Vernacular Religion in the Iranian Diaspora: Women and Islam in Tehrangeles

With nearly half a million Iranian Americans living in and around Los Angeles, Southern California is home to more Iranians than anywhere outside Iran.Although many community members identify as secular, stereotypes characterize Iranian Americans, like other populations from Muslim-majority countries, as pejoratively religious and culturally suspect.For Iranian American women who do practice Islam, navigating their religious, ethnic, and political identities, on both personal and communal levels, is thus complex, fraught, and poorly understood by both majority communities and scholarship. Folklorist Afsane Rezaei applies theories of vernacular religion to Iranian American Muslim women living in Southern California, exploring how they negotiate their religious identities in this particularly delicate diasporic context, how they engage with external imaginaries in their practices and narratives, and how they develop a sense of agency over their religious identification.For many, Islamic