highly bureaucratized system of criminal justice and incarceration. These changes also resulted in the emergence of a modern professional class of law-enforcement, that were defined, not just by their job, but also by broader cultural, and social ideals the helped to define them as a distinct social class different from other modern social groups, like the military, the technocrats, industrialists and professionals . Similarly new categories of crime emerged, along with a series of new professional criminal classes. Finally public cultural and political attitudes changed in accordance with broader cultural transformation underway in society. This paper uses the interface of police and criminals, and law enforcement and crime, as microcosms of broader social and cultural transformations underway in Iran during this period. Therefore, we gain a deeper understanding of how the processes of change that came with colonialism, globalization, and state-led modernization underway in society affected ordinary people and those living on “the proverbial underbelly” of society.

At the turn of the twentieth century in Iran, ulema’s status as knowledge producers was called into question. I posit that in addition to modern education—new primary schooling (dabest?n) and the university (d?neshg?h)—a new discourse on the ulema made their epistemic demotion possible. Proceeding historically, I argue that the literary and intellectual imagination vis-à-vis the ulema changed in quality as Iran entered the twentieth century. In the classical period, sources primarily berated the bad among the ulema for character vices such as hypocrisy, but without a corresponding attempt to critique or undermine the underlying structure of ulema social and epistemic authority. A change occurred with the constitutional movement (1906-1911). Constitutionalist sources treated character vices as secondary and shifted their primary attention to the critique of anti-constitutionalist ulema for their alleged social sins against the community and for their obstructing of new education. With rise of the Reza Shah state, a further change occurred. The intellectuals of the new educational order called into question the social authority of the entire ulema collective from whom they differentiated themselves, and further attempted to marginalize the ulema from what constituted true, legitimate, and mainstream knowledge. By the 1930’s, the state and new intellectuals converged on the following: true knowledge belonged to state-trained intellectuals; the ulema, now referred to as “spiritualists” (ru??n?y?n), had to limit themselves to “spiritual” and ritual matters. The sources I use to trace this history are diverse, some are widely known, printed, and examined, while others are studied for the first time in this paper. They include classical Persian poetry, Hadith texts, constitutionalist and modernist literature, and an unpublished university thesis. This paper is part of a larger project that examines educational and intellectual change in Iran from 1889 to 1934.