The 1979 Iranian Revolution enabled religiously conservative women to partake in building a Shi’i revolutionary state by creating unparalleled access to the women’s seminaries. I lived in Iran for 15 months to explore what being loyal to this project looked like for them. Of the eight women, five were students of the Supreme Leader, and over twenty were involved with the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary organization. While my ethnography, “Paths Made by Walking” (forthcoming September 2024), tells stories about what I have learned from the women, it does not detail my challenges of doing fieldwork with them, who are at the forefront of supporting the Islamic Republic. In this paper, I describe the precarity of red-flag moments I set aside in order to accomplish my fieldwork; moments that include interrogation, documentation of my actions, encounters with state actors, and violence. I situate my experiences in Holland’s figured worlds as symbolic spaces made meaningful by narratives, actors and interactions with each other (Holland 2009). As I increasingly recreated my sense of self as part of the women’s figured worlds, the more I cared about my presentation of self, an attempt that was built on the common ground of our Muslimness. But, there were other greater figured worlds in the sociohistoric time and space being constituted and reconstituted at the same time; those that identified me as a possible threat because I, history-in-person, though a Muslim, came from a place, the United States, that has historically sought to destroy their project. I explore this critical tension for what we might learn about a particular kind of surveillance, and the exercise of colonial power on forms of Muslim womanhood.