Vernacular Religion in the Iranian Diaspora
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A01=Afsane Rezaei
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Author_Afsane Rezaei
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSR
Category=JHMC
contemporary Islam
contemporary religion
customs
diasporic Islam
diasporic religion
digital religion
domestic ritual
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
Farsi
folk narratives
folk religion
folklore studies
folkloristics
forthcoming
gender studies
intersectional agency
Iran
Iranian
Iranian American
Iranian American Muslim women
Iranian diasporia
Iranian Muslim women
Islam
Islamic Republic of Iran
Los Angeles
memes
Muslim
Muslim American
Muslim women
narratives
nostalgia
oppression
Orange County
Persia
Quran
relative agency
religious studies
ritual
Shia women
Shiism
Shiite
Southern California
vernacular Islam
Vernacular religion
women
women's social spaces
women's space
women's studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780299357405
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2026
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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With nearly half a million Iranian Americans living in and around Los Angeles, Southern California is home to more Iranians than anywhere outside Iran. Although many community members identify as secular, stereotypes characterize Iranian Americans, like other populations from Muslim-majority countries, as pejoratively religious and culturally suspect. For Iranian American women who do practice Islam, navigating their religious, ethnic, and political identities, on both personal and communal levels, is thus complex, fraught, and poorly understood by both majority communities and scholarship.
Folklorist Afsane Rezaei applies theories of vernacular religion to Iranian American Muslim women living in Southern California, exploring how they negotiate their religious identities in this particularly delicate diasporic context, how they engage with external imaginaries in their practices and narratives, and how they develop a sense of agency over their religious identification. For many, Islamic religiosity in the diaspora is an integrated and embodied aspect of folklife, closely tied to the sense of self, social networks, and communal identity, and is negotiated and reimagined in everyday, improvised, and sometimes contradictory ways. Rezaei’s careful ethnography reaches beyond the binary of piety and resistance and offers new and nuanced understandings of Iranian American lived religion.
Folklorist Afsane Rezaei applies theories of vernacular religion to Iranian American Muslim women living in Southern California, exploring how they negotiate their religious identities in this particularly delicate diasporic context, how they engage with external imaginaries in their practices and narratives, and how they develop a sense of agency over their religious identification. For many, Islamic religiosity in the diaspora is an integrated and embodied aspect of folklife, closely tied to the sense of self, social networks, and communal identity, and is negotiated and reimagined in everyday, improvised, and sometimes contradictory ways. Rezaei’s careful ethnography reaches beyond the binary of piety and resistance and offers new and nuanced understandings of Iranian American lived religion.
Afsane Rezaei is an assistant professor of folklore studies at Utah State University. Her work has been published in New Directions in Folklore, Ethnography, and Journal of Middle East Women's Studies.
