The 1979 Iranian Revolution enabled conservative women previously limited in mobility to partake in building a Shi’i revolutionary state by expanding access to the women’s seminaries unparalleled in the history of Shi’i Islam. I lived in Iran for 15 months to explore what the consequences have been for some of them. Of the eight women I did my research with, five of them were either on reserve or actively involved with one of the six branches of the Basij. Over 21 of the howzevi I interacted with were active in the University Basij. Fatemeh and Hoda come from a family of martyrs and war survivors. Fatemeh and Hoda were students of Agha-ye Sharifi at Howzeh-ye Kowsar. And, like many of Agha-ye Sharifi’s students, the two sisters were both howzevi and members of the University Basij and Jahadi Sazandegi (they referred to as Jahadi Basij), the Reconstruction Corps. By virtue of their association with the Islamic government, they remain faceless and unworthy of consideration. In this presentation, I draw on their ethnography as students of Howze-ye Kowsar and as daughters of a martyr, who saw themselves as vanguards of a state with the maxim to derail western political domination in the Middle East. I pose an alternative look at their lives, moving analysis away from a dehumanizing narrative and into one that focuses on how they experience belonging in their polities of practice. This work is part of a recently completed book project entitled, “Shirini: The Work of Howzevi (Seminarian) Women in Iran.” It is positioned at the intersection of state, Islamic education, and the Iranian women’s movement, currently characterized by women’s work to undermine patriarchal state policies.