Social change under authoritarian regimes is achieved through unconventional means of legal mobilization. Socio-legal scholarship on authoritarian regimes suggests that as states and legal systems gradually democratize, local actors gain at most a court of public opinion and an increase in consciousness about the law and their rights. 1 Within this field, scholarship on Iran engages with unintended outcomes of an Islamico-civil legal system2 where everyday actors contribute to social change through a ‘collective presence.’3 This paper brings to light the power of the collective presence of Iranian practitioners of white marriage (cohabitation) in influencing official discourses and debates at the clerical level. Using data collected from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Iran, this paper will examine the interviews I conducted with clerics and seminary scholars in Qom, about the emergence of white marriages, the existing institutions of temporary and permanent marriage, and women’s rights in conjugal relationships broadly. Some of the seminary scholars are women who engage in a collective “rereading” of the Quran on the grounds that Islamic jurisprudence is dynamic and must be revised for expediency. I triangulate these interviews with major concerns raised about the challenges of women’s rights in Islamic jurisprudence at a conference of clerics that I attended. These discussions reveal the power that practitioners of white marriage exercise through their collective presence, where their unsanctioned conjugal practices permeate contemporary Shi`i Islamic debates about gender. The pervasiveness of white marriage in these official Iranian discourses is a response to an unconventional movement in an Islamic republic where clerical debates influence gender laws and lead to incremental social change.