Vernacular Religion in the Iranian Diaspora

Name: Vernacular Religion in the Iranian Diaspora
Price: 208 AUD
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ISBN: 9780299357405

Women and Islam in Tehrangeles

Afsane Rezaei

$208

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

University of Wisconsin Press
30 June 2026

Gender studies: women; Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies; Islamic studies; Social & cultural anthropology

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.

By: Afsane Rezaei
Imprint: University of Wisconsin Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780299357405
ISBN 10: 0299357406
Pages: 144
Publication Date: 30 June 2026
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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.

Reviews for Vernacular Religion in the Iranian Diaspora: Women and Islam in Tehrangeles

""Elegantly and succinctly argued, this groundbreaking study of Muslim women's piety and sociality makes an important contribution to the study of vernacular Islam and of women's agency in general. Eminently teachable in religious studies, women's studies, and diaspora studies.""--Margaret A. Mills, author of Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional Storytelling