At Work in Unseen Motion:  An Interview with Anthropologist Amina Tawasil, author of Paths Made By Walking: The Work of Howzevi Women in Iran

It was my first time riding a bus owned by Madraseh Ali. With its overextended  curved hood, faded dark gray exterior, and wide seats supported by uncomfort able, worn-out spring coils, the bus appeared as if it had been pieced together in  the 1970s. The driver, whom the women thanked upon our arrival at the park,  was in his late sixties. Being with us this morning meant he would be spending  part of his day off driving us to and from Behesht-e Maadaran, the Mothers’  Paradise, also called Park-e Banuvan or Women’s Park. All eleven women with  us were in their twenties and were master’s students of Huquq, or Islamic rights,  and Fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence. Two women who were students of Falsafeh-ye  Islami, Islamic philosophy, would later join us. Some of the women were Mary am’s students. Maryam, in her thirties, gave birth to her daughter, Fereshteh,  now eighteen months old, while writing a comparative analysis between Shi’i  Islamic jurisprudence and the United Nations charter on international trade for  her dissertation. Maryam came from a small town outside Esfahan, half a day by  bus from Tehran. She had just become a student at the highest level of study in  the howzeh, the Dars-e Kharij level, under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2008. On  this day, Maryam was given the responsibility of chaperoning her students for a  picnic at the park. 

We walked along a path toward the park’s back entrance and found a gazebo to  settle in. There, a green metal wall separated us from the rest of Tehran. The women  took off their chador, or black open cloaks, and hung them on the gazebo pillars.  Some removed their hijab, or headscarves, brushed their hair, and put on jewelry,  while others took turns playing ball with Fereshteh. We chatted as we ate breakfast  together on a cement platform a few feet away. Each of us had a story to tell, but of  all the women I had met previously, Zahra’s Persian sounded noticeably different  to me. Maryam later told me that Zahra was from the southernmost part of Iran. At  some point, Nahid quietly excused herself. She returned wearing a purple manto,  a knee-length coat, and a purple motif scarf. A gray purse hung on her shoulder.  She sat down, opened the purse, and one by one took out a lipstick, eyeliner, eye  shadow, and face powder. The women smiled, then laughed, as if they were watch ing a scene from a play. Nahid then began to pretend to know how to apply makeup  on her face. She chuckled and then tried to appear serious only to laugh again. The  women teased her, saying how she actually did not know what makeup was to be  applied to what part of her face. She laughed in agreement, but everyone somehow  knew she wanted to put on makeup, which she would otherwise not do beyond this  moment. One of them touched her cheeks and began helping her. 

Since men were not allowed inside the park, the gardeners, vendors, and guards  were all women. The guard near us blew a whistle every time she saw women taking out their cameras. Many young girls and women passing by wore tank tops  and sweatpants. Some wore the manto and scarves while walking in pairs or in  groups. Young girls played music and danced. Daf, or handheld drums, as well as  zaghred, a high-pitched sound, could be heard in the background from other areas  of the park. Ma’ede eventually came running toward me with a ball and, while  laughing, said she wanted to practice her English with me. Ma’ede was twenty five years old, and though she had been born in Tehran, her family was originally  from Kashan. Her brother had completed his master’s degree in electrical en gineering and was living in Calgary. Her husband was from a village near Qom  and was finishing his PhD in aerospace engineering at Sharif University, known  throughout Iran as the primary feeder institution for engineering programs at  Stanford University. She had been in the same engineering program for the first  two and a half years, but she decided to transfer to Madraseh Ali, where she felt  happier. She made this decision because she initially wanted to know more about  the different kinds of laws. 

Explaining her interest in philosophy and international law, Ma’ede re marked, “America speaks about human rights, but they don’t live it. They cre ate wars in the world and oppress people. They want to rule the world.” She  proceeded to tell me that Morteza Motahhari’s teachings had inspired her, es pecially his teachings about women’s rights and international human rights.  

