A typology and analysis of the Tabriz guilds movement in Safavid era (1571-1573 AD/ 979 – 981 AH)

At the end of the Shah Tahmaseb‘s reign, Tabriz, the first capital city of the Safavids, witnessed the movement of the Guilds against the central government. The event triggered the movement was a small scale one, originally arising from a physical conflict between a butcher and a gunman, but swiftly transformed into a mass movement, spread throughout the city. This was a well-organized and multilayered movement in which the Guild constituted the body of the movement and the athletes, the top leadership. To mobilize the movement, they, both, organized their supporters and political advocates around the goals, determined for the movement. Although, the existing resources, from that period, concerning the movement, seems either to maintain the movement in a total obscurity or at least in poor attention and deliberation, some evidences, otherwise, verify, in a convincible manner, that the activists involved in the movement, reached a remarkable achievement by expelling the government authorities from Tabriz, and replacing them in controlling and running the city for the period of two years. Based on a descriptive-analytic approach, along with a theoretical framework constructed from the theoretical perspectives of thinkers such as Tilly, Zald, merged within the class-based approach of Erik Olin Wright, the present article, is an attempt to provide a typology of the movement, and also to proceed further to inquire on the reasons and mechanisms through which this movement came into existence. This research discusses that the Guilds movement instantiates a low class civil movement which should be explained first and foremost as a protest against the oppressive taxation policy, implemented by the current government accompanied by a long term deprivation of the majority of the population from the economical benefits of the Silk Road. The collective nature of this movement, according to the suggested theoretical framework, can be categorized as reactionary actions with a slight orientation toward competitive ones.