Say What Your Longing Heart Desires is an ethnography about the many ways Muslims pray and the relationship to the divine and the self, architected through prayer. It follows a group of educated middle-class women in postrevolutionary Tehran over ten years. Through the life experiences of five women, Niloofar Haeri asks the reader to question established analytic frameworks in the anthropology of Islam on agency, the discursive traditions, and the often underestimated impact ordinary women exercise in the hermeneutics of Islam and liturgy.
Critical to this analysis, as Haeri points out, is the generational aspect of her study. The women she studied came of age in 1979, around the time of the revolution, which changed the religious landscape in Iran. Before religion became imposed in public life, these women had spent their childhood learning the classical poetry of Islamic mystics as a particular child pedagogy in Iran. This poetic imagination...
