My presentation claims that many Iranian Angelinos counter the dominant American imaginations of Iranians as people of color by conforming to, adopting, and internalizing the politics of race in the US that privilege whiteness. This paper is based on the ethnographic data collected during my dissertation fieldwork in 2017-19. I focus on public events such as celebrations of Nowruz, Quranic sessions, and political meetings of Iranian Angelinos as sites that “consolidate” individual agencies and engage with American relations of public domination that define Muslimness and Iranian-ness (Sharpe 2008: 218). The current paper relies on several examples from my larger fieldwork project entailing participant observation of more than a hundred public events and forty in-depth interviews with Iranian Angelinos. I look at these events as texts (Feighery 2016: 81) and study verbal and performative discourses produced in the context of Iranian Angelino public events to inquire about the ways the issue of race is addressed in the community. I argue that many Iranian Angelinos’ public events that celebrate the “Iranian heritage” in the streets of Los Angeles counter the American imagination of Iranians as people of color by mobilizing the potent discourse of Iranian nationalism which links Iranians to the Aryan Myth and “claim” a white identity for Iranians (Maghbouleh 2017: 21). These public events in which organizers usually refer to Iranians and their celebrations such as Nowruz by words “Persian,” “Zoroastrian,” and “Aryan,” challenge the negative American political and media imaginations that frame Iranians as people of color. However, they do not do so by critiquing the politics of suspicion and exclusion perpetuated in these American public discourses, but by questioning the assumption of these discourses that consider Iranians non-white. My research validates that not only do relations of racial domination devour resistive forces and exclude “others,” but individuals excluded by dominant discourses may also desire to be “incorporated” into the broader dominant relations. What the excluded race does is not always to outcry the logic of suspicion and exclusion maintained by the dominant racial discourses and ideologies, but to argue that their racial identity has been misunderstood. In other words, the excluded do not always resist racial domination; they may protest not being part of it.

Based on nine months of ethnographic research incorporating (participant) observation and interviews, this paper looks at Iranian women’s practices of vernacular religiosity in the US, how they are positioned within a range of marginalizing discourses in the diasporic context, and how women navigate this space of marginality in both discourse and practice. Practices of “vernacular religion” or “folk religion”, as defined by Leonard Primiano (1995) and Don Yoder (1974), are characterized as practices that are on the sidelines of, but in conversation with, institutional religion. Practices of vernacular Islam have been popular among Shia women in Iran since at least the early 19th century (Montazer and Keshavarz 2017) and have been studied more extensively after the Islamic revolution that caused a surge in their popularity (Torab 1996). Within the discourse of Institutional Islam, women’s vernacular practices such as Rowzih, Sofrih, or Mowlud, have been commonly labeled feminine, unserious, and inferior forms of religiosity (Betteridge 1980, 2002), or even un-Islamic novelties (Torab 1996), partly as they take place in domestic, all-female spaces where institutional Islam cannot exert much control. In the US context, I show that this marginality takes on additional forms, as Iranian women who participate in these practices are multiply vilified within discourse other than Islamic orthodoxy: 1) ostracized as Muslims by the Islamophobic discourse in the US 2) vilified by secular Iranians in the US who consider Iranian Muslims an extension of the Islamic Republic, and 3) shunned by reformist Muslim Iranians who consider vernacular/ritualistic forms of religiosity “superstitious” and detrimental to the “real” Islamic faith. While engagement with Islamic practices may be generally susceptible to Islamophobic attitudes in the US, I argue that the vernacularity of these practices further subjects them to vilification by both secular Iranians and progressive/reformist Muslims who view them as emblematic of irrationality and religious backwardness. Drawing from ethnographic data, including personal experience narratives and anecdotes, I demonstrate how women navigate this space of marginality mainly with respect to other Iranians in the US. I also demonstrate that despite the widespread stigma, practices of vernacular religion tend to attract a relatively large audience in the US, as the performative and affective characteristics of these practices allow for complex and multi-layered modes of engaging in one’s faith beyond the mandates of Islamic orthodoxy or an individual-centered approach to faith pursued by Iranian reformist Muslims.