“Shahid Motahhari’s opinion of the universal declaration of human rights is  that it is wrong, because it only took people into consideration. It does not speak  about the relationship of God to the people, even though God was the one who  gave these rights. It cannot be universal,” she explained. She admired Ayatollah  Abdollah Javadi Amoli’s work on the philosophy of human rights, especially his  critique of humanism. Ma’ede eventually wanted to study Dars-e Kharij with  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader. She had recently heard Ayatollah  Khamenei’s speech urging people to make books more Islamic. “Right now,  everything in the science textbooks comes from Western theories. Even if the  writer is Iranian, the theories they use are still from the West,” she added. She  hoped to change this with her education. Ma’ede was studying Islamic jurispru dence and Islamic rights for her master’s degree because she wanted to work  toward making the laws in Iran closer to Islamic laws. 

We eventually went downstairs to join the rest of the women to play vasati,  a game that resembles dodgeball. We played until the point of exhaustion and  then sat on the cemented edge of the grass area. Alimeh was the only one in her  immediate family that was studying at Madraseh Ali. Her cousin was a student  of Islamic sciences, but he had recently died while patrolling the Afghanistan Iran border. With a smile, she said she was not interested in marriage. Alimeh  was twenty-seven years old and was writing her master’s thesis on the laws of 

investment shares while teaching undergraduate courses that semester. During  lunch, one of the women asked Maryam about the types of stipulations a woman  could include in a marriage contract. In response, Maryam asked who among  them were married already, so that perhaps they could share some ideas. Rayhane  jokingly inserted in English, “If I were married, I would not be here!” She put her  finger up in the air as if lecturing someone and jokingly said, “Gheyrat!” She was  referring to her would-be husband’s protective feeling of responsibility for her.  Everyone laughed. Elham then began reciting poetry about love and longing for  the beloved. In the midst of the laughter, someone began teasing Elham. 

Like nuanced signposts, our gathering at Behesht-e Maadaran sampled the  interplay of human touch, voice, and affection in the telling of self, others, and  futures that constituted the social world of students of the howzeh. It provides  an estimate for how they moved in and with their surroundings as well as their  concerns, on which I build my analysis about women and a particular kind of  women’s Islamic education in Iran that develops and maintains a society that  ideally supports the work of spiritually bringing oneself closer to God. It reveals  the various research they committed themselves to. They addressed research  concerns with their Islamic education from the howzeh, using Islamic knowledge  grounded in over one thousand years of Islamic scholarship including philosophy,  jurisprudence, and the language of Islamic rights. This was an education sup ported by an entire collective: religiously conservative women and men like the  bus driver; the women’s fathers, brothers, and husbands; and, most importantly,  the Islamic Republic. 

Many women like Maryam were raising children and managing their house holds or caring for their parents and siblings while completing programs in the  howzeh. Like Zahra from southern Iran, they came from different regions and  from varied backgrounds. Their family members were engineers or stationed at  the Afghan-Iran border. Unfettered by their fathers’ authority, howzevi women  traveled from all over Iran to study any one of the Islamic sciences. Yet, like Nahid  and others, they had to be specific kinds of women who observed Shi’i Islamic  practices. In other words, they had to be women who could distinguish the proper  time and place for behaviors like wearing makeup, playing ball, laughing out loud,  maintaining gender separation, or wearing the black chador. As Elham signaled,  they needed to be women who married men with gheyrat, or men who had a sense  of protective emotional responsibility for them and their children.  This gathering tells us that these women were not merely surviving their limi tations and waiting for the right moment to undermine them. The 1979 revolu tion Islamized public space as never before, which made it safe for them to take  advantage of having access to Islamic education and possible for them to work  on strengthening a system that positions them at the center rather than on the periphery. They held contemporary Islamic scholars like Ayatollah Morteza Mo tahhari, who was assassinated in May 1979 right after the revolution, in high  regard. They, like most religiously conservative Iranians, use the honorific title  shahid for men like him to remind others that they died for an Islamic cause. It’s  also used to describe someone who died fighting in the Iran-Iraq War from 1980  to 1988. As we can see from Ma’ede’s educative vision, the howzevi’s work often  involves seeking ways to maintain a system that is committed to supporting the  personal work of khod shenasi, an individual’s effort toward self-awareness in  order to create a spiritual nearness to the divine. 

