Say What Your Longing Heart Desires is an ethnography about the many ways Muslims pray and the relationship to the divine and the self, architected through prayer. It follows a group of educated middle-class women in postrevolutionary Tehran over ten years. Through the life experiences of five women, Niloofar Haeri asks the reader to question established analytic frameworks in the anthropology of Islam on agency, the discursive traditions, and the often underestimated impact ordinary women exercise in the hermeneutics of Islam and liturgy.Critical to this analysis, as Haeri points out, is the generational aspect of her study. The women she studied came of age in 1979, around the time of the revolution, which changed the religious landscape in Iran. Before religion became imposed in public life, these women had spent their childhood learning the classical poetry of Islamic mystics as a particular child pedagogy in Iran. This poetic imagination has played a crucial role in shaping the knowledge of the divine, locally known as ʿerfan. After the revolution, the ʿerfan approach to religion experienced an unofficial diversification through many channels, such as doʾa prayer books, while simultaneously organized mystic groups were repressed. It is in the confluence of these two social moments that Haeri’s interlocutors assume a very particular role as carriers of the ʿerfan-inflected approach to religion, as a critique to the overaccentuated legalistic and clerical one, which dominated postrevolutionary Iran.The title, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires, taken from the second book of Rumi’s Masnavi, tells the story of a shepherd’s prayer and Moses’s anger on hearing it. The shepherd, with deep sincerity, promises God that if he ever finds him, he will comb his hair, rub his feet, clean his house, and kill his lice. Moses, shocked, chastises the shepherd for blasphemy. He is, however, cautioned by God for failing to distinguish between qal (the external form of words) and hal (the authentic inner feeling for divine presence). Moses’s repentance leads him to run to the shepherd and declare, “Don’t search for manners and rules / Say what your longing heart desires.” The ethnography therefore pivots between these two linguistic formulations: on the one hand, qal, which to a legalistic and clerical mind comes across as blasphemous, and on the other, the tone, desire, and mood enunciated via words, revealing the deeper state, or the hal, of the believer. What gives words meaning, Haeri points out, is the state of one’s heart and intentionality, which calls into question the formality of religious utterances and repetitions. The whole ethnography is embedded in this metaphor in four beautifully narrated chapters.Chapter 1 discusses the role of poetry in Iranian society. Special attention is paid to the nature of reciting a poem as a process of learning to acquire a voice. This technique becomes important in the obligatory prayer, or namaz, later in life. Haeri notes how reciting a poem for her interlocutors means becoming the poem’s author without questioning the real authorship (48–49). Assuming authorship of the words is a powerful modality of agency, and the role of the pedagogics of poetry recitation is a method of “child rearing” that serves in later life as a “stream of ideas with which one can grapple over a lifetime” (48). Here Haeri makes a crucial observation that because of an individuated poetic imagination, the namaz is experienced not as a repetitive act but as something that gives pleasure, as a poem does.Thus this theme of pleasure, or the hal in prayer, is taken further in chapter 2. Namaz, Haeri maintains, is not so much an act of repetition as a process of learning how to perform the Qurʾanic words with presence and self-reflection. In other words, religion is learned not by heart but through the “presence of the heart.” The first, by heart, means repetition and memorization, without reflection, but the second, presence of the heart, points to performing Qurʾanic words as an individually inflected expression of the self’s interiority. It is the same mechanism by which one learns to recite a poem (chap. 1), for pleasure.Chapter 3 gives an account of a spontaneous prayer, or doʾa. Unlike namaz, doʾa is not obligatory and is done in Persian instead of Arabic. Further, there is a difference between the doʾa spontaneously performed and the doʾa written by imams in the form of prayer books (chap. 4). God seems closer in doʾa than in namaz.Thus in chapter 4 we learn that doʾa in Persian challenges the mystical quality of Arabic. This challenge also comes through the proliferation of women authors who write doʾa prayer books. The performance of doʾa in various social gatherings becomes a “moving mosque.” These acts go beyond challenging the authority of the Arabic language in worship. They are a statement on the role of the overly masculine expression of worship and liturgy in the mosque, where the female voice is silenced in a manifestation of the formulaic role that mosques have assumed in postrevolutionary Iran.Haeri’s ethnography challenges two well-established analytic frameworks in the anthropology of Islam: that of what constitutes a discursive tradition and that of women’s agency and freedom. It does so by showing how the poetry and literature of the mystical Islamic poets and written commentary on such texts are formative to Iranian religiosity and religious subjectivity and have dialogued with official scriptural Islamic sources for centuries. Not only is this dismantling a popular and entrenched Eurocentric perception that there is no critique within Islam but it also shows a historical genealogy of a particular subject of freedom and agency: that of the poetic/authentic/individuated voice as a critical voice.One of Haeri’s interlocutors in the book’s conclusion tells her: I do not think that I am obliged to pray . . . five times. . . . It has been years that I no longer have this belief . . . because in general I feel that it is me who has the need to pray; it is not the great God. . . . I like very much to begin my day, whenever I wake up, eight or five in the morning. . . . When I sit in the bus, I have no need for doing the vūzū [ablutions]. . . . [Don’t search for manners and rules, say whatever your longing heart desires]. (154–55)Middle-class women led a quiet revolution within a patriarchal postrevolutionary Iran indeed.A pleasurable read, the book continues an important dialogue of Muslim self-making, reflexivity, and agency and highlights the significance of “laypeople,” especially women, in remaking religious discourses. As an example of lived Islam, Haeri’s work will be helpful to students and experts in the field of anthropology of Islam, ritual, and Muslim subjectivities. It also offers a great comparative example of a trend that can be observed across some Muslim communities with their own ʿerfan Sufi heritage in Europe and beyond.This publication is part of the ERC StG 2019 TAKHAYYUL Project (853230).