I will explore in this paper how opposition between homogenized doctrines of theocratic religious identification and Orientalist discourse toward “Muslim” identity in the U.S., produces multilayered identities of Islams that may exist not only side by side within a community, but even situationally within the same person. I will discuss through several examples and case studies ways in which members of the Kentucky Iranian community have reconstituted religiosity through a complex array of negotiated Islamic ontologies. Building on participant-observation and in-depth interviews with the members of Iranian community in two big cities vs. two small cities in Kentucky, my research findings has evidenced heterogeneous understandings of Islam, not as a consequence of the transition from pre- to post-migratory contexts, but as ontological reconstitutions of religious identities released from a holistic definition of Islam. By investigating lived experiences of practicing islams, my research reveals that neither the Iranian state’s homogenized version of Islam, nor the labels of “Muslim,” or “Islamic” found in political rhetoric in the U.S., are adequate categorizations of diasporic Iranian identity. While there is plentiful literature on the substitution of the Islamic past with non-Islamic ontological claims among Iranian diasporans (Gholami 2016, Khosravi 2012, Mobasher 2012, Spellman 2005), studies that focus on (re)conceptualizations of Islam in local contexts are scarce. This paper intends to present some of my key findings regarding Islam in diasporic settings as a sphere of religious experimentations once untethered from the pre-migratory theocratic contexts. Calling into question theories of an anthropology of Islam that conceives of Muslims’ practices as reflecting a homogeneous, universal identity, I focus instead on varying ontological expressions through which people may identify themselves as Muslim. This spectrum may range from a devout Muslim to an interlocutor who claims to be an atheist, but still follows Islamic traditions in occasional funerary and burial practices. I depart from scripturalist approaches drawn from the founding text of Islam (Asad 2009, Messick 2018), which may exclude the latter from being in a Muslim category. I instead adopt a descriptive approach to observe these ontological expressions, not as contradiction and ambivalence toward an orthodox Islam, but as a collective range of heterogeneous, multivocal islams (el-Zein 1977, Afzal 2014) that are actualized in practice. In doing so, my work develops an understanding of the Iranian diaspora, as a group of people who identify themselves based on varying ontological islams in practice.

From its first issue in the Spring of 2002, the quarterly Faslnameh of the Khaneh-ye Iran-e Mishigan (rendered in English as the “Persia House of Michigan,” hereafter the PHoM) has been in continuous circulation – via email and snail mail - among the small and dispersed Iranian-American community in Southeast Michigan. The PhoM was not the first Iranian cultural organization in Southeast Michigan, but has been the most durable. More than just a community newsletter, the PHoM and its Faslnameh aspired to “build connections among Iranians living in Michigan” on secular and avowedly apolitical terms. The version of Iranian culture that the PHoM reinforced was rooted in the experiences of the professional class that it. Its activities strove to provide an alternative image of Iranian culture to the one projected by the Islamic Republic and further stereotyped in “mainstream” American culture . Within the context of Southeast Michigan, which is home to a large and diverse Arab-American population, the PHoM also sought to distinguish Iranians from other communities of Middle Eastern heritage. More than just an artifact of contemporary Iranian Diaspora in the American Midwest, the Faslnameh’s form and content also resonate with Iranian expatriate newspapers going back to the late 19th Century and early 20th centuries. Those earlier periodicals, which are often studied as part of the “imagined” national (and quite political) history of Iranian press and journalism, also performed a community-building function for expatriate Iranian communities in Cairo, Calcutta, and Istanbul. Like the PHoM’s Faslnameh, they were sensitive to the local political and culture conditions of the time. The resonance between the PHoM Faslnameh and the history of the Iranian expatriate press will be examined through the content of the Faslnameh itself (the bilingual publication is currently being indexed to facilitate bilingual searches of its 18-year run) and from interviews recorded with PHoM members by the Michigan Iranian-American Oral History Project at the University of Michigan-Dearborn (http://library.umd.umich.edu/miaohp/index.php). These sources offer an unparalleled chronicle of the social, entrepreneurial, and professional presence of Iranian-Americans in Michigan. Even though Iranian-Americans do appear in the Michigan “mainstream” periodicals going back the late 19th Century, there nothing of comparable detail about cultural life Michiganders of Iranian descent to what is found in the PHoM Faslnameh.