Talal Asad posits that for a behavior to be Islamic, it should be “instituted practice (set in a particular context and having a particular history) into which Muslims are inducted as Muslims” (Asad 1986: 21), further explaining that “a practice is Islamic because it is authorized by the discursive traditions of Islam, and is so taught to Muslims – whether by an ‘alim, a khatib, a Sufi shaykh, or an untutored parent” (Asad, 21). In his model, Islamic institutions and their agents mainly create Islamic discourses within the Islamic societies' political and ideological power matrix (Asad 23, 29; Anjum 2007: 666). These discourses then trickle down into the everyday and vernacular level (Asad 1986: 21-23), where lay Muslims also circulate and negotiate Islamic discourse. In other words, Islamic discourses at the vernacular level are shaped in tandem and conversation with Islamic institutions and their agents (Mahmood 2005: 115; Awass 2017: 36). Based on several months of ethnographic fieldwork in two Iranian-American Shia mosques in Los Angeles, I bring examples to propose that Muslims can produce verbal and performative Islamic discourses not in conversation with Islamic authoritative sources and institutions but in tandem with non-Islamic institutions, discourses, and “public imaginations (Falk and Faessel 2019: 3)” of Islam in the US. I emphasize that these outward-looking discoursive processes are not secondary and trivial; they are the main drive for Muslim Iranian Angelinos —who regularly participate in religious events such as Quranic gatherings, prayers, and sermons— to produce Islamic orthodoxy and orthopraxy. I present the results of my participant observation and interviews to further argue that Iranian Angelinos adopt and share the postcolonial categories of “good/bad Muslim (Madani 2002: 766-7),” (re)create these categories, associate themselves with good Muslims, and shun the bad ones. They define the good and bad Muslims around racial, sectarian, and ideological forms of difference. Above all, they incorporate these discourses of association and differentiation in their vernacular conceptualizations of Islam and the Islamic discourses they produce and disperse. The authoritative Islamic sources do not inspire their production of Islamic discourses; instead, Iranian Angelinos’ Islamic discourses mainly function to construct modes of Islam that are perceived as “good” from the perspective of dominant postcolonial and racist imaginations of Islam and Muslims in the US.