Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Constructive-Reflective Studies

Niloofar Haeri

Johns Hopkins University

Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran (Stanford University Press)

From the jury:

Niloofar Haeri’s deeply researched and elegantly written book brings readers into the most intimate and exigent spaces of a religious world. Haeri examines the everyday prayer practices of Iranian women as the basis for reflecting on the relationship between prayer and poetry and on how ideas about religiosity debated in classical Persian poetry inform the world of prayer. Haeri’s ethnographic study of Muslim women at prayer, a practice that is at once deeply personal and utterly social, underscores the diversity of Muslim religious practices and challenges conceptions of what constitutes “authentic” religion, complicating the distinction between ritual and non-ritual forms of worship. This beautiful book is a signal contribution to the study of women and Islam, with implications for the study of religion itself.https://www.aarweb.org/AARMBR/Publications-and-News-/Newsroom-/News-/2021/2021-AAR-Book-Awards.aspx