Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran by Niloofar Haeri (review)

Abstract

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 educatedmiddle-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 has played a crucial role in shaping the knowledge of the divine, locally known as ʿerfan. After the revolution, the ʿerfan approach to religion experienced an unofficial diversification through many channels, such as doʾa prayer books, while simultaneously organized mystic groups were repressed. It is in the confluence of these two social moments that Haeri’s interlocutors assume a very particular role as carriers of the ʿerfan-inflected approach to religion, as a critique to the overaccentuated legalistic and clerical one, which dominated postrevolutionary Iran. The title, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires, taken from the second book of Rumi’sMasnavi, tells the story of a shepherd’s prayer andMoses’s anger on hearing it. The shepherd,with deep sincerity, promises God that if he ever finds him, hewill combhis hair, rub his feet, clean his house, and kill his lice. Moses, shocked, chastises the shepherd for blasphemy. He is, however, cautioned by God for failing to distinguish between qal (the