I will explore in this paper how opposition between homogenized doctrines of theocratic religious identification and Orientalist discourse toward “Muslim” identity in the U.S., produces multilayered identities of Islams that may exist not only side by side within a community, but even situationally within the same person. I will discuss through several examples and case studies ways in which members of the Kentucky Iranian community have reconstituted religiosity through a complex array of negotiated Islamic ontologies. Building on participant-observation and in-depth interviews with the members of Iranian community in two big cities vs. two small cities in Kentucky, my research findings has evidenced heterogeneous understandings of Islam, not as a consequence of the transition from pre- to post-migratory contexts, but as ontological reconstitutions of religious identities released from a holistic definition of Islam. By investigating lived experiences of practicing islams, my research reveals that neither the Iranian state’s homogenized version of Islam, nor the labels of “Muslim,” or “Islamic” found in political rhetoric in the U.S., are adequate categorizations of diasporic Iranian identity. While there is plentiful literature on the substitution of the Islamic past with non-Islamic ontological claims among Iranian diasporans (Gholami 2016, Khosravi 2012, Mobasher 2012, Spellman 2005), studies that focus on (re)conceptualizations of Islam in local contexts are scarce. This paper intends to present some of my key findings regarding Islam in diasporic settings as a sphere of religious experimentations once untethered from the pre-migratory theocratic contexts. Calling into question theories of an anthropology of Islam that conceives of Muslims’ practices as reflecting a homogeneous, universal identity, I focus instead on varying ontological expressions through which people may identify themselves as Muslim. This spectrum may range from a devout Muslim to an interlocutor who claims to be an atheist, but still follows Islamic traditions in occasional funerary and burial practices. I depart from scripturalist approaches drawn from the founding text of Islam (Asad 2009, Messick 2018), which may exclude the latter from being in a Muslim category. I instead adopt a descriptive approach to observe these ontological expressions, not as contradiction and ambivalence toward an orthodox Islam, but as a collective range of heterogeneous, multivocal islams (el-Zein 1977, Afzal 2014) that are actualized in practice. In doing so, my work develops an understanding of the Iranian diaspora, as a group of people who identify themselves based on varying ontological islams in practice.