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

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 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's Masnavi, tells the story of a shepherd's prayer and Moses's anger on hearing it. The shepherd, with deep sincerity, promises God that if he ever finds him, he will comb his 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 external form of words) and hal (the authentic inner feeling for divine presence). Moses's repentance leads him to run to the shepherd and declare, "Don't search for manners and rules/Say what your longing heart desires." The ethnography therefore pivots between these two linguistic formulations: on the one hand, qal, which to a legalistic and clerical mind comes across as blasphemous, and on the other, the tone, desire, and mood enunciated via words, revealing the deeper state, or the hal, of the believer. What gives words meaning, Haeri points out, is the state of one's heart and intentionality, which calls into question the formality of religious utterances and repetitions. The whole ethnography is embedded in this metaphor in four beautifully narrated chapters.

Chapter 1 discusses the role of poetry in Iranian society. Special attention is paid to the nature of reciting a poem as a process of learning to acquire a voice. This technique becomes important in the obligatory prayer, or namaz, later in life. Haeri notes how reciting a poem for her interlocutors means becoming the poem's author without questioning the real authorship (48–49). Assuming authorship of the words is a powerful modality of agency, and the role of the pedagogics of poetry recitation is a method of "child rearing" that serves in later life as a "stream of ideas with which one can grapple over a lifetime" (48). Here Haeri makes a crucial observation that because of an individuated poetic imagination, the namaz is experienced not as a repetitive act but as something that gives pleasure, as a poem does.

Thus this theme of pleasure, or the hal in prayer, is taken further in chapter 2. Namaz, Haeri maintains, is not so much an act of repetition as a process of learning how to perform the Qurʾanic words with presence and self-reflection. In other words, religion is learned not by heart but through the "presence of the heart." The first, by heart, means repetition and memorization, without...