Iranian driving culture has attracted growing interest in recent years, reflected in the 2015 film Tehran Taxi by Jafar Panahi and now Reza Banakar's fascinating book with contributions from Sharod Nasrollahi Fard, Behnoosh Payvar and Zahra Saeidzadeh.

Iran suffers from one of the highest rates of road traffic accidents (RTAs) in the world—as high as, according to a 2007 UNICEF reportFootnote ¹, twenty times the global average. Based on over seventy hours of interviews with taxi drivers and lawyers from Tehran and Shiraz, this book explores the reasons for the dangerous driving habits of Iranians and their disregard for traffic laws. Banakar's key purpose is to understand the problem by throwing light on the country's legal culture, which “is used to describe why the majority of people normally follow certain laws or to explain why they collectively ignore them as in the widespread disregard for traffic rules in Iran” (p. 11). But the book also has a much wider focus in that it attempts to throw light on the “social imaginary” of Iranians through the prism of driving culture. Banakar addresses the following questions: Are the dangerous driving habits of Iranians caused by their excessive individualism? How is this related to the way they perceive the law and state authority in general? How do Iranians understand the wider society around them and what nexus of rights and responsibilities informs this understanding? What is the relationship between the driving habits of Iranians and their perceptions of modernity and technology?

In grappling with these questions the book makes several references to the concept of “living law,” drawn from the sociological jurisprudence of Eugen Elrich (1862‒1922), a scholar whom Banakar has written about insightfully in his previous work. Elrich rejected the claims of legal positivism that a norm became a legal rule only if it was posited by the state and argued that the sources of law are plural and were not to be found primarily in the statute books, but in the many different kinds of social associations in which people co-exist. According to Elrich, what counts as law depends on what kind of authority exists to give it legal significance among those it is supposed to regulate. Thus he focused on the rules of conduct that people in actual fact obeyed and which sometimes attracted far greater cultural authority than state legislation and decisions applied by courts. Elrich called these rules “living law.”

Through the interviews as well as from a survey of Iranian legal history, Banakar identifies urf (custom) as the “living law” of the community embedded in the lifeworld of Iranian society. As a supplementary source of Islamic law, urf “operates bottom-up through cultural and customary practices.” These rules are then endowed with a sense of legality “with or without the endorsement of the state” (p. 185). In contrast to urf, state law operates in a “top-down fashion through legislation, official interpretation and the enforcement of legal rules, or by making legal decisions, often upheld by the implicit or explicit threat of violence against non-compliance” (p. 185). This means that in the Iranian context urf often reflects what Banakar refers to as “descriptive norms” that have legal significance because they play a crucial role in how ordinary people de facto organize their exchanges and activities. State law on the other hand includes a large number of “injunctive rules” which communicate to the wider society how things ought to be. Whilst he recognizes that this is not a clear-cut distinction, Banakar argues that there is a major discrepancy between descriptive and injunctive norms in Iranian society compared to western societies, and that in most other countries injunctive norms “exert a minimum degree of constraint on driving habits, thus maintaining a relatively orderly and safe driving environment” (p. 48).

What are the causes of these attitudes and of the high rate of RTAs in Iran? “Expert” opinion in Iran (based on the research of traffic and health authorities) has “medicalized” the phenomenon by attributing it to psychological and health problems. In other words, domestic studies have applied a largely positivist methodology and neglected socio-legal and cultural approaches which are deemed unscientific and untrustworthy. In trying to understand the social, political and psychological factors which help explain Iranian driving culture, Banakar employs Katouzian's well-known theory of the “short-term society” which has created “a unique form of individualism—a particular sense of community and legal culture” (p. 57). Iranian history and politics, Katouzian argues, are characterized by “weak states” (in terms of legitimacy) versus “strong societies” (in terms of sustained kinship bonds). Whilst the state would find ways of legitimizing its rule in the short term, in the long term it would always be rejected by the populace—a dynamic that left its mark on the formation of Iranian society and meant that: “Since the people had no independent or intrinsic rights, they did not accept any independent and intrinsic responsibility”. Successive Iranian states were characterized by arbitrary rule (estebdad), lacking the legal framework which constrained European absolutist monarchs and preventing the formation of social classes which might act as a check on its power. This, in turn, creates an arbitrary society, which tends towards social disorder and political chaos whenever the state loses its control. This state/society configuration is characterized as “short term” because it does not allow for the development of social, political and legal structures into long-term institutionalized practices. Thus “While Iranians show collectivist tendencies as far as their loyalty to, and trust in, their ‘peer group’ is concerned, they act ‘individualistically’ towards the larger ‘society of strangers’” (p. 156). Katouzian refers to this form of individualism as “personalism.” Iranian collectivism is expressed in the family and neighborhood (mahalleh) but not in the wider “society of strangers.” The result is a distrust of state authorities and in particular the state's legal institutions and law enforcement officials. Banakar argues that these attitudes are reinforced by the rebellious and anti-state dimensions of Shi'ism which in turn reinforce Iranian personalism (p. 160).

