Abstract

Why is it that certain texts, ancient and repeatedly recited, continue to have a life? How is it that they have such sway over the emotional and cultural histories of individuals and societies? I will examine in detail the central ritual of Muslims, a ritual prayer that must be performed everyday, 5 times a day, and search for answers to those questions in my ethnography of a group of middle class educated women who live in Tehran.

About the Speaker

Niloofar Haeri is professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and Chair of the Program in Islamic Studies. She is a Guggenheim fellow. Her first book was on language and gender in Egypt, and her second one Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt (2003 published in Arabic in 2011) followed the implications of attempts since the 19th century to “modernize” Classical Arabic—a language primarily associated with the Qur’an. She is the editor of a Special Section of Hau: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2017) where the Protestant notion of sincerity is put in conversation with other religious traditions. Her most recent book is Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran (Stanford 2021). It won an award from the American Academy of Religion; and also won the Fatema Mernissi Award from the Middle East Studies Association.