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Jenna Streich
Jenna Streich is a biology teacher at Saint Joseph High School in South Bend, IN. Prior to the 2021–2022 school year, she taught physical science and geoscience at Mercy Career & Technical High School in Philadelphia, PA, where she also founded Debate Club and was a member of the school’s technology team. Jenna has designed and implemented culturally relevant, inquiry-based pedagogy for diverse student populations and is passionate about integrating Catholic education and peacebuilding. She also has experience as a music teacher, co-directing a middle school band program in South Bend and interning with the Artane School of Music in Dublin, Ireland. Jenna holds an M.S. in secondary education from Saint Joseph’s University and a B.A. in theology and pre-health studies with a minor in peace studies from the University of Notre Dame.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Divergent Encounter between Prayer and Poetry in Contemporary Iran


Leaf of Calligraphy from Poems by Sa’di. Via The Met Museum. Public Domain.

In the fall of 1997, when I was living in Shiraz, a city in the south of Iran famous for its poets and its mystics, a few times I woke up early enough to join a small group of women who at dawn went for walks up one of the barren hills surrounding the city. Once the abode of saints and the source of subterranean water springs, these hills were already menaced by urban expansion back then, but still constituted for Shirazis an exit route from the concerns of everyday life and an opening towards a separate domain of experience. One of the women, a grandmother who lived first-hand Iran’s social and political upheavals, told me that while ascending the hills at dawn, she composed instant poems about God, nature, and her feelings. Words would come to her and the rhythm of her steps, intertwining with the embodied memory of the few verses she had learned in school, generated a sound pattern that weaved these words into composite expressions. She felt a connection with the universe and a correlate sense of emotional relief. At times, if she remembered these short compositions or had scribbled them on scraps of paper, she recited them to her family or friends in a self-joking halfway manner. Her position as an old woman allowed her to both inhabit and disavow these “poems.” Her “poems” certainly would not have been considered such by any of the innumerable literati of the city, but, precisely for this reason, they stood out for me as capturing something of a specific mode of existence that made irrelevant the distinction between communication with a transcendent God and a sensation of being one with the universe. Defying presumed differentiations between compositional rules and free improvisation, between argumentation and feeling, her “un-poems” were at once metaphysical and immediate. Their triviality was an act of profanation of every religious and poetic order. “Sprung at dawn on the hills, the irreverent micro-epiphanies of an old woman of Shiraz displaced centuries of sophisticated elaborations of theologians, mystics, and poets,” I scribbled in my notes. But I had to interrupt the walks, could not retrieve any of the un-poems, and lost touch with my acquaintance. This mode of existence remained an undeveloped comment in my notebook.

Now many years later, Haeri’s new important book, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires helps me understand better the early morning Shirazi un-poems of my lost acquaintance and the mode of existence they delineated. The world of the women of Tehran Haeri vividly describes is twenty years more recent and hundreds of kilometers away from the barren hills of Shiraz. The Tehrani women’s engagement with prayer and poetry seems to me far from the ways of my Shirazi acquaintance. But what the Tehrani women do, as narrated by Haeri, helps clarify how the Shirazi un-poems weren’t a simplistic and irreflexive blurring of prayer and poetry, as they might have appeared to some Shirazi, but also Tehrani or international learned observers. Rather, following Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who I take as a guide in this short essay, they were an act of profanation that made communication with the transcendent inoperative by opening up a different relationship between language, life, and the world.

To understand how such profanation can happen, in conversation with Haeri’s findings, I examine three aspects of the complex relationship between prayer and poetry. Discussing how women in the Iranian capital Tehran pray, read poetry, and take classes in Qur‘an and Persian mystical literature, Haeri explains that the women she frequented reappropriate institutionalized, state sponsored Islam by performing prayers as an intimate engagement with God, drawing in equal measure on their relationship with the divine and the poetic. The relationship between prayer and poetry in these women’s practices is far from simple. Prayer and poetry are too similar to be separated, but too different to be equated. Their interconnection is also what sets them apart.

The first point of divergent convergence between prayer and poetry is the bilingualism that defines their practice. In Iran, Arabic is the language of the Qur‘an and prescribed prayers (salat in Arabic, namaz in Persian—the bilingualism starts here). Persian is the language of mystical poetry and everyday use. Iranians usually study Arabic in school, but they often rely on Persian translations to read the Qur‘an for its meaning, and use Persian for voluntary prayers (do‘a), though collections of Arabic prayers are also widely used. Mystical Persian poetry is full of Qur‘anic references, and while written in a language intelligible to any Persian speaker, its metaphors and rhetorical figures require long term engagement and socialization to be appreciated. This intertwining of the two languages makes it such that, as Haeri explains, Arabic is seen as the sacred language in which one fulfills one’s religious duties. Arabic resonates with the divine even if (or precisely because) one doesn’t immediately understand its meanings but remains one step removed from the joys and pains of everyday life. Persian instead is the vernacular that offers the women a repertoire of mystical verses to put into words their spiritual and existential attachments. Persian is the everyday language that allows them to address God as a close confidant in informal prayers, even though in these conversations they can never quite fully inhabit the transcendent plane of Arabic. This bilingualism is no simple opposition between a religious language and a secular one because the interplay between Arabic and Persian opens and closes intersecting sacred and profane domains of experience. At the limit, the two languages tend to converge towards something more indistinct, at once enlightening and frightening. Though according to some religious scholars, Persian can be used in certain sections of the namaz, using lines of Persian poetry in the prayer sequence one might risk diverging from procedure. Probing such linguistic intersections, moving back and forth between intimacy and transcendence, as Haeri narrates, the Tehran women at times tend to expand linguistic boundaries and devotional rules to create a space that in their view makes communication effective and gives them the sense that they have performed a “good” prayer. Combining the planes of expression of Arabic and Persian, the women reconfigure the established order of things through a linguistic experience that makes the power of words cosmological.

The second point of divergent convergence between prayer and poetry is the relationship between rules and desires. In conversation with Haeri, the women seem to suggest that instituted Islam is an affair of prescribed rules and regulations that, while necessary, makes one’s relationship to God distant and anonymous, turning prayer into a dull repetition of empty formulas. They contrast this rigidity with poetry, a speech act that they see as translating inner feelings into words. As in the case of bilingualism, this is no simple juxtaposition. To start with, as Haeri shows, rules in prayers are crucial for establishing the ground of devotional effectiveness: it is the embodied reiteration of words and movements that gives them meaning. But rules and manners are only one dimension of prayer. Its success is also predicated on an appropriate disposition, itself a matter of self-cultivation perhaps, but one that is not dependent upon the application of an abstract rule to a routine performance. Success in prayer depends on how one inhabits the rule and therefore feels it: the heartless pronunciation of prayer will not lead you very far, say the Tehrani women, this time agreeing with what religious scholars say in the media. Poetry, indirectly, helps in developing the proper intention and disposition in prayer because with its figures and associations poetry makes the world of spiritual imagination vivid and concrete: it offers a descriptive language of desire. But poetry is made of rules and manners no less than prayer. Aesthetic pleasure in Persian poetry is achieved via the appropriate assembling of different elements: proper meter, rhyme, and rhetorical figures are essential to poetry. One can take as an example the verse by the famous 13th century mystical poet Jalal ad-din Rumi that Haeri uses as the title of her book in her own beautiful translation. The verse, composed of two lines, is pronounced by the Prophet Moses addressing a shepherd on how to pray:

Hiç ādābi o tartibi maju
har çe mikhāhad del-e tang-at begu

“Don’t search for manners and rules
Say what your longing heart desires”

The verse states that in prayer one should relinquish manners and rules (ādāb and tartib) and simply express one’s feelings and desires. However, this intimation is articulated through the very poetic conventions the verse incites readers to leave aside. For example, sound alliterations such as the one between the terms ādāb and tartib are fundamental in poetic compositions. In fact, the entire verse is an exercise in parallelism. Appearing at the end of the verse, the two imperatives maju/begu (“don’t search/say,”) highlight the negative/positive contrastive injunction that defines the two lines that make up the verse. In its apparent simplicity—these imperative forms are part of everyday vernacular in contemporary Iran—this parallelism exhibits complete mastery of conventions via phonemic (m/b, a/e, j/g) and semantic (don’t/do) oppositions, while also enfolding, hidden in the rhyme at the end of the verse, the object of the prayer’s desire. The ending of the two imperatives, the vowel u, is also in Persian the third person pronoun which might refer, as Haeri explains, both to the beloved (who makes one’s heart long) as well as to God. The pronoun u is gender neutral and can be translated in English as either he, she, or it. The opposition between a negation (“don’t search”) and an affirmation (“say”) finds its resolution in a neutral desire which also constitutes the verse’s rhyme. Poetry works here as a device that by contrasting what it declares with how it works asserts its own self-referentiality. By exhibiting rules and manners but negating their relevance the verse demonstrates its own power of expression: this is what poetry can do. Despite the women’s tendency to see them as opposite, rules and desires in prayer and poetry are not mutually exclusive. However, while in prayer rules need to be internalized in order for them to feel as desirable, in poetry the rules need to be explicitly exhibited in order to make poetry itself the object of desire.

The third point of convergence between prayer and poetry also marks their ultimate divergence. The Tehrani women conceive prayers as acts of communication. For them, Haeri tells us, prayers are the linguistic medium to address God. Whether their performance is perceived as successful or not, prayers, as rituals, renew and reinforce the transcendent distance that separates God and humans by establishing a communication channel between them. (Haeri suggests that the women see their successful prayers as producing a state of “presence” a sense of intimate nearness with God, and this is certainly appropriate, but such presence is the correlate effect of an act of communication with the distant Other. In other words, in prayer presence can be felt only as the opposite of the necessary absence that establishes the act of communication). When women feel that God is not answering their calls, the communication channel of prayer is no less effective, to the extent that women stop praying, even for long periods, because they expect a response. Eventually they often come to realize that such a response is dependent on their own disposition, because God always answers, either by triggering events in a person’s life, or by not responding.

