Based on the author’s ethnographic research on Muslim diasporas and the circulation of Islamic knowledge in Trinidad and Tobago, this paper examines the salience and transformation of Iranian Shi’ism in Trinidad and Tobago. Among the much-debated global consequences of the Iranian Revolution, perhaps one of the most over-looked is Iran’s impact on the Shia revival in this corner of the Caribbean—from empowering political revitalization, to rigidifying the previously fluid boundaries between the Sunni and Shia, and problematizing Muslim women’s negotiation of “modernity” and dress. Although South Asian Shia were brought to Trinidad and Tobago as indentured labor beginning around the mid 19th century and left a legacy inscribed in Hosay (Karbala commemorations) and the Hosay Riots (acts of resistance against colonial authority), by 1979, the Shia here were no longer substantially differentiated from Sunni congregants. However, in the 1980’s, when the Trinbagonian Muslim-minority began to re-engage and reconstruct Heritage Islam, till then largely shaped by missionaries from South Asia, they were introduced to Iranian Shi’ism, largely through the circulation of Shi’a missionaries from Iran and Trinidadian students sent to study there. In order to explore the impact of popular “representations” and “misrepresentations” of Iran, Iranian women, and Shi’ism on Trinidadian Muslims and their publics, this discussion will focus on the “Imam e Zamana Shia Mission”, the mosque established by Afro-Trinidadian Sunni converts who re-converted to Shi’ism to be “closer” to the Prophet and his family after the revolution. Wrestling with challenges—such as local perceptions of Iranian Shi’ism as “not really Islam” and of Iranian women as oppressed, the US entrapment and incarceration of their Imam on terrorism charges, and their annual public protests over the Trinbagonian national celebration of Hosay as an inappropriately festive occasion--a new generation of young Afro-Trinidadian Shia leaders is reconfiguring the future of the mosque and redefining the role of women, race, and community, producing a distinctively Trinidadian (“creolized”) Shi’ism in the process.

This paper investigates religious unity and religious experimentation in (re)conceptualizing Iranian nationalism. I draw on ethnographic research conducted in Iran in 2016 and the United States in 2017 to examine how the state uses collective identity, place, and patriliny to shore up religious nationalist claims, and how its citizens abroad may distance themselves from conflations of decent and territory with religion. My research suggests a strong connection between patrilineal claims of descent and Shi’i religious authenticity in Iran. It assigns all citizens to the religious category of their father, and conversion from Shiism is discouraged and in some instances unlawful. The state uses shrines of the Prophet Mohammed’s descendants, which are Shi’a mausoleums and pilgrimage sites, as sites for the promotion and territorialization of religious nationalism. It traces lineages not to Cyrus the Great or another non-Islamic figure, but to the founding figure of its faith, an Arab belonging to a different national category. Interviewees suggested to me that some of the men honored by the shrines were not regarded as descendants of the Prophet prior to 1979. However, the Islamic Republic’s Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization creates documentation of enshrined men’s genealogies through lines of male ascendants culminating in the Prophet (through his daughters), and displays it at the shrine sites, in publications, and through various other media. These efforts reveal post-revolutionary Iranian religion and nationalism to be deeply intertwined in Iran. My 2017 research with Iranian-Americans suggests that once distanced from Iran, many Iranians wrestle personally with religion, and perhaps to a greater degree than members of other immigrant groups. Working with Iranians in two countries, I found territorialization tethered by patriliny in one place, and seemingly deliberate deterritorialization and disconnection from patrilineal religion in the other place. Far from their previous context of state-imposed religious nationalism, Iranian Americans demonstrate a high degree of experimentation with the role of religion in reconstructing their imagined national community. Many seem to relish being untethered from descent-based religion, and adhere to other faiths, atheism or secularized ethnic expression. I argue that the absence of state-promoted territorialized boundaries of inclusion and exclusion results in a reconceptualized religiosity and heteroglossic sense of nationhood.

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.

The entanglement of religion and politics in Iran can serve as a potential source of mistrust between the anthropologist and her interlocutors (Kalinock 2004:473), particularly when the research is centered around faith-based communities and their practices. In the contested terrain of contemporary Iranian politics, the presumed intentions/agendas of the researcher are more likely to come under scrutiny before any ethnographic research touching on faith-related subjects can take place. In such circumstances where the potential for mistrust is high, the perceived position of the anthropologist as an “insider,” a “halfie,” or an “outsider” can make or break an ethnographic endeavor. In this paper, I draw on my own fieldwork with two Iranian-American faith-based communities in the US--Muslims and Christian converts--to address challenges of building trust and rapport with my interlocutors in the absence of a shared faith, despite sharing other similarities and connections. I render my observations vis-à-vis existing scholarship, building upon ethnographic studies in which the researcher and the research population do not share a belief system or political ideology (Erzen 2006, Kalinock 2004, Harning 2000, Luhrmann 2004, 2012), and the literature on the dynamics of occupying the halfie position in the field (Abu-Lughod 1991; Behar 1996; Narayan 1993). Drawing from and combining both strains of scholarship, I address faith/belief-related positionality as part of researcher’s “multiplex subjectivity” (Rosaldo 1989) which is highlighted in the halfie situation, and the challenges it can pose for navigating the dynamics of trust and ethics in ethnography. While halfie anthropologists may have easier access to their research population by virtue of pre-existing national, ethnic, or linguistic connections, I argue that being a halfie in faith-based Iranian communities (particularly in diaspora) can increase the potential for mistrust. In other words, if not considered an “insider” of the faith, being a “halfie” in other respects does not necessarily ease the establishment of rapport and may even become a liability, as openness about one’s faith-related positionality might bar researcher’s access to the group. In this regard, and based on my own fieldwork with Iranian-American communities, I address whether it is “ethical” ethnographic practice for the halfie anthropologist to take on the position of an “insider” through “performing” faith; i.e. by participant observation in groups’ faith-related activities, or by simply allowing the group to interpret her participation as a sign of affinity and/or propensity towards their religious beliefs.