We congratulate Dr. Niloofar Haeri for being chosen the winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s Fatema Mernissi Book Award, which honors the best work in studies of gender, sexuality, and women’s lived experience.

The announcement was made at the 2021 MESA Awards Virtual Ceremony held December 1, 2021. The award is also announced on MESA’s website.

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

The title is taken from a well-known story in which Moses tells a shepherd not to worry about the “manners and rules” of religion but rather to “say what your longing heart desires.” Using beautiful, limpid prose, Haeri weaves together poetry, religion, and ethnography to show how a group of middle-class, educated Iranian women counter the state’s version of Islam. They regularly revisit and reconsider Islamic theology by drawing on the vast body of mystic poetry that is so central to Iranian culture. In the process, Haeri blurs lines thrown up between the secular and the religious in recent scholarship and invites us to consider the deeper, political, and public meaning of ritualistic religious practices.

Sara L. Palmer

Awards Coordinator

Editor, Issues in Middle East Studies

Middle East Studies Association