Poetry is as transformative a speech act as prayer is, however, the power of poetry does not rest on communication but, as I mentioned, on self-referentiality. Persian poems, as the verse quoted above shows, often address something or someone, but their effectiveness does not rest on the speech act reaching the addressee (whose identity is therefore ultimately irrelevant from this perspective). The success of poems is not predicated on an answer to the call. A Persian poem works when its assemblage, drawing attention to the expressive power of language via linguistic means, generates an intransitive desire, a desire of desiring, thus reorienting its direction away from a transcendent order towards the poem itself: poetry is self-sufficient. In so doing, verses trespass any circumscribed domain of experience, undo any sacred separation between a metaphysical order and the here and now, making temporarily irrelevant the distinction between presence and absence. Certainly, as the Tehrani women seem to do, this power of poetry can be retooled to supplement prayer with an uncommunicative dimension, but ultimately prayer requires the re-inscription of language into a separate order that is beyond it, otherwise its own efficacy as an act of communication is compromised, and its distinction with ordinary language neutralized.

A (Shirazi) poetic mode of existence instead is predicated on this very indistinction. The immanent power of poetry of not-communicating is what makes possible to experience language and life differently. In these moments, losing its function of saying something, language is exposed as pure event, revealing its own power of expression. After all, this is also what at times life is: life and nothing else. There are times when, walking at dawn, distinctions between life as it is and life as it should be are suspended. This is the power of poetry and its mode of existence, at least as I had the fortune to encounter it on the hills of Shiraz. This is the “faith of the old women of Shiraz” as I came to understand it.

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Setrag Manoukian
Setrag Manoukian is a cultural anthropologist interested in knowledge and its relationship with power. His area of specialty is Iran. He is the author of essays on Iran’s society and culture, and of City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz, History, Poetry (Routledge, 2012). He teaches in the Institute of Islamic Studies and the Department of Anthropology at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
 
Theorizing Modernities article

Religion, Modernity, and Experience: Reflections on Niloofar Haeri’s Say What Your Longing Heart Desires


Riza-yi `Abbasi (ca. 1565–1635), The Old man and the Youth, second quarter 17th century, Islamic, Safavid period (1501–1722). Ink, transparent and opaque watercolor, and gold on paper; 5 in. high 2.12 in. wide (12.7 cm high 5.4 cm wide). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1925 (25.68.5). Public Domain.

Given the complicated and sometimes dangerous political reality that scholars and journalists face on the ground, there is a dearth of in-depth studies that shed light on the dynamics of lived religion in Iran. Niloofar Haeri’s new book, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires is the latest among less than a dozen books that have been published in the past decade on the topic. Other examples include works from Alireza Doostdar, Narges Bajoghli, and Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi. The book offers us a fascinating window into the religious lives of a group of women through the lens of prayer and poetry. As a good anthropologist, Haeri is forthcoming with her own positionality at the very beginning of the book. “Having grown up in a religious family in Iran,” she says in the preface, “and having lived through the 1979 revolution, I spent many years of my life running the other way whenever the subject of religion came up. I was uninterested and at times even quietly hostile.” After a crucial encounter with a religious relative who tells her about how well her prayers had gone one evening the author begins to understand that—in spite of living many years in the company of men and women who prayed—she “did not understand the most basic ritual that Muslims must perform every day”—an honest and brave admission that many secular scholars would not easily make (xi).

Despite this very modest starting point, Haeri succeeds in positioning herself in the field among a group of educated women who are brought together by their love of Persian mystical poetry. She listens empathetically, asks important questions, and develops an analytical framework that is informed by some of the best studies done in the field of anthropology of religion. The book succeeds exceedingly well in its primary mission: to demonstrate to the western reader (especially the secular ones) that despite the way that Islamic piety is often associated with rigid formalism, rituals like prayer (namāz in Persian) are complex and dynamic phenomena deeply connected to the inner spiritual life of the faithful and, in the case of her interlocuters, intertwined with a mystical understanding of religion.

Two concepts stand out as crucial for Haeri’s analysis of namāz as performed and understood by her interlocuters: ʿerfān and hāl. A close analysis of the two concepts, I believe, is very helpful in unsettling some of the dominant binaries through which religion is often understood in Iran. These binaries include secular/religious, hegemonic/marginalized, and traditional/modern. This is the theme I would like to explore a bit more in depth in this piece.

ʿErfān, which is usually translated to “mysticism” in English literature, is a widely used concept in contemporary Persian discourse. While the concept was invented in late seventeenth century as an alternative to the traditional term tasawwuf (Sufism) as I have shown in my own work, it was only during the second half of the twentieth century that it began to be widely used as a staple of public discourse on religion, a trend that only accelerated in the aftermath of the Revolution. Haeri is aware of this historical contingency and, as such, she tries to situate her interlocuters’ understanding and practice of ʿerfān in the context of Iran’s recent history, especially after the Revolution. She notes the influence that the Islamic Revolution had on drawing the attention of the women she worked with to religion (xiv, 23) and the broader interest in religious topics among the public. In the aftermath of the Revolution, Iranians have been engaged in extremely vital, fascinating, and rigorous public (and private) debates about religion which cannot be simply reduced to a debate between “believers and nonbelievers, pro-Islam and anti-Islam, pro-regime and anti-regime” (4). When it comes to the tradition of ʿerfān, especially as understood through the lens of Persian mystical poetry, there has been an exponential increase in its practice after the Revolution. As Haeri correctly notes, the popularity of the tradition of ʿerfān is not confined to classes and gatherings focused on reading and discussing the mystical poetry of Rumi and Hafez—like the focus group with whom Haeri worked. Rather, it encompasses a broad spectrum of people from different religious persuasions, from seculars who won’t identify as religious, to the Islamist proponents of the Islamic Republic. To quote Haeri, “[T]he depth and breadth of the mystic tradition in Iran is such that it divides even individuals, groups, and institutions that are, to one degree or another, proponents of the Islamic republic” (18). Interest and investment in the tradition of ʿerfān, in other words, defies the usual binaries such as religious/secular or hegemonic/minoritized (61–64).

While the concept of ʿerfān has been the subject of some scholarly analysis in the past, Haeri’s focus on the concept of hāl is both original and thought provoking. Like ʿerfān, this is also a widely used term in contemporary Persian discourse that is “meant to capture a sudden, fleeting, and unpredictable change in one’s emotional state, a moment when one feels an overwhelming sense of connection to the divine (to nature, to the universe)—a sense of ecstasy, joy, or even deep sorrow” (13). The term can literally mean either “present moment,” or “[someone or something’s] state of affairs” (either physically or mentally), but its use in Sufi literature is more technical. Al-Qushayri (d. 1074), in his famous al-Risālah defines hāl as “something that descends upon the hearts [of the mystics] regardless of their intentions, their [attempts] to attract it, or their [desire to] earn it. This can be [the states of] joy, grief, expansion, contraction, passionate longing, vexation, awe or need.”[1] This latter meaning or something close to it, as Haeri notes, is widely used in contemporary Iran among religious people in reference to the experiential aspects of their piety. The concept of hāl in this meaning is central to Haeri’s analysis because it is directly related to the question she begins the book with: How can a prayer go well? The answer is simple: if it is accompanied by good hāl. Along with other central concepts such as ekhlās (sincerity) and hozūr (presence), therefore, hāl is the backbone of a pietistic discourse that spotlights the subjective dynamics involved in the act of prayer rather than its ritual formalism.

By dwelling on concepts like hāl, Haeri’s analysis puts a premium on the experiential aspect of religion. Yet, as she notes in passing, this emphasis runs against the pervasive “mistrust of the experiential” in the study of religion and beyond (81). The author foregoes any discussion of the theoretical roots of this mistrust and its ramifications for her work. I do think, however, that this would have been a fruitful engagement. It is important to note that this mistrust was primarily a corrective re-action to a popularized conception of religion promoted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Protestant theologians and scholars like Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834), William James (d. 1910), and Rudolf Otto (d. 1937). In this lineage of thinking, religion is primarily understood and analyzed as a matter of personal direct experience with the “Infinite” or the “Divine,” which comes at the expense of taking ritual and communal aspects of religion seriously. Interestingly, while Haeri’s interlocutors are very comfortable with the ritual of namāz performed in private, they seem to share this suspicion of the communal, which manifests in their dislike of communal settings for prayer. According to her, they “mostly expressed a preference for praying at home, in their own rooms or in a space where they can be alone….[P]raying in crowded areas such as a mosque was spoken of as not being conducive to concentration, which is necessary for a good namāz but a state that is hard to achieve and a constant struggle” (81–82).

While one might find pre-modern predecessors for this negative attitude towards public performance of namāz, I would argue that it has no precursors. It is true that one can find a critique of publicly performed acts of piety through the themes of ostentation (tazāhor) and insincerity (riyā) in Persian poetry (80). This critique, however, is not really what these women seem to be concerned with in the above quote. Rather, they seem to see a publicly performed namāz to be less than ideal because it is not conducive to a good hāl. My preliminary impression of pre-modern sources is that the use of the term hāl, especially when it is used in its mystical sense, is not as extensive and widespread as Haeri seems to suggest (21). Rather, I would suggest that the early- to mid-twentieth century developments play a much more pronounced role in the formation of modern conceptions of piety in Iran, including the concept of hāl. I would argue that, similar to the wide-ranging appeal of ʿerfān in modern Iran, the focus on the experiential aspect of piety is something that pervades the contemporary religious landscape—from the older generation of liberal-minded individuals (like Haeri’s interlocutors) to the younger Islamist supporters of the Revolution (like the basījīs, members of paramilitary umbrella organization associated with the Revolutionary Guards). In other words, while the latter group might oppose the former as “secularists” and the former denounce the latter as “fundamentalists,” deeper currents of modernity constitute them both. An anecdote from the book might shed more light on this point. “Many of these women believe,” Haeri says “that their mothers and fathers rarely talked to God in the ways that they do…They characterized their parents’ approach and that of the generation before them as mowrūsi (inherited) and ābā va ajdādi (fathers and ancestors) …They did not do ‘their own research’” (116–17). Here, Haeri’s interlocutors portray their parents’ mode of piety as rote ritualism and blind obedience to ancestral traditions. In contrast, they are proud to identify with a mode of piety that is self-conscious, choice-driven, rational, and experience-centered. This is exactly the type of piety the Islamist ideologies of the Revolution have promoted for decades now.