Ma’ede, like the others, made sense of her immediate concerns like secular  laws and universalized human rights as always in relation to God. That is, any  kind of work that involves solving human problems cannot be divorced from a  conversation about God—more specifically, the purpose of life itself. The women  I spent time with shared this assertion and added that the laws that govern most  of the countries originated from some religious text and conceptualization of  human life and world. Political factors like US imperialism were important parts  of this constellation. Through her Islamic education, Ma’ede saw herself as act ing on her plans to do something about her concerns. She hoped to eventually  partake in Ayatollah Khamenei’s class so that she could replace secular laws in  Iran with Islamic laws and replace Western thought in Iranian books with Islamic  thought. As a result, it was a kind of work that continued to push back against  American and European domination in Iran and the greater Middle East, a way  to end, in their words, “oppressive conditions,” including those that women con tinued to experience. 

One outcome of this access to the women’s howzeh elmiyeh has been the  system-wide transformation. As a result of women’s efforts to develop the sys tem, the women’s howzeh has eventually become a degree-granting institution  wherefrom graduates become qualified to work in institutions that affect policies in Iran. They continue to be a crucial component of the Islamic Republic  as they work behind the scenes on domestic policies and the educational and  social programming that affects public life in Iran. The creation of Behesht-e  Maadaran along with gyms, sports complexes, and parks exclusively for women  provides clues to the extent the howzevi have been engaged with the transformation of public space since the revolution, an engagement that was not always  possible for religiously conservative women. As a result of all this, access to a  howzeh education has opened up the potential for an increase in the number of  mujtahideh, or women who make legal decisions for themselves and other women  through independent interpretation of the Qur’an, the sacred book of Muslims,  and the Sunnah, the documented lifeways and the manners of the Prophet Mo hammad. Equally important, there has been a shift in the curricular direction of the women’s howzeh, away from producing Islamic scholars and toward produc ing supporters and developers of the Islamic Republic. 

Participation as Resistance 

My challenge is to effectively present narratives that reflect both methodologi cal integrity and a commitment to anthropology’s humanizing endeavor. To do  this, it is important to find ways to make sense of the howzevi’s logic and ways  that allow for a shift in perspective about the possibilities of womanhood. Theo retical frameworks play a crucial role in this effort. They can open up ways to  understand human phenomena. But the theories we use can also obscure parts  of the human experience. What one theory can help explain, another theory may  not. Thus, it’s important to choose theoretical approaches, or a combination of  them, that will best explain lessons learned from the field. In the following, I  first explain which frameworks would be counterproductive to the humanizing  work of this book. I then explain those that are more aligned with the book’s  objective: theory of agency, situated learning, the anthropology of becoming,  play and humor, and indigenous theories from Islamic philosophy—essential  motion and self-knowing. 

As I demonstrate in the following, the dominant analytical framework used to  explain Iranian women’s participation in contemporary sociopolitical discourse  is politicized resistance. This refers to actions interpreted as a subversion of an  existing sociopolitical order patterned after the rule of men, more specifically,  where the conception of the household, by implication—law, is assumed to func tion naturally through the authority of men. Participation, therefore, is largely  equated with transgression against the government, which is both Islamic and  offering up patriarchy. This framework is useful for reiterating a scholar’s prior  commitment to emphasizing resistance against male authority. More specifically,  it is useful for explaining women’s subversive work, especially work that mirrors  our contemporary desires for recognition, autonomy, leadership, and authority. 

This prior commitment is linked in part to another supposition—that there  is a universal good life, in this case for all women. This good life is to be acquired  by women aspiring to become and becoming autonomous. In a Kantian sense,  a good life consists of “a way out,” the freedom from a mindset that accepts the  authority of others over our own reasoning, a marker of which is the obligation  “to dare to know,” sapere aude, as evidence of maturity. In this context, inside  every woman is a desire to dissent in order to be free from constraints; as Azadeh  Kian-Thiébaut writes, Iranian women desire “to form an identity which is no  longer founded on traditions.” Through this frame of autonomy, the self is the  source of moral order, and individuals, families, social networks, churches, and governments eventually become obstacles to this way out because these entities  are carriers of ideology.

What this desired life of