Shia-Sunni Conversion Among Arab Minority in Iran This study investigates the Shi'a-Sunni conversion among Arab minority in Iran. During the past decade, hundreds of young Arabs mainly in the poor neighborhood and slums in different cities of Khuzestan, a province located in the southwest of the country, have converted to Salafi Islam. The political dimensions of religious conversion have been the focus of many studies. Scholars suggest that the converts may deploy religious conversion to express their political or cultural dissent and to resist state and/or religious authorities. By the same token, scholars on Islamist movements suggest that the resurgence of Islamic activism in the Middle East and North of Africa can be understood as a form of social protest of urban dispossessed. The underlying assumption of these theories is that urban poor in response to their disillusionment and frustration from poverty, unemployment, inequality and state failure resort to Islamism to protest those who they see as the cause of their despair particularly corrupted authoritarian states and imperialist interventions. Despite the great insights that these studies provide, the role and importance of ethnic relations and state nationalism in the rise of Islamist movements largely absent in these theories. This study through exploring the experience of the conversion to Salafism among Arab minority in Iran will examine these questions that why members of an ethnic minority convert from the majority religion to a minority religion? What does the religious conversion mean for the converts? And how the religious conversion affects the state-citizenry relationship? In this study, based on an ethnographic study, I propose that the conversion among Arab minority is generally a refusal of an incomplete, religious-based inclusion that the state adopted after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. I argue that the state appropriation of Shia-Islam compelled Shia Arabs to use the conversion to express their dissent and to challenge the state strategy of partial, religious-based inclusion. My finding suggests that there are class and gender dynamics in the religious conversion. While most of the converts in poor neighborhood embrace an apolitical version of Salafism, middle-class Arabs see the conversion as a strategic move to subvert state religious policies toward ethnic minorities and mobilize geopolitical tensions to fight back. I will also discuss the gender dynamic of the religious conversion among Arab minority in Iran.