My remarks here, of course, are tentative and should be taken with a grain of salt. A robust genealogical study of concepts like hāl is necessary to arrive at a proper understanding of this important aspect of religious experience in Iran. In the meantime, we can thank Haeri and her wonderful book for prompting us to think about how we might be able to rehabilitate the experiential without sacrificing the ritual or the communal.

[1] Al-Qushayri, Al-Risalah, 133. Translation taken Knysh (tr.), Al-Qushayri’s Epistle on Sufism, 78 with some minor modifications.

1 Comment on Religion, Modernity, and Experience: Reflections on Niloofar Haeri’s Say What Your Longing Heart Desires Array
Ata Anzali
Ata Anzali is an Associate Professor of Religion at Middlebury College where he teaches courses on Islamic traditions and comparative religion. He received his PhD from Rice University after studying in multiple institutions of higher education in Iran. He holds an MA in Islamic philosophy and Kalam from Tehran University and has extensively studied the philosophical and the mystical traditions of Islam at the Qom Seminary. He is the author of “Mysticism” in Iran: the Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept. His research interests include social and intellectual history of Iran since the sixteenth century. He is particularly interested in the genealogy of modern religious concepts in Persian.
Theorizing Modernities article

“The Dead Don’t Go Anywhere”: Phenomenology, Religious Studies, and History


Calvary Cemetery (Queens, New York) set against the modern Manhattan skyline. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

It is no secret that many former European Christian theologians who became students of world religions drew on phenomenology in their work. The philosophical tradition of phenomenology they in part drew on began in the early twentieth century with Edmund Husserl’s attempt to understand how humans experience the world prior to that experience’s redescription via the social and “hard” sciences.  To study religion phenomenologically for scholars of world religions—whom, among others, include Rudolf Otto (d. 1937), Gerardus van der Leeuw (d. 1950), and Mircea Eliade (d. 1986)—meant to bracket one’s own assumptions about the world and, as best as one could, empathetically describe what religious experiences are like for other persons and the manifold ways they are expressed across the various religious traditions of the world. While partially an attempt at understanding and arranging the various features of the world’s religion for the purposes of scholarly analysis, for many of these scholars, phenomenology of religion was also part of a quasi-divine quest to articulate an alternative to the modern world. They saw the latter as fragmented, alienated, and devoid of meaning; to articulate the deep meaning of religion was to offer an antidote to this disease of nihilism.

It is also no secret that this method of studying religion is now seen as passé and lacking in nuance, self-reflexivity, and attention to the dynamics of power in shaping the lives of religious actors and those who study them. Yet, even several decades following the demise of this theoretical and methodological approach, a scholar like Tim Murphy still felt the need in 2010 to write: “I study phenomenology of religion only to bury it,” an ambition in which he is not alone (34).

Murphy’s desire to bury phenomenology is the culmination of critiques of phenomenology of religion that began in the 1990s. During that decade scholars styling themselves as critical students of religion—rather than its “caretakers”—sought to dismantle phenomenology and in its place construct a theoretical approach to religion grounded in genealogical approaches inherited from Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. Rarely has this involved, however, uncovering the philosophical foundations of phenomenology in philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the impact of those philosophies on the study of religion. It has instead treated them as purveyors of an uncritical approach to examining social formations that should be discarded in favor of more “critical” methods.

The announcement of the death of phenomenology is premature, and in this brief post I show that its premature announcement has resulted in a vision of the critical study of religion that is anything but critical. This is because the critical study of religion has imagined itself as a detached form of engagement that does not take into account its own situatedness in a particular historical moment and the first-person perspective that critical inquiry takes. I do not advocate a return to the phenomenology of Eliade or Otto in staking out this position, but instead suggest that we might utilize the insights of philosophical phenomenology on these subjects to reimagine the practice of scholarship today. This call to engage classical sources in philosophical phenomenology, in other words, is not a call to return to them uncritically. Indeed, as decolonial critics in the Contending Modernities series have shown, these philosophers were often steeped in European nativism and exclusivism. This critical reappropriation is instead intended to contribute to philosophical accounts that prioritize the agency of the marginalized who challenge racism, coloniality, and misogyny in our politics and culture.

Phenomenology and Religion

As an initial counter to Murphy, a reader might expect me to employ the William Faulkner line made famous by Barack Obama, that the “past is never past, it is not even past.” On this account, the past cannot be buried because it remains present in how we experience the world today. But this line would be inadequate because it fails to capture the subjective way in which the past lives in us. I would offer instead the following lines from the Israeli TV drama, Shtisel, which focuses on the everyday lives of Hasidic Jews living in Jerusalem:

The dead don’t go anywhere. They are always here. Every man is a cemetery. An actual cemetery, in whom lie all our grandmothers and grandfathers. The father, the mother, the wife the child. Everyone is here all the time.

I prefer these lines, which are attributed to writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, because they remind us that the past is not something that lives outside of us—it is not something we can peer out at or down at from an objective position—rather, it is something carried within us; it fills us with possibility even as it weighs us down. This poetic description of the past is one that can be philosophically articulated via the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, as I will suggest later, history is the contingent source out of which our very subjectivity, and thus our agency in the world, is formed. Further, a critical reappropriation of Heidegger’s phenomenology provides scholars with a vision of critique that values history, contingency, and emancipatory horizons. There are many ways to practice phenomenology, in other words, and in advising against particular reductive approaches we need not abandon the philosophy altogether.

For instance, to embrace aspects of Heidegger’s thought need not mean embracing Eliade’s. The latter would find Heidegger’s historical phenomenology unacceptable. For Eliade, the modern approach to history—with its emphasis on contingencies rather than universals, the particular rather than the general—risked erasing from human existence the power of meaning, order, and a connection to something larger than our individual existence. Eliade saw his task as being to rescue us from such a vision of history—away from modernity—and to return it to a more authentic mode of being, one that was sacred rather than profane, meaningful rather than nihilistic. In nostalgically longing for a past where the burdens of history could be discarded, Eliade, as critics have rightly pointed out, buttressed an uncritical approach to studying religion that often reified patriarchal, heteronormative, colonialist, and racialized visions of religion. For example, in setting up the experience of “archaic societies” as the norm by which all other societies should be governed, he also took their social structures as natural and normatively binding.[1] Thus, for him, traditional gender roles that may restrain the flourishing of individuals were baked into the very essence of the cosmos. Oppression here is naturalized and normalized in such a way that it appears unchanging (See McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion).

I argue that this kind of phenomenology is indeed both intellectually and ethically troubling. But in discarding all of phenomenology along with it, we have lost insight into the breakthroughs philosophical phenomenology made in understanding how it is we come to know the world through our conscious experience of it, and indeed how we are able to question and critique this knowledge.

The philosophical tools for articulating how it is we are able to make critical claims about the world—that is, claims that challenge the seeming naturalness of the normative order and the political, social, and economic institutions that support that order—can be found in the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger.[2] For Heidegger, our existence in the present is part of a continuum from the past. As such, authenticity is not realized in recovering an idealized past, as it is for Eliade, but in taking it up in the present via historical traditions to which we can be held responsible. This “critical phenomenology” has seeds in Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, which Heidegger developed in more historicist directions. For Husserl, the ego’s knowledge of the world is structured intentionally, that is, it is already directed outward away from itself. Husserl saw this as a universal feature of consciousness that would make it possible to articulate a unified and universal human account knowledge. While agreeing with Husserl’s notion of intentionality, Heidegger went further in embedding intentionality in the contingent world. He contended that the human being was indeed structured outwardly toward the world (what he called Being-in-the-world) but that this outward orientation meant that our very way of understanding the world was shaped by the history into which we were born. He further showed how the practice of critical engagement with the world could only come about through our confrontation with the possibility that our way of living in and understanding the world might come to an end. In realizing that my world is contingent in this way, it becomes possible to see my own responsibility to that world, as well as those with whom I share a community in it.

For Heidegger, our existence in the present is part of a continuum from the past. As such, authenticity is not realized in recovering an idealized past, as it is for Eliade, but in taking it up in the present via historical traditions to which we can be held responsible.

Scholars like Russell McCutcheon and Timothy Fitzgerald have assumed that the phenomenological tradition associated with Heidegger and his teacher Husserl committed the same sins as Eliade: highlighting the importance of cosmic meaning over contingency and history. In other words, Husserl emphasized the efficaciousness of meaning for individual flourishing over the way meaning is bound up with structures of domination. As such, self-described critical scholars of religion have rejected phenomenological approaches in favor of genealogical ones. Borrowing from Foucault and other poststructuralists, these critical scholars contend that the genealogical method best preserves a critical edge to analyses of religious traditions. While beyond the scope of this blog essay, I note briefly here that genealogy and phenomenology are not in essence opposed to one another. Indeed, both Heideggerian phenomenology and Foucauldian genealogy emphasize the importance of contingency and history. Where they perhaps differ is in their orientation towards constructing a future. For Heidegger, the self was not so restrained by contingency that it could not act in the world, whereas for Foucault if often appeared it was (even if in Foucault’s later work he shifted towards a more robust account of individual agency).

It would be easy to dismiss this turn as one that is simply based on a misreading of the history of the relationship between philosophical phenomenology and phenomenology of religion. To some extent, it is. But there is a deeper concern that motivates the turn to genealogy as well. And this is that even among philosophical phenomenologists, there is an emphasis on subjective experience and meaning that is suspect to scholars of religion. Why?

Theology, Critique, and the First-Person Perspective

As previously noted, the study of religion, in which phenomenology of religion was for many years a dominant force, often relied on concepts like subjective experience and meaning. As critics have noted, this often led phenomenologists of religion to implicitly or explicitly forward their own Christian theological assumptions about the world. If the past of religious studies lays in the particularity of the Christian theological tradition, so the logic goes, then any critical study of religion in the present must reject that past. Otherwise, scholarship on religion risks simply being another form of theology, and the very reason for the existence of the discipline of religious studies and the departments in which it is studied are thrown into question. Turning to Foucault or Derrida in the past has allowed scholars to claim a critical stance towards religion that bypasses the question of their own subjective relationship to their object of study. Recent developments within the humanities, however, have pointed to the limits of these genealogical approaches and provide an opening to return to phenomenology with fresh eyes.

