Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran

by Niloofar Haeri

Following the 1979 revolution, the Iranian government set out to Islamize society. Muslim piety had to be visible, in personal appearance and in action. Iranians were told to pray, fast, and attend mosques to be true Muslims. The revolution turned questions of what it means to be a true Muslim into a matter of public debate, taken up widely outside the exclusive realm of male clerics and intellectuals. Say What Your Longing Heart Desires offers an elegant ethnography of these debates among a group of educated, middle-class women whose voices are often muted in studies of Islam. Niloofar Haeri follows them in their daily lives as they engage with the classical poetry of Rumi, Hafez, and Saadi, illuminating a long-standing mutual inspiration between prayer and poetry. She recounts how different forms of prayer may transform into dialogues with God, and, in turn, Haeri illuminates the ways in which believers draw on prayer and ritual acts as the emotional and intellectual material through which they think, deliberate, and debate.

Genres: Poetry, Islam, Nonfiction, Iran

224 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2020

Reviews

[Margaret Rowley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Niloofar Haeri’s book follows conversations between a group of five women and their sometimes-companions as they grapple with questions of religion in the wake of the Iranian revolution. Many of these questions include aspects of mysticism which might be denied by the legalistic state, including finding connection with God through prayer.

This book was a pleasure to read. I want to imitate its intimacy and personal tone in my response - and in my writing in general, where it’s possible - because I think the style lets the book establish this kind of closeness between the reader and these women.

One aspect that I appreciated was Haeri’s attending to sound. For example, when addressing the asan, she notes that in urban areas “Almost all asan are prerecorded” and that “some of these reciters have passed away, but their azan continues to be broadcast.” (72) The emphasis on sound (and on the haptic) extends to the importance of recitation, where “Qur’anic verses are being recited not read, and hence the relationship that is built with this oral text over time is not predicated exclusively or even primarily on what the form ‘says.’” (158) Reciting is different than reading: it’s internal, it’s sensory, it’s embodied. “Children’s first encounter with the text of the Qur’an was not reading it but learning to recite it from memory” (32). The Qur’an is taken into the body, associated with movements and postures and physical supplication. Here I’m thinking of Rudolph Ware’s The Walking Qur’an, where he argues that the body itself becomes a holy text when the Qur’an is memorized. I think what Haeri and her interlocutors are grappling with here is that there is a difference between a text that is read from the page and a recitation from memory. What the difference does for these women seems to be to allow them a flexibility and a personal element in how they approach God.

Aside from this, Haeri also gives a basic (but not pandering) overview of the practices of many Muslims, which might make this a great first book in a course on Islam.

I think the most important thing that this book does, though, is to establish intimacy with an Other, the Other that has been actively manufactured in the United States since 9/11 (as Sahar Aziz was arguing last week): a Muslim woman. The intimacy means that the readers are invited into their living rooms, smelling the food and peeking at the personal notes inside their Qur’an. We are invited to share in their universal kinds of grief: losing a parent, fearing for the life of a spouse, having a sick child. We hear about their experiences of ecstasy, their miracles, and even their very personal and private fights with God. I can’t imagine reading this book and not emerging feeling close to these women, despite any literal or metaphorical distance.

[versarbre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very easy-to-follow ethnography. College kids would like it.

[Isaac Kofsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. So well-written, interesting, and educational. I would highly recommend it.

[genevieve · Rating 5 out of 5]

words are magic. Poetry is a religious thing.