Whilst Banakar expresses some doubts about the cogency of Katouzian's theory (p. 57) it is nevertheless the main explanatory framework for the emergence of the particular form of individualism which, he argues, characterizes modern Iran. Indeed, this appears to be confirmed by many of the interviewees in the study who cite individualism—especially zerangi (slyness/cunning)—as one of the main causes of dangerous driving and general disregard for the law. The interviews also show a deep-seated distrust of the state legal system, which people regard as highly arbitrary. Additionally, they seem to show that urf is the main normative/legal framework which guides Iranian life (though attitudes vary with class, gender and age group). Notably, in terms of their perceptions of the sources of state law, most of the interviewees named the Majles, rather than the sharia or the Supreme Leader, as the primary source of law.

Banakar's exploration of these issues is fascinating and highly suggestive. The book also provides a very useful three-level framework for the study of legal culture in Iran which could be applied to understanding other socio-legal spheres such as property rights and contract. But there is sometimes more than a hint of Iranian exceptionalism to the argument stemming from an over-reliance on Katouzian's theory of the “short-term society” as an explanatory framework. How much is Iranian “personalism” shaped, for example, by the particular combination of authoritarian rule (and the distrust of the public and the political sphere that this often encourages, as Katouzian maintains) combined with the various processes of modernity and globalization which have transformed Iranian society over the past century, such as the growth of an increasingly consumerist culture to which the automobile has been central? The car is a modern technological innovation and in many ways the ultimate expression of competitive individualism. Driving a car seems inevitably to lead to egotistical behavior in which our fellow human beings—other drivers, cyclists and pedestrians—are often seen as obstacles. As Banakar acknowledges, the car appears to have alienating effects on drivers and this applies “as much to Iranians as to North Americans, Africans or Western Europeans” (p. 56). The thesis that in this realm the gap between descriptive and injunctive norms is wider in Iran than in many other societies is broadly convincing but some comparative references to driving and legal cultures in other parts of the world would help to contextualize this and strengthen the argument. Furthermore, in understanding how much cultural factors explain the high rate of RTAs in Iran it would be useful to weigh this against other independent variables relevant to understanding RTAs in other middle-income countries. Here Banakar's cultural and sociological approach could be rounded out with a political economy of RTAs. Does the low cost of petrol mean that Iran (and especially Tehran) has a particularly high level of per capita automobile and motorbike ownership which increases the chances of road accidents? Does the inadequacy of public transport provision and the poor quality of roads exacerbate this situation? How much does bad traffic and town planning contribute to the situation? Of course these questions are beyond the scope of the book but some references to studies that look at such questions (and they do exist) would have been helpful.

The book ends with two supplementary chapters. One of these provides a useful overview and analysis of the current Iranian legal system and the jurisprudence which informs it. The other is an original and textured chapter by Behnoosh Payvar about female taxi drivers in Tehran and the contradictory effects of this relatively new profession (previously an exclusively male occupation) for women on gender relations. Payvar's chapter reflects a theme running through the book about the way gender and class tensions are mirrored in driving habits and how Iranians experience and describe the traffic situation in their cities. Banakar argues that gender relations in particular are manipulated by the state as a strategy to maintain social order and legitimacy through what he refers to as the “unholy union of patriarchy and estebdad” (p. 197).

In all, Banakar's is a pioneering study, the first to address the informal legal culture of Iran in any depth and to attempt an understanding of the discrepancy between this culture and the state law. Thus it is an important contribution to understanding the dynamics (and ultimately the weakness) of the rule of law in Iran.