One proponent of the postcritical turn in the humanities is Rita Felski, who in The Limits of Critique suggests that the critical approach taken by scholars in the humanities no longer offers the resources necessary to meet the needs of students or the wider scholarly community. Following Paul Ricoeur, she describes the critical approach that is now dominant in the humanities as a “hermeneutics of suspicion” characterized by  a Sherlock Holmesian “detective-like” approach to examining texts. It is “an attitude of vigilance, detachment, wariness (suspicion) with identifiable conventions of commentary (hermeneutics)” (3). Such an approach pushes to the wayside how a text might affect me, challenge me, or move me. It leaves aside, in other words, the affective ways in which I might meaningfully relate to the text. In detaching myself from my object of study, I repress the ways that I subjectively relate to the text.

Still from the American drama film Sherlock Holmes (1922) with John Barrymore, on page 41 of the May 13, 1922 Exhibitors Herald. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Detachment is often treated as a virtue, rather than a vice, in the study of religion. Detachment, we are taught, is necessary especially because of the subject matter we study. To be too attached is to risk becoming religious, i.e. failing to separate oneself from the object of study that is necessary for “academic” work. It is to become again a theologian, like the phenomenologists of old. We, that is “scholars of religion” rather than “apologists,” implement the tools of theory and in doing so set aside our “experience” and “first-person” perspective in order to practice detachment and sharpen our critical acumen. When we do so, however, I would contend that we risk—contra Felski—not becoming too critical, but uncritical. This is because criticism is always made from a first-person perspective, from a person who is indeed a cemetery of the past and is attached to what they study in a variety of ways.

How can we take account of our attachment to the world in ways that preserve the practice of critique? Phenomenology offers a—though not the—resource for sorting out such issues. When Heidegger and Husserl were analyzing the first-person perspective they were doing so not naively, but with the question of how it is that we have knowledge about the world, and thus how something like a critical stance towards the world was possible. For Heidegger, it is the human capacity to engage with the world in a way that does not merely accept what others say about it—the anonymous “they” (Das Man)—that makes it possible to say that there is something like an “I” that stands apart from the world. This is not the radically independent “I” that stands at the center of libertarian political philosophy or even the “I” that is restrained by the moral law in Kantian philosophy. This is an I enmeshed in history, one that defines itself necessarily through categories handed down to it from the past—Heidegger describes this as its fallen nature. The “I” is bound to a history not of its own choosing, and yet, in recognizing that it is an “I” who takes up that history, sets itself apart from it. For Heidegger, as mentioned previously, this most concretely happens when I am confronted by the possible “death” of the conceptual world that makes my life possible. This might occur, for example, when my concepts fail to make sense of the world—one might think here of the failure of stereotypical gender categories to match up to people’s experience—and thus their contingency, and ultimately their dependence upon me to take them up as meaningful (or not) becomes clear. To return to the earlier example, here we can see why Heideggerian phenomenology is unlike Eliadean phenomenology. Where the latter cements stereotypical gender roles into the cosmic order of the universe, the former treats them as contingent norms that we can take over, re-define, and re-signify.

It is ultimately the dependence of categories upon agents acting within history that makes critical thought possible. Otherwise, the distinction between the world that is known to me and the world itself vanishes, leaving the very possibility of questioning how one understands the world impossible to give an account of. For me to take on any historically constituted normative identity, whether “father,” “colleague,” “brother,” or “teammate,” presupposes an I who takes it up, and therefore cannot be reduced to it. And it is my ability to take these categories up and examine their imbrication in certain political, economic, and social systems, that makes it possible for me to critique them, revise them, or advocate for their abandonment. A more concrete example of this kind of engagement are the recent calls to reimagine what constitutes “public safety” beyond the current conceptual framework that centers on policing. It is thus taking historically constituted norms up from the first-person perspective that makes a critical relationship to the world possible.

Conclusion

How might this aid scholars who want to reconfigure the study of religion as a critical enterprise? First, it helpfully reminds us that a critical disposition toward the world should not be conflated with the desire for objectivity. For even objectivity has a history that spoils such a desire. We are all enmeshed in histories not of our choosing. Our focus should be on how we take up those histories rather than on the naïve assumption that we can abandon them. This requires that, in part, we take responsibility for our own past in the study of religion as a discipline that has always been attached to theology and that in order to self-consciously move forward cannot bury that history. The recent work of Noreen Khawaja is exemplary in this regard. Second, it also suggests that we can think more capaciously about what critical work in the study of religion might look like. Rather than disinterested studies of “other people” who might do theology, unlike those of us in the social sciences or humanities, we might imagine those whom we study as fellow travelers with whom we share a world. This might not mean we always agree with the claims of those we study, but it might mean we see ourselves as bound up with them in ways that cannot be undone by speaking and writing in jargon that distances us from them. Indeed, this is a claim that postcolonial and decolonial critics have for too long been suggesting is necessary if we are to be honest about the reasons for our methodological orientation. While scholars have been rightly eager to take up the tools of these fields, too often our own relationship to religion, theology, and the past of religious studies has remained occluded in our own analyses. In engaging with its phenomenological past in the way I outline here, religious studies might exhume the past and in so doing, learn to live with it even as those in the field set out on new paths beyond it.

[1] I do not mean here to imply that these societies were as oppressive and unchanging as Eliade’s construction suggests, but rather that his construction of them that he drew on using his own cultural presuppositions were.

[2] This is not of course to say that Heidegger’s own political commitments should evade scrutiny. Indeed, as has been carefully demonstrated by numerous scholars, Heidegger’s allegiance to the Nazi party in the 1930s was an allegiance he saw as bearing out the critique of liberalism embodied in his other philosophical work. Nonetheless, following Heidegger scholar Gregory Fried, I would contend that the philosophical problems he raised are ones that still require our coming to terms with and that indeed by interpreting Heidegger through a critical lens, we can excavate a liberatory potential in his thought he himself would not have endorsed. This is part of what it means to take responsibility for the phenomenological tradition of which he is a part.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

A Ritual of One’s Own


Anthology of Persian Poetry. Author: Hafiz (Iranian, Shiraz ca. 1325–1390 Shiraz). Date: 17th century. Via Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

Self-proclaimed “secular” Iranians often criticize their fellow “religious” compatriots of blindly following laws of a “foreign” religion, especially when it comes to the performance of the daily prayers which is dismissed as parroting Arabic words without even trying to understand their meanings. The act of repeating foreign words day in, day out—i.e. the performance of ritual prayer (namāz)—comes to represent the irrationality of religion and the stagnation of its followers for the rational forward-moving seculars whose speech and act (as well as speech acts) are always meaningful. The perceived absence of agency on the part of the ritual-performers is reinforced by another perception, namely, the theocratic state overloading the public space with its hegemonic vision of Islam that inevitably seeps through every nook and cranny, including the private sphere of the religious individual’s mind. Niloofar Haeri’s, Say What your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran masterfully paints a far more complex picture, one which illustrates creativity in bounded acts and ingenuity in repetition.

Focusing on the practices of a group of Shi’ite women, Haeri practices the “anthropology of Islam” à la Talal Asad by showing how her interlocutors strive to make sense of the discursive traditions of their time, understand and reformulate their shifting relationships, and achieve coherence in the face of contradictory narratives and discourses. As such, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires illustrates the amount of thinking, creativity, and negotiation that goes into understanding what it means to be a regular Muslim in the Islamic Republic of Iran in the twenty-first century. In the process, the boundaries between the religious and secular, public and private, and religion and literature are constantly crossed and undermined. It is the latter contribution on which I would like to focus further here.

In my own work, I refer to Iran as a “poetic nation” and claim that the modern discourse on the Iranian nation has been built around a perceived continuity and coherence of classical Persian poetry. It does not matter if the birthplace of the poet falls outside the modern geography of Iran—e.g. Rumi in Afghanistan or Nizami in Azerbaijan—they are the national treasures of Iran whose poems have acted and will continue to act as moral guides throughout the ages. Haeri demonstrates the importance of poetry in the daily lives of people and how much it is intertwined with every aspect of being. “Iranians do a lot with poetry: they learn to think about certain ethical values, ways of being and conducting themselves; they become literate through it; they build friendships; […] they use it to express their feelings” (45). But more importantly, “they learn to think about religion in imaginative and paradoxical ways” (ibid.).

The latter point is crucial in understanding Islam as it is lived in Iran. One of the main contributions of the academic study of religion is illustrating how the religious and secular are co-constitutive rather than two separate opposing realms (see, for example, Talal Asad’s, Formations of the Secular). Haeri further illustrates that in Iran, religion is constituted by poetry and that in the public imagination, poetry plays an authoritative role in defining, destabilizing, and pushing the boundaries of religion. Even more worthwhile, it is through ritual, that misunderstood by-product of religion, that Haeri finds the innovations and interventions informed by classical poetry. In the Iranian case, poets act as the acknowledged “legislators of the world,” if I am allowed to distort Shelley’s assertion in defense of poetry; they are the interpreters of the Qur’an.

“Mystical” poetry (sheʿr-e ʿerfāni) is where the marriage of religion and literature is most noticeable; however, howʿerfān is understood in the modern context complicates these matters further. As a modern concept whose roots go back to the Safavid period (aptly studied by Ata Anzali, another contributor to this symposium),ʿerfan troubles the religious/secular binary as an alternative “spirituality” (spirituality without religion) that can accommodate individualistic quests without the communal restrictions associated with “orthodox” Islam. ʿErfāni poetry, in this understanding, is the vehicle to express an intimate and direct relationship of human beings with the Divine. It is in this sense that poetry creates a type of (mystical?) experience, similar to Haeri’s concept of “presence.”

Haeri further illustrates that in Iran, religion is constituted by poetry and that in the public imagination, poetry plays an authoritative role in defining, destabilizing, and pushing the boundaries of religion.

ʿErfāni poetry expresses the ineffable and as such, signifies something beyond its literal meaning. It is not just the rhythm and rhyme that leave the listener with that indescribable feeling, but what is said through the unsaid, the intertextual play with the tropes of the poetic discourse, the ways the words and letters are combined and set in the assigned meter. No matter how many times one reads or hears or recites a poem by Rumi, Hafez, Saʿdi, and many others associated correctly or incorrectly to the mystical tradition, one can feel that state (hāl) which cannot be explained through words. Similarly, Haeri demonstrates how this group of Shiʿite women pour their own meanings into the scripted text of ritual prayer to “make a connection to the divine so that they may be co-present” (66). For a long time ritual prayer has been understood as meaningless, “pure actions without any function beyond their definition as obligatory acts of worship” (Steinfels, 308). But for these women, as well as for many practicing Muslims all around the world, the formal aspect of ritual prayer is a limited if not marginal concern; valid performance of the prayer is not enough. By aestheticizing the ritual, they make “the sign a more complex matter than a pairing of meaning and abstract sound image” (67).

Haeri illustrates how her interlocutors turn qāl into hāl, authoring the authorless acts of prayer each time they repeat the same words and deeds, and in the process, create a ritual of their own.

I am left with a few questions of my own after reading this thought-provoking work. We are trying to move beyond the “universal” categories that shape our discipline; we teach “religion” fully conscious (hopefully) that it is “not a native category,” but it is the category that we have. Works like Haeri’s historicize and politicize some of our analytical categories such as religion, literature, and mysticism and show that the local practitioners reconfigure these categories and take part in their global formations. If we accept this premise, can we imagine a reverse direction in this constant reconstitution of religion as we teach it in academia? Can we, for example, theorize/translate the meaning-making process at work through the companionship of poetry and prayer in Iran for the larger context in the study of religion? In a similar vein, how can the modern concept of ʿerfān, as practiced and understood by both “religious” and “secular” camps in Iran, be juxtaposed to “mysticism” as an analytical category in religious studies, anthropology, literature, philosophy, etc.? In other words, should ʿerfān be an independent category used only for studying debates in modern Iran or should we extend our signifier, i.e. mysticism, to be capable of signifying the complexities of ʿerfān within it as well?

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Ahoo Najafian
Ahoo Najafian is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies in the Religious Studies Department at Macalester College. Her studies focus on Persianate Islam and the intersection of religion, literature, and politics in contemporary Iran. Her current project is a book about 20th Century interpretations of the works by Hafez, the famed 14th Century Persian poet, entitled “Poetic Nation: Iranian Soul and Historical Continuity.” She teaches courses such as Introduction to Islam, Gender Relations in Islam, Muslims and the Imaginal Realm, and Islamic Republic: Explorations in Religion and Nationalism. From 2018 to 2020, she taught at Carleton College as an Ira T. Wender Postdoctoral Scholar in Middle East Studies and Religion. Born and raised in Iran, Prof. Najafian earned a BA and MA in English literature from Tehran University, an MA in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of British Columbia, and a doctorate in Religious Studies from Stanford University.
Field Notes article

COVID-19, Conspiracies, and Conceptions of Identity

, and
Iqra Afzal, a vaccinator gives the covid-19 vaccine to Nurhidayah Luding who is a foreign student from Thailand studying at the Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan on September 1, 2021. IMF  Photo/Saiyna Bashir, September 1, 2021, Islamabad, Pakistan. CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The coronavirus pandemic has impacted nearly every individual across the planet. It has ended and upended lives, forced people to make decisions that just a few years before would have seemed unimaginable, and completely, perhaps forever, altered the way people live and go about their daily lives. The following post will explore differing attitudes towards the pandemic across groups from around the world, the sources of pandemic conspiracy theories, and how religious dynamics tie into these two components. This reflection arose from the collaborative discussions between students of the Madrasa Discourses program and a Notre Dame student during the summer of 2021.

Pandemic Perceptions Across Identity Groups

At the outset, we note that attitudes towards the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination against the disease have varied across the socio-political fabrics of different countries. There has been no linear or singular trend in how people have responded to the pandemic. This should not be surprising. Any group of people—whether grouped by religion, social strata, or political affiliation—will have a different response. There is no one way to respond to the pandemic because people have diverse religious and cultural identities that lead them to respond in different ways. Across the globe, though, there are categories of responses that people fall into concerning the pandemic and the vaccine. Most people are welcoming of the vaccine and ready to receive it. Others are happy that a vaccine exists but are skeptical of what they have been hearing and coming across in some news sources regarding (rare) side effects and other potentially dangerous consequences. They worry, for example, that they are lab rats who are being given a vaccine with unproven effectiveness, or that they are likely to receive expired or adulterated vaccines. There are also those who refuse to receive the vaccine for personal, religious, political, and/or other reasons. There are even some who do not even believe that the coronavirus and thus the pandemic are real at all. They think COVID-19 is a fabricated disease and that the soaring number of deaths is nothing out of the ordinary.

Our group discussions focused on this third group, namely those who do not believe in vaccines or the pandemic. These perceptions can at times be driven by different myths, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. Perhaps one of the most prominent drivers of COVID-19 skepticism and conspiracy theories are social media platforms, such as Facebook and TikTok. Some vaccine conspiracy theories that have been widely circulated in India, the US, and Pakistan include the belief that the vaccine will cause you to grow an extra body part, will cause you to “glitch,” will turn you into a werewolf, or will make you infertile. Others believe that the vaccine is actually a microchip tracking device (see some of these myths dispelled here). Still others believe that the vaccine causes autism or a possible DNA gene mutation. While most of these conspiracy theories are created for mere laughs, they nonetheless reveal that people’s beliefs about the vaccine, especially skepticism, fear, or denial, reflect the socio-political dynamics of their countries.

There has been no linear or singular trend in how people have responded to the pandemic. This should not be surprising. Any group of people—whether grouped by religion, social strata, or political affiliation—will have a different response.

One conspiracy theory in circulation among the Muslim minority in India is that the vaccine creates some sort of magnetic force within the body. The conspiracy theory has evolved to include the belief that the United States government may eventually use this magnetism to pull Muslims out of the country and onto Mars. This conspiracy theory reveals much about this identity group’s deeper feelings of mistrust towards the Indian and American governments, which are perhaps further rooted in the feeling of being a minority religious group in their country. Coupled with the irresponsible responses of some political leaders and a lack of trust in the governmental institutions, some people are reluctant to take vaccines from government centers and government medical institutes. They doubt whether the proper vaccine is being injected into them and are concerned that they are being fooled in some way. Another contributing factor among these identity groups is that religious scholars that are held in high esteem are sometimes skeptical of modern tools (such as medical technologies) and methods of modern medicine. When these scholars believe in such misconceptions, they are likely to misguide many others as well.

In the United States, some Catholic Christians are likewise hesitant to receive the vaccine and some flat-out refuse to receive it. They refuse, however, on different grounds than Muslims in India. Some Catholic Christians are concerned that one of the vaccines was made using fetal stem cells. Under normal circumstances, the Church condemns such a practice. A core belief of the Catholic Church is respect for the dignity of all human life, from conception until natural death. Because obtaining embryonic or fetal stem cells typically requires destruction of the embryo or fetus, this practice, therefore, comes into conflict with Catholic doctrine. The global pandemic, and the controversy surrounding the use of stem cells, led Pope Francis to issue a church order to assure members of the faith that in these devastating and unprecedented circumstances receiving the vaccine was recommended, though not obligatory. The Coronavirus has forced Church members all the way up to the highest levels of leadership to make difficult decisions on the tenets of their faith and notions of morality.

In Pakistan, responses to the COVID-19 vaccine have been varied. Although people are often reluctant to receive the vaccine, they again have different reasons than some Muslims in India and some Catholic Christians in the US. The people who have less exposure to authentic information have the oddest reasons for opposing vaccination—for example, that the vaccine may be a population control mechanism, or that it may cause a life-threatening disease. Others influenced by social media believe in different conspiracy theories, including an international conspiracy that the vaccine is intended to surveil and control different populations. Moreover, even some educated and literate people, who typically do not believe in conspiracies, are hesitant to receive the vaccine because they are unsure of its quality. One example is the reluctance of frontline health care providers to get vaccinated. Their reason for not wanting to be vaccinated is that they do not trust the health care system and/or are worried about becoming lab rats. It should be noted that Pakistani Catholic Christians do not raise the stem-cell issue as US Catholic Christians do, keeping in mind that Christians in Pakistan make up only 1.27% of the population while Christians in the United States make up 72% of the population. Rather, their concerns are the same as those mentioned above, and thus are more correlated with the socio-economic class they belong to rather than their religious affiliation. The threatened identity, be it religious or socio-economic, is the source of the conspiracy in which one believes. In each of these identity groups’ narratives, people believe conspiracies because they lack trust in social and political institutions. They believe theories because believing reality feels more dangerous or detrimental to them.

The sources of conspiracies are not religious beliefs but rather are the reservations and vulnerabilities a community already has towards the government, society, or another distrusted entity. Any part of the community that does not receive clear and trusted information will be most inclined to conspiracies. It is the fear of the unknown and uncertain or the feeling of being under threat that is the source of conspiratorial thinking.

Reckoning Identity with the Pandemic

This post has been focused on the relationship between identity, religion, society, and conspiratorial thinking. To conclude, we turn briefly to the deeper questions the pandemic has raised about religious belief and practice.

Due to masses being canceled, a table was set up with blessed palms, yellow ribbons, and prayer cards on Palm Sunday at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Springfield, Tennessee. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

During the pandemic, many individuals and groups were forced to confront foundational issues and questions that they would never have considered. Individuals and religious institutions were forced to make difficult decisions and adapt to a new way of living, praying, and engaging in fellowship with one another. On a logistical level, the pandemic has barred religious people from attending services in person, but, on the other hand, it made virtual services possible. On a more spiritual level, the pandemic has pushed some to become more hostile to religion, while it has pushed others to become more religious. Believers no longer have physical access to their places of worship and may thus feel isolated or abandoned by their religious community or God Himself. They may ask: Why has God allowed such suffering to occur? This may lead them to start questioning their religion or reconsider their faith. For this reason, global religiousness and religiosity may decline. On the other hand, the pandemic led some people to reconsider or revive the religious spirit. The sickness and loneliness that the pandemic has wrought has pushed some believers closer to religious practices and rituals. Some consider it to be a phenomenon depicting the human power to thrive and survive in response to a global dilemma. It has nothing to do with spiritual or divine causes.

The challenges to religious belief as well as the rampant proliferation of conspiratorial thinking indicate that the pandemic has had a significant impact on society. Addressing these impacts will require individuals, communities, and governmental institutions to reevaluate their understandings of the world and their priorities within it. Reckoning with one’s faith is a necessary step for these identity groups in moving forward in this new pandemic world. Likewise, establishing or reestablishing trust in communities and governments appears to be another essential step on the path forward. It seems vital that people be included and involved in decision making and policy in an unbiased manner that addresses community concerns. Additionally, the almost uncontrollable dissemination of unverified information and misinformation demonstrates the dire need for reliable and authentic information.

The world has changed, and people’s identities must change with it.

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Mary Kate Godfrey
Mary Kate is a Kellogg International Scholar at the University of Notre Dame studying Political Science and Global Affairs with a minor in Musical Theatre. She spent the summer of 2021 participating virtually in the Madrasa Discourses program. Mary Kate hopes to pursue a career in international relations and public service.
Zulqernain Haider
Zulqernain Haider is a PhD scholar at International Islamic University Malaysia, Department of Fiqh and Usul fiqh. He also completed his MA in sociology and anthropology IIUM. He joined Madarsa Discourse in 2019.
Sidra Zulfaqar
Sidra Zulfaqar is a Sharia and Law graduate who completed a Masters (LLM) in the same subject from international Islamic University, Islamabad. She is currently serving as a visiting lecturer at International Islamic University. She joined Madrasa Discourses in 2019.
Theorizing Modernities article

Language and Feeling in Ritual Practice


Folio with Verses in Nasta’liq Script. The verses on this folio are written in diagonal lines of nasta‘liq script. Noted for its refined and lyrical quality, nasta‘liq is ideally suited for love poetry replete with mystical allusions and Sufi metaphors. Date: A.H. 1017/ A.D. 1608–9. Via Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

Just what is “modern religion” exactly? Conventional wisdom, biased toward Protestant Christianity, would claim that it is the kind that fits best to modern society, which is defined and purportedly organized as secular. Since Iran is a society that officially opposes secularism, one might assume that religion there is not modern. In a secular society, one that institutionally separates religion and politics, church and state, religion is meant to be a private matter only. The ideal practice of “modern” religion is thus conceived of as interior, a matter of personal conviction and private experience, not of obligation and public display. In the history of Christianity, the latter was the critique Protestants levelled at Catholic legalism and ritual. In light of that critique, they sought to establish a new church with fewer mediators between the individual and God. By 1800, in an era of rising secularism, the Protestant thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher arrived at a further understanding of modern religion, defending the value of faith in its experiential rather than moral dimension, religion as a feeling rather than a rule. True religion, then, was the one sincerely felt, not merely performed as a duty. And this is where Niloofar Haeri’s Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran delivers fascinating insights for those of us who know more about the history and practice of Protestant Christianity in Europe than of Islam in the Middle East. It turns our assumptions about what modern religion might be on their heads and reminds us of similarities between the two traditions.

It is an interesting feature of Protestantism that its core understandings around the proper relationship between person and God emerged from and was articulated strongly in mystical practices: Martin Luther started his career as a member of a contemplative community; Pietist movements of the seventeenth century and the revivalism of the nineteenth century all drew on mystical language and strove for a personal and immediate experience of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Today’s charismatic Christians follow in these footsteps, and in so doing, appear in the eyes of many secular observers to be decidedly un-modern. In the contexts that I have studied—German and US American Christians since 1800 —religious practices which strive to feel God’s presence in the body become increasingly viewed as “too” religious, associated with politically reactionary views and fundamentalist understandings of religious texts. It is hardly remembered now how modern it once was to practice an experiential religion and have a personal relationship to God, a stance which provided the basis for a privatized religion that could fit into a secular society.

Reading Niloofar Haeri’s book, I was struck by the different constellations and history of experiential and legalistic modes of religious engagement she described, and how well suited it is to help readers question conventional wisdom—on religion in Iran specifically, and on the notion of modern religion more generally. Just like the Christianity I have studied (and Haeri notes interesting parallels between them throughout her book), Islam has struggled with the tensions between these two modes of religion. It also appears to be the educated middle classes which strive for an experiential mode of religious practice, shying away from a legalistic, externalized mode, in which even mindlessly going through the motions is considered enough to fulfill the religious obligation (in this case, demanded by the state). As Haeri notes in her conclusion, from the perspective of Muslim practitioners drawing on the deep tradition of ‘erfān, the laws of the anti-secular, Islamist regime in Tehran are in fact “institutionalized insincerity,” demanding obedience to rules regardless of one’s feeling. Throughout the book, she shows how the regime itself cannot completely reject Persian mystical traditions, though it remains ambivalent toward them. It appears to be a contradiction in the very fabric of Islamist rule in Iran and provides a far more nuanced understanding of how religion is practiced under such conditions. Are the women that Haeri portrays practicing a more “modern” Islam than that which the regime demands? Or is the regime itself “modern” because it produces this mode of practice? Not only do Haeri’s interlocutors feel that their parents and grandparents only practiced out of obligation (in a “pre-modern” mode) before the revolution, but the book as a whole argues convincingly for a broad societal problematization of religious practice after 1979 across the spectrum from secular to religious.

It is hardly remembered now how modern it once was to practice an experiential religion and have a personal relationship to God, a stance which provided the basis for a privatized religion that could fit into a secular society.

Haeri’s ethnography, with its excellent material and insightful analysis, opens a window onto this problematization, which revolves around the question of prayer. Why must Muslims pray at all (since regular namāz obviously does not automatically make everyone a better person)? What should motivate people to pray (love of God or fear of punishment; display of piety, or for oneself)? These are, as Haeri informs us, “the most frequently discussed questions on television, radio, Internet and among friends and strangers in Iran today” (72). Negotiating the space between religion and the secular, between the Islamist law of the land and personal conviction, revolves around these issues. This is no doubt because prayer, as a way to regularly communicate with God,  is a central practice of Islam, and arguably of religion generally. The tension between formalistic and experiential modes of this communication turns up not only at the societal level, but also at the personal level for the women interviewed here, since they can also have a prayer session that suffices formally but still not find it to be good enough. They strive for the feeling of hāl, which Haeri identifies as a sense of “co-presence with the divine”; this is what makes prayers truly valid and efficacious for them.

Particularly in this part of her analysis, Haeri sheds light on the emotional work of what appears to be mere recitation and rote prayer (in a foreign language, no less), again calling into question one of the basic assumptions about what makes religion modern. The mechanistic mutterings of the rosary in Catholicism (at one time also in a foreign language, Latin) was the very image of premodern religion for Protestants, who championed prayer “from the heart.” And yet, as I have found, their own great attachment to the Lord’s Prayer, the Psalms, and other texts belies this prejudice; they, too, have an understanding of how memorizing and reciting the words of another entails their internalization. Those words become, to a certain extent, one’s own, and reciting them was often described to me as a high point of the church service. Haeri’s study digs deeply into how speaking from the heart relies on the formal structures of language and ritual; they provide the necessary scaffolding for achieving a deeply personal experience. Recitation, therefore, does not make sincerity impossible. The words are not the issue for these practitioners so much as the question of how one prays. A good namāz also requires effort: “concentration (tamarkoz), sincerity (kholūs), and presence of the heart (hozūr-e qalb)” (159).

The importance of hāl as an indicator of a good namāz highlights how emotion mediates the experience of divine presence, and this study also offers insight into the connection between language and emotion. Two languages are at play here and each may offer its own emotional affordance. The mystical quality of the older, foreign language may conjure a sense of mystery and awe, while one’s own vernacular would seem to be closer to the heart and everyday life, which can make for more passionate, personal feelings. Haeri’s study suggests that the art of prayer among her interlocutors involves the creative interplay between such affordances. I have used the term “emotional practice,” building on William Reddy’s speech-act concept of “emotives” and Arlie Hochschild’s understanding of emotional work, to explain why emotions like hāl are a kind of skill, even if we do not experience them as being within our own power. Emotions are not so much “had” as “done,” and the fact that they cannot reliably be accomplished successfully speaks to the inherent instability of iterative practice and space for inserting one’s own creative agency. Judith Butler and other theoreticians of performativity emphasize that language precedes the subject and indeed, following Michel Foucault, serves to subjectify the individual, but it does not fully determine her subjectivity. This potential is excellently demonstrated in Haeri’s study and will hopefully encourage more investigations of this kind in other religious contexts, continuing to trouble our assumptions about modern religion as a matter of private experience.

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Monique Scheer
Prof. Dr. Monique Scheer is professor of historical and cultural anthropology at the University of Tübingen. In her teaching and research, Scheer brings perspectives from the history and anthropology of emotions together with issues around belief and conviction, religious and secular, and how they play out in social settings characterized by cultural and religious pluralism. Scheer's research monograph, Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany (2020) combines historical and ethnographic methods in applying practice theory to the study of religion and emotions in the context of modern German Protestantism.
Theorizing Modernities article

Teaching Islamic Poetry Beyond Orientalism


Page of Calligraphy from the Kulliyat of Sa’di. Date: 18th century. Via Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

When I introduce students to Islam in my undergraduate courses, I always feel a little nervous. I am a scholar of Catholicism, I know no Arabic, and like everyone with a graduate degree in the humanities, I was trained in the pernicious histories of western appropriation of Islam well. At the same time, I have a deep sense of moral responsibility to teach at least some Islam in introductory theology courses. The vast majority of my undergraduate students come into the classroom with either a blank slate when it comes to Islam, or, more likely, with their heads full of disconnected snippets of Islamophobic images and narratives culled from growing up on a media diet in the post-9/11 United States. Add to that, Islam isn’t “other” or “out there”; there are always devout Muslim students in my theology classes too, usually first-generation students commuting from elsewhere in the Bronx, Queens, or Manhattan.

I begin teaching Islam always with trepidation, but I usually reclaim some confidence once I’ve introduced a line from Carl Ernst’s preface to Following Muhammad. He describes learning about Islam as a practice in which “the reader participates in the creative act of reimagining as human an immense group of people who have been demonized.” We talk a lot about the moral stakes of what Ernst calls “restoring a human face to Islam” (xxi). I’ve had a lot of success with documentaries like The Light in Her Eyes, anthropological work like Caroline Moxy Rouse’s Engaged Surrender, and this set of interviews with Muslim scholars who describe their work in personal terms. These are all deeply effective and humanizing materials.

But my nervousness inevitably picks up again, because the truth is, in my heart I love teaching most of all the mystical and poetic texts of religious traditions. There are few teaching memories I have that are more joyful than introducing students to the beauty of Rumi and Hafez from Omid Safi’s Radical Love, or discussing podcasts like this one, or even having incredible musicians like Dan Kurfirst and his band sing Rumi’s poetry accompanied to music. But of course, a unit on Islamic mysticism is besieged with dangers on every side: the risk of perpetuating orientalist fantasies about the pure Sufi kernel in an otherwise legalistic and dry religion. I try and tackle this head on, but I still struggle to connect Islamic poetry and mysticism to the larger pedagogical project of humanizing Islam. The students find the material beautiful and unexpected, but it’s hard to shake them of the idea that these poets merely illustrate a rarefied world of elite male writers, and that studying them is akin to peering into a museum. Some classroom discussions have veered disappointingly towards stereotypes that perhaps Islam “used to” be beautiful, playful, spiritual, but no longer. I sense these stereotypes always loom darkly at the edges of my teaching, and despite different pedagogical experiments tackling it, I never felt like I dealt with it satisfactorily. I always felt uneasy.

Then along comes Niloofar Haeri’s masterful new book, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires. It is a beautiful, concise, and thought-provoking work, analyzing a community of women in post-revolutionary Iran whose religious lives are centered on the poetic and mystical materials of Islam, what she calls ‘erfān. The word ‘erfān has a wider connotative range than the words mystical, poetic, or spiritual have in English. The latter usually signal something that is done privately and interiorly. ‘Erfān, as Haeri describes it, is a communal practice through and through: these women grew up in Tehran memorizing and performing the poems of Hafez and Rumi at family parties, listening to poetry competitions on the radio, and keeping elaborate notebooks filled with transcribed mystical poems as teens. As adults, they host lunches and dinners where friends read poems and prayers for discussion and debate. It is these intensely relational settings in which Islamic interiority is cultivated.

The truth is, in my heart I love teaching most of all the mystical and poetic texts of religious traditions…But of course, a unit on Islamic mysticism is besieged with dangers on every side: the risk of perpetuating orientalist fantasies about the pure Sufi kernel in an otherwise legalistic and dry religion.

The book’s title comes from a famous dialogue in Rumi’s Masnavi, where Moses tells a shepherd what God has revealed to him: “Don’t search for manners and rules/Say what your longing heart desires.” The line embodies a central ‘erfān idea, that of the heart as the innermost and truest place out of which the pure love of God radiates (13). Readers already familiar with Rumi will recognize his characteristic vision of God, but Haeri’s work completely brings it to new life. Now, suddenly, we don’t read this only as evidence of the 13th century Persian Sufi genius, but we also see it as a theological vision that has been kept alive, circulated, debated and prayed with in the hearts and minds of people all over Iran today, particularly women.

One of the most interesting points Haeri makes concerns how this culture of ‘erfān emerged in Iran. Following the 1979 revolution and the end of the Pahlavi monarchy, Iranians experienced a succession of Islamicists consolidating power who aimed to Islamize society at every level. Many Iranians, of course, complied and promoted this vision, while others, such as secularists who remain allergic to anything religious, resisted. But for a huge swath of the culture, something subtle happened—a robust culture of laity began to take the Islamic materials into their own hands, and join in arguments about topics like what a true Islam looks like, the nature of God, and religious sincerity. Many of these people were drawn by the mystical and poetic materials and engaged them with urgency: the stakes, as Haeri puts it, were high in a way that was never true previously. Before 1979, most people mostly left Islam in the hands of the clerics and elites. Little was at stake because much of it never touched their lives. Now, on the other hand, nearly everyone has gotten into the game of religion.

But more than an overview of an understudied cultural phenomenon, the brilliance of  the book lies in Haeri’s analysis of the dynamic emotional, spiritual, and intellectual landscape of a group of people who are typically obscured in studies of Islam: educated, middle-class lay women. For example, in Chapter 1, “Where Do Ideas Come From?” Haeri argues that the prayers and mystical poems the women memorized made the religion real for them, but not just because of what the poems were “about” (the meanings of many mystical poems are not exactly clear). The memorization of poetry also served as an aesthetic and “pedagogic” practice that contributed to the cultivation of a literate, good, and moral person.  A person with a head and heart full of Hafez, Saadi, and even women poets whose names were new to me, like Parvin Etesami, would learn to cultivate ādāb, inner and outer refinement in ethics, character, and aesthetics. The practice of memorizing poems and sharing them publicly also enable the women to “acquire performance skills and quick wittedness, they hone their skills in memorization; they use it to express feelings and they learn to think about religion in imaginative and paradoxical ways” (45). Drawing on theorical material on sacred presence, Haeri also shows how the memorization of poems and prayers make present non-ordinary reality to the believer. One woman describes, for instance, how uttering a poem as an adult that she memorized as a child makes present a long-dead parent, while another woman describes performing her daily ritual prayers and imagines herself at Mecca, even standing before the Prophet (66-67).

Memorized poems also become the material out of which the women practice do’ā, or spontaneous prayer to God, the subject of chapter 3. In this chapter, the women’s voices are most central and most personal, with Haeri describing their intimate and serious dialogues with God. When it comes to spontaneous prayer, she writes, the women “make it up as they go along, using their imagination, their experiences, and whatever related sources they may have been exposed to, such as poetry, prayer books, the media, and discussions with others…God is neither conceptualized nor worshipped in just one way. The relationship with God is capacious and experiences vulnerabilities and ruptures” (123). What a vivid image to contrast to U.S. stereotypes of Muslims who “submit” to God uncritically and monolithically. These women are full of doubt and creativity.

In the end, I truly cannot think of a more compelling book that can do the work of (returning to Ernst’s phrase) “restoring a human face to Islam.” Scholars have long aimed to combat stereotypes of Islamic legalism and politization by introducing students to the mystical visions of Rumi, Hafez, and Saadi. But this book helps us do so much more than that—it enables us to keep this mystical language alive in our classroom while making sure we don’t ossify it as the orientalists did, and only see it as part of Islam’s past, the domain of rarefied male elites, and as disconnected to living Muslims today.

At the present of my writing this piece, we approach a new academic year in the midst of another COVID resurgence. It is quite honestly hard to face it with anything but dread. But when I imagine a day this coming year, maybe back in the classroom, reading some beautiful poems from a collection like Radical Love, then reading Say What Your Longing Heart Desires with my undergraduates, I start to feel something like the rushes of actual excitement, something much more powerful than nervousness or even dread. I am so grateful to Niloofar Haeri for this extraordinary book. I can’t wait to share it with my students.

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Brenna Moore
Brenna Moore is Professor of Theology at Fordham University. She works in the area of modern Christianity, with a focus on Catholic intellectual and cultural history in Europe. Dr. Moore’s teaching and research centers on mysticism and religious experience, gender, a movement in theology known as “ressourcement,” (“turn to the sources”) that paved the way for Vatican II, and the place of religious difference in modern Christian thought. She is most recently the author of Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2021). This project explores a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Theorizing Modernities article

Textual Encounters: Meaning and Time in Islamic Studies


“Woman Applying Henna,” Late 16th century. This painting is a rare depiction of a young woman applying henna to her feet, a ritual associated with rite of passage celebrations, specifically marriage, in Iran and surrounding regions. Via the Metropolitan Museum of art. Public Domain.

In Say What Your Longing Heart Desires, Niloofar Haeri offers an anthropological account of textual encounters. While the book does not explicitly criticize major trends in Islamic studies, its approach to religious texts provocatively, if sometimes quietly, subverts familiar methodological distinctions. I want to ask how the book offers not a new interpretation of canonical texts, but a new way of conceptualizing textuality.

Let’s begin from the fact that Haeri is not primarily approaching Islamic texts as objects of exegetical interpretation or historical contextualization, as is common in the discipline of history. She also does not adopt an approach more commonly found in her own discipline of anthropology, which focuses on the sociopolitical use of texts — how, for instance, certain actors invoke scriptural passages to certify political authority or justify institutional inequalities. Haeri does not repudiate these approaches, and to a degree she draws on them in framing her analysis. However, her attention in this book mostly lies elsewhere, drawing our attention to a very different type of textual engagement. Across this remarkable ethnography of prayer and poetry, Haeri examines texts that her interlocutors recite, recurrently, over their lifespans. This shift in focus represents a methodological displacement, indeed a reorientation of the primary modes of textual analysis in Islamic studies. What is at stake in this displacement?

I want to highlight a difficult passage from the book that begins to suggest the significance of this move—difficult not because the analysis is unclear but because the passage concerns the very meaning of “meaning.” A number of Haeri’s interlocutors told her that in reciting al-Hamd (the sura recited in acts of daily prayer), they are communicating with God. They are using God’s words to express their own concerns, and because their own concerns are multiple and change with time this communication does not always have the same meaning each time they pray. Haeri notes the somewhat unusual nature of this claim, which strains the concepts of “meaning” and “communication”: “How can the most recited sura of the Qur’an ‘not always have the same meaning’?… What many of these women explained effectively meant that they use God’s chosen words to tell Him what they want to share: requests, gratitude, questions, anxieties, and remembrance of a person who is ill or has passed away, or wordless thoughts and feelings” (85).

In these acts of ritual prayer, the concept of meaning is not primarily about how these women interpret the words of the text. The women do, of course, reflect on the lexical semantics of certain passages in the Qur’an, and their understandings of certain verses evolve as they learn more about the texts in classes, discussions, and readings. But in the act of namāz, exegesis is not the primary concern of the enunciator. “I do not immediately begin to pray as soon as I stand on my sajjadeh,” Parvin states. “I pause and gather my thoughts. Then I try to concentrate on each word that I am saying and while doing that I am also telling God what I need, what I am afraid of, I ask for guidance” (84). Maryam also emphasizes the labor of enunciation itself: “Well, I am not choosing the words of the sura… but I try to concentrate on pronouncing them well, not hurrying through them, and I try to learn to tell God what I want to” (85). In both of these accounts of namāz, the moment of expressing one’s own anxieties and desires is preceded by an effort at concentrating and on trying to pronounce correctly. The meaning of scripture is at issue not as a problem of interpretation but of recitation.

Maryam indicates that she is learning to speak to God. The emphasis on learning suggests that she does not presume her own adequacy as a speaker. Her capacity to communicate with God can be improved over time, implying that the ritual act neither begins nor concludes with this one prayer. It is part of a longer process of repeated performance of the divine word and, across these many recitations, of learning how to present oneself to God.

If namāz is a mode of communicating with God, we need to rethink the very concept of communication that is at work here. The familiar, modernist concept of communication, which assumes that a speaker is verbalizing an intention and conveying a message to an addressee, is insufficient for understanding namāz. The words of the ritual are not simply an externalizing medium for expressing an internal intention or desire. The speaker, in this case, cannot presume the adequacy of her own presence before her addressee. The sincerity of her intent (kholūs) and the presence of her heart (hozūr-e qalb) are part of what the continued practice of namāz is meant to cultivate over time. As Haeri argues, “the reciter of namāz strives to create a space of co-presence by using God’s words to tell Him what the reciter wants. She comes to coexist with the divine in the very words that belong to Him” (87).

In retraining our scholarly attention on textual encounters defined by recurrent recitation, Haeri’s account signals an additional aspect of meaning-making that might otherwise fall from view. The women’s sense of meaning in prayer acquires depth in time, as their words and action comes to be mediated by a layering of voices. Returning to certain mystical verses of Hafez or Saadi or repeating certain Qur’anic passages across a lifespan, these women hear echoes of past encounters with the text—the voices of parents who taught them a passage in years past, or the intonations and accents of other relatives and friends who guided them in the studied act of properly reciting it. When someone communicates their own concerns and questions to God, using the words of God that they have repeatedly recited over time, they also carry the “accumulated presences” of others’ voices in their own (67). If the women cannot simply select and choose which voices from their biographical past to privilege and which to silence, then we cannot presume that they are sovereign with respect to the voices that arise in prayer. Already embedded in the act, a multitude of others’ voices shape the acoustic medium in which one is otherwise expressing one’s own concerns to God. How, then, does this communicating subject come to isolate her own concerns from the multitudes that populate the sounds she enunciates? This is a problem not for the analyst to resolve in theory but for participants to contend with as part of the process of subject formation. How do these women come to know their desire, if the very practice of prayer summons the presence of others?

I have suggested that Haeri’s monograph provides a double reframing—of meaning in terms of recitation and of prayer in terms of the presence of multiple voices. I want to consider now how these two aspects of Haeri’s depiction of textuality converge on a distinctive understanding of temporality. It is nothing new, of course, to say that a religious text is not static and that its uses and interpretations are subject to changes over time as the circumstances of uptake evolve. Haeri’s ethnographic materials go beyond the now-commonplace preoccupation with contextualizing the site and moment of textual engagement. The subject reciting God’s word in prayer is constituted by multiple processes unfolding in time, or as I will describe it here, processes shaped by the time of tradition and the time of biography.

A biography will never encompass the historical scope of the tradition, and in this respect the historical unfolding of tradition will never fully coincide with an individual’s lifespan. Tradition, however, is an inheritance across generations, and its transmission requires a specific materialization in the voices of kin and the guidance of instructors. The time of tradition manifests itself for the practitioner as a striving to become present before God in and through God’s words; at the same time, however, the practitioner, progressively learning to speak to God, must voice herself with the multiplicity of past figures and events, intonations and accents, that she recalls but cannot command in the present moment of recitation. From the perspective of an individual, the trajectory of tradition must be made to articulate with the trajectory of a life, along with the uncontrollable multivocality by which the latter is constituted.

One might ask at this point whether this methodological reorientation of the study of texts simply puts politics to the side? How might we bring an account of the politics of religion back into the analytical frame? Haeri’s ethnography does not directly broach the question, but nor, I would claim, does the work foreclose it. I read Haeri’s text as cautioning us not to assume that political encounters with religious texts have primacy with respect to practices of recitation in prayer. Politics, taking place in time, must render itself intelligible in contexts already shaped by the temporal unfolding of tradition and biography. A Qur’anic sura may be invoked for political purposes, but the invocation is often made public, and thereby political, by means of its recitation. For listeners familiar with the sura, this recitation evokes a spectrum of instances whose paradigmatic moment is one of communication with God. To the extent that a social actor pursues a political end by means of recitation, the individual can be questioned and criticized for whether they act with the sincerity and presence of the heart required for that form of speech. The criteria for that judgment derive from prayer, through the intersecting trajectories of tradition and biography that shape that practice. These multiple temporal trajectories may in the given conjuncture reinforce or disrupt one another. A key task for the future study of Islamic texts lies in accounting for how social action orients itself at these points of articulation between the times of tradition, biography, and politics.

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Kabir Tambar
Kabir Tambar is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. He is the author of The Reckoning of Pluralism: Political Belonging and the Demands of History in Turkey. He is currently researching the critique of violence in late Ottoman and Turkish Republican contexts.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on Say What Your Longing Heart Desires


Religious experience has long been a central, and troubled, category in the study of religion. From Rudolf Otto to William James to more recent theorists like Stephen Bush and Ann Taves, a focus on the experiential aspects of religion has been seen as a necessary counterweight to theological trends that emphasize doctrine and textual analysis, and social scientific trends that treat the individual’s experience as a byproduct of wider social and political contexts.

The theoretical wager of Niloofar Haeri’s argument in Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Poetry, and Prayer in Iran—winner of the 2021 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Constructive-Reflective Studies, sponsored by the American Academy of Religion (AAR)—is that these two modes of analysis need not be seen as diametrically opposed, and that indeed there is dynamism between how individuals practice and personally experience religion and the traditions and institutions that impose boundaries on those practices. Through fieldwork conducted with a group of middle-class Iranian women, Haeri shows how practices of prayer and poetry reading/recitation converge in ways that allow these women to explore a personal relationship with God. Against stereotypes of rote religious practice that one might find in western media—i.e. that Islam is about fulfilling religious obligation without concern for one’s sincerity in doing so—Haeri shows that for these Iranian women, prayer and poetry open one up to the experience of hāl, which can be translated as joy, passion, and awe before God. In describing how the interior lives of these women take shape against the backdrop of an Iranian society still deeply shaped by the 1979 Revolution, Haeri demonstrates that the boundaries between public selves and private selves are never as stark as they seem. Thus, those who only focus on the constraints that discourse, language, institutions, and structure place on subjective action miss how those limits are embodied by flesh and blood human beings. Because humans are embodied creatures they often take up constraints in ways unimaginable to those who designed them. To believe that it is either the individual or social context that is the main driver of change, in other words, is to introduce a false binaristic choice.

Haeri explodes this binary through her sustained attention to both the context in which these women live and their personal experiences. In chapter 1, she outlines the role of poetry in the childhood and adolescent years of her research subjets; in chapter 2, she details both the conventions and contexts surrounding practices of ritual prayer; in chapter 3, she describes the development of do’ā, or spontaneous forms of prayer, carefully laying out how this form of prayer has taken on a more specific meaning following the Revolution; and in chapter 4, she details the development of prayer books over the past decades. In each of these chapters, Haeri trains her attention on how the women in the group study, pray, and recite poetry against this wider social and political background. Prayer and poetry, on her account, allow these women to speak directly to God (even when they are repeating the words of others). It is a medium through which they give voice to the joys, anxieties, and fears they have about family, religion, and many other aspects of their lives.

The collection of essays in this symposium bring a variety of disciplinary expertise to bear on this monograph, and in doing so open up ways of engaging the book that are as dynamic as the text itself. Brenna Moore shows how Haeri’s book might be useful in the classroom for those wanting to counter orientalist stereotypes of Islamic mysticism, especially in its present-day focus on how practices of prayer and poetry recitation are being reappropriated by Muslim women. Kabir Tambar focuses on the challenge that Haeri’s book poses to familiar ways of approaching textual analysis in Islamic studies. Rather than reading the texts that these women draw on, as well as the claims these women themselves make as self-evident, Haeri pushes us to see texts, and the individuals that recite them and pray with them, as dynamic and ever-evolving. This, Tambar contends, forces us to reimagine subject formation beyond a static and sovereign individual. Ahoo Najafian is likewise compelled by the conceptual boundary breaking that Haeri’s text analyzes and theorizes. Najafian focuses on the the shifiting boundary between religion and literature, and suggests that Haeri’s engagement should lead us to further challenge the assumptions built into categories like those of religion or mysticism. Monique Scheer, meanwhile, compares the practices of the women that Haeri discusses in her own work on Protestant Christian religious experience. Haeri’s book, Scheer contends, upends many of our assumptions about what modern religion entails and reveals a closer proximity between the two traditions than have heretofore been imagined. Amy Hollywood mines similar territory, but does so through a recounting of a recent podcast conversation on the topic of Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre. Similar to Scheer, she finds that Haeri’s recounting of these Iranian women’s practices of prayer share more in common than one would expect with Protestant varieties of Christianity. Here, it is prose that provides the means by which to unlock these deeper theological points of connection. Ata Anzali suggests that currents of modernity run underneath the piety expressed by these women in their practices of prayer. These practices, Anzali contends, share more in common with pre-Revolution secularists rather than, as might be assumed, pre-modern religious actors. This is precisely because of their similar concerns with authenticity and self-expression. Finally, Setrag Manoukian begins his essay by offering an account of a conversation with a woman from Shiraz who, like the women in Haeri’s book, finds deep meaning in poetry. He then explores what he calls the “divergent convergence” between prayer and poetry in Iran concerning the role of language, the relationship between rules and desires, and what it means for prayers to be acts of communication.

The issues raised in the symposium go to the heart of the research concerns that animate Contending Modernities. By inviting us to confront our assumptions about what counts as modern religion, and where its origins lie, Haeri’s book again reminds us that accounts of modernity’s development are indeed contentious, and that there is no singular narrative that unites these different strains. Rather than seek unified accounts of modernity and secularization, perhaps we might take a cue from the women Haeri studies to think more capaciously about the sources and theories we draw on in our scholarly practice.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.