This paper analyzes how Iranian women have maneuvered around religious and patriarchal structures to claim and obtain their anti-patriarchal demands from the late nineteenth century until the end of Qajar era (1925). Centered on one of the most common religious rituals, the pilgrimage, I will apply three concepts; faith, fight, and flight to argue that religious rituals, far beyond their spiritual value, were used as a means of emancipation and patriarchal bargaining to enable women to seek liberation and demand freedom from Iran’s ‘Colony of Islamization.’ This study helps understand how the twentieth-century revolutions provided the means through which women gradually gained political maturity and eventually accommodated religious choice, as witnessed during the current revolutionary movement, Woman. Life. Freedom. Exploring women’s gradual flight from religious faith to political faith, this project argues that women’s political awareness was primarily achieved through ‘bargaining with patriarchy,’ a paradigm that Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) developed. Kandiyoti demonstrates that women’s conformity to patriarchal norms can, unintentionally and indirectly, give women a sense of self-esteem, independence, identity, and power. This project contributes to studying the women’s movement through revolutionary activism and pilgrimage, and subversion of patriarchy. Historical studies of space, mobility, and borderlands illuminate pilgrimage as moments when women developed strategies to negotiate a sense of individuality, facilitate survival, and assert their independence.