The character of the “akhund” or cleric has been, as much maligned as it has been romanticized in the post-revolutionary Iranian imagination. This paper looks at two post-Khatami era films, Reza Mirkarimi’s Under the Moonlight (Zir-e Nur-e Mah), 2001, and Kamal Tabrizi’s The Lizard (Marmulak), 2004 both of which are representative of how the clerical establishment is seen in Iranian society. The two films present an array of clerical types: the dogmatic literalist seminarian, the older heavy-handed bureaucratic authority figure, the criminal that pretends to be a cleric. But most importantly, Under the Moonlight presents the archetypal seminarian going through a crisis of faith. The protagonist, Seyyed Hassan, has little interest in literal interpretations, instead showing an appreciation for the figurative and poetic. He eventually comes to understand the profession as more a social undertaking to rid society of its ills than oversight and management of public piety. The two films “remain affirmative of the role of religion in one’s life” but they do much more than that. This four-tiered archetypal classification roughly reflects the range within which representatives of the clerical establishment and I want to argue Islam in general are imagined in the Islamic Republic. Why is it important to investigate the different faces of Islam as imagined by the Iranian public? Islam in today’s Iran is, as Thomas Tweed calls it, a “sacrospace,” where the interplay between arid theology (khoshkeh-mazhabi budan) and the complexities of earthly being are playing out to create new orthodoxies. As these films show, orthodoxy is defined differently among disparate groups within the Qom seminary. The films show that marginal imaginings of Islam, as presented by Seyyed Hassan who doubts whether its possible to find God in the seminary in Under the Moonlight might in fact, be more mainstream than we think. These characters reflect the possibility of new orthodoxies that have at the same time been written about by the New Theology movement. As Talal Asad points out, “The margins exist partially as a space to which society can relegate thinking and discourses it considers dangerous and destabilizing.” Iranian film has become one of those spaces where dangerous discourses about Islam are being shaped.