Exploring how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.
When we recite, in time we come to embody the language of the recitation. We hear our own voice and at times that of others.
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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.
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A close analysis of ʿerfān and hāl, I believe, is very helpful in unsettling some of the dominant binaries through which religion is often understood in Iran.
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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.
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Haeri 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.
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Conventional wisdom, biased toward Protestant Christianity, would claim that “modern religion” is the kind that fits best to modern society, which is defined and purportedly organized as secular.
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Haeri’s book 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
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Haeri’s monograph provides a double reframing—of meaning in terms of recitation and of prayer in terms of the presence of multiple voices.
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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.
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Although Haeri’s rich ethnography focuses specifically on prayer, something like the distinction between a religion of the law and a religion of the heart so common in nineteenth-century Christianity runs throughout the book.
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