Recent studies in the anthropology of Islam have shown that ambivalent observance or conscious negligence is characteristic of the religiosity of many self-identifying Muslims. In Debevec’s work (2012), for example, we see women who continue postponing their daily prayers until a later time in life. During fieldwork with Muslim Iranian women in London, Spellman (2005) encounters women who participate in religious rituals but also dance at a ceremony in the same day, and frame their behavior as being “too weak” to follow all the mandates of religion. Schielke’s work (2009) talks about young Muslim Egyptians who are not concerned with being observant year-round except in certain times that have a more religious significance, like in Ramadan when they say daily prayers or stop drinking or watching porn. Similar orientations towards religious practice are noted in Beekers and Kloos’ "Straying from the Straight Path", which addresses practitioners’ admission of failure/negligence in observing religious rules(2017). In this paper, I demonstrate the distinction between this sense of failure/straying from the path that “occurs where there is a choice and where practitioners make a wrong choice knowingly” (Sunier 2017: 110), and the feeling of not having strayed at all based on a redefined notion of observance. Relying on the ethnography of several Quran study gatherings in Southern California, I address this distinction by analyzing Iranian-American Muslim women’s reformulation of the very idea of observance. Many women I worked with had at least in some way openly strayed from practices traditionally associated with Islamic orthodoxy—observing hejab, saying daily prayers, observing halal laws, going to hajj, and the like. However, for many of them, a lack of continuous observance was not framed as “straying from the path” or an admission of failure or negligence in observing religious rules. It was rather considered the proper mode of observance based on an unmediated interpretation of the Quran, achieved by women in the space of their own Quran study groups. In other words, women questioned and negotiated the validity of the very religious mandates they were allegedly straying from. I show how women draw on different narrative forms as sources of “vernacular authority,” generating “informally aggregated communal wisdom” (Howard 2013: 81) in response to the institutional mandates of Islam as well as etic understandings of their faith. Approaching faith as a realm of choice and negotiation, these women create new parameters within which to situate themselves as proper Muslims.