11 PIOUS MERCHANTS Religious sentiments in wills and testaments Christoph Werner Merchants in the Qajar period are a social group that it is hard to pin down. They emerge together with the Shiite clergy as the victors of the fundamental transformations in nineteenth-century Iranian society, and their close connection and interaction with the ulamå  is represented in the regularly adduced alliance between the bazaar and the clergy. But in fact, the anonymity of the bazaar constitutes a black box that hides, rather than elucidates, the identification of single personalities, whereas leading members of the ulamå  in comparison turn out to be easily distinguishable individuals carrying concrete names and faces. Wealthy wholesale merchants (tujjår) clearly belonged to the Qajar elites and were also considered by their contemporaries as ayån or notables. 1 Through family relations, marriages, and common proprietorial and economical interests they were closely intertwined with other prominent notable groups from the administrative and clerical field. What distin- guishes merchants primarily from other notables is their absence from most of our sources. While Western material provides in general a good and reliable picture of advantageous trade routes, estimates of imported and exported goods, or details of customs duties and the like, it is usually silent on the local protagonists of trade, namely the Persian merchants who despite the growing European involvement would still have operated and controlled most of the trade running through the bazaars – with the single exception of those who operated under foreign protection or who were directly involved in political affairs. Even if we find references to influential merchants in Persian archival documents, we frequently lack the narrative sources to place them into a wider framework. While rijål-works provide information on high-ranking clerics, biographical anthologies (tadhkiras) yield data on poetically inclined bureaucrats, and local histories can contribute to the under- standing of tribal aristocratic elites, it becomes very difficult to construct genealogies or even to gain basic biographical facts on merchants. In 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111 211