Exploring how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.
Among the various correctives that Moore’s book provides is to the widely held idea that doctrine plays a primary role in attracting individuals to religion.
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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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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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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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