An Iranian Seminarian Woman Navigating Religious Conservatism and Secularism

This presentation is part of a chapter of a forthcoming book (2024) about *howzevi* or seminarian women who use their Islamic education to do the work of supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran. They are women historically caricatured as puppets of the Islamic Republic (see Kian-Thiébaut 2002; Moghissi 1994; Nafisi 1999; Poya 1999; Sanasarian 1982). Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tehran, I complicate this narrative by demonstrating how a young seminarian woman navigated religious conservatism in a women’s seminary and secularism in her extracurricular English classes. In doing so, I argue for anthropology’s humanizing endeavor at a time in Iran when it becomes easy to disregard women’s diverse experiences. In this paper, I tell the story of nineteen-year-old Zaynab who was in her second year at Madraseh Ali where many students were training to work for government programs and offices. I also describe her experiences with reformist and secularist classmates in her afternoon English language class. Her goals were different from her classmates in both settings, where she identified herself as a *mazhabi motavaset*, a moderately religious conservative. This was a problem for many. I describe the way Zaynab confronted her challenges, not in resistance, but of using her Islamic knowledge to momentarily pull both the religiously conservative and the secular-leaning to her center. I demonstrate how this possibility among many possibilities about womanhood cannot be confined to the dichotomous paradigm of the good guys as pro-freedom versus the bad guys as anti-freedom in the Iranian context. I position my analysis in anthropological and Shi'i indigenous paradigms. I first explain the relevance of the Muslim self and the work of self-knowing for Zaynab. I then use Holland’s *figured worlds* as symbolic spaces made meaningful by narratives, actors and interactions in my analysis (Holland 2009). I show how human actions are inevitably picked up as markers for others to interpret in unexpected ways, which makes belongingness an unending process. This marks the human subject as always “in the midst of social life within asymmetries and constraints” (Biehl & Locke 2017). This unfinishedness resonates with the philosophical outtakes of women like Zaynab whose dispositions are influenced by Mulla Sadra, a seventeenth century Islamic philosopher, who posited that, “All existent, except God, are in the process of becoming…an ongoing project of the self” (Jambet 2006). The process is open-ended, incomplete, and takes place in the middle. Zaynab and the women around her, in essence, are always unfinished.