Based on ethnographic data, my paper argues that formation of vernacular Islam among Iranian communities of Los Angeles is influenced by western-inspired discourses perpetuated by the mainstream American media. Challenging Talal Asad’s conceptualization of Islam as a discursive process guided by Muslims political and ideological institutions, I bring multiple examples from the Iranian communities of Los Angeles to claim that in the contemporary era and among diasporic Muslim populations, religious traditions and discourses are in constant conversation with and influenced by western political discourses. Asad contends that Islam is a discursive tradition—a process through which the past and future are addressed “with reference to a particular […] practice in the present” (Asad 1986: 14). He delineates discursive tradition as a process whereby people negotiate true beliefs and practices via dynamic engagement with some sets of principles and with each other, connecting past, present and future (Asad 1986). For Asad, the process of discursive tradition is guided by Foucauldian discourses that provide frames and means of understanding, negotiating, and interpreting “the past” (Mahmood 2005: 115) on behalf of Muslims societies’ political and religious “institutions” (Awass 2017: 36). However, in the course of my dissertation fieldwork concerning the religiosity of Muslim-Iranians in Southern California, I have encountered many Shia traditions that are in conversation with and influenced by western discourses rather than discourses constructed by Islamic institutions. For instance, while performing mourning rituals for the martyrdom of the third Shia Imam—Imam Hossein—in the streets of LA, the congregants of Shia mosques (such as masjid al-Zahra) give red roses to every random passerby—a new and unprecedented practice which according to organizers of the mourning ceremonies aims to counter the discourse of Islam as a religion of violence popularized by the US media. This and other examples I have documented through my participation in and observation of Islamic practices of the Iranian communities of LA, undermine the exclusive impact of Muslim societies’ political and religious institutions on the formation of Islamic traditions. Although my data affirms Asad’s conceptualization of Islam as a discursive tradition, I call for broadening the concept to include political and ideological discourses that are not necessarily rooted in Muslim societies. I argue that such a rethinking of discursive tradition is necessary in the contemporary context in which Muslim societies are more than any time exposed to western discourses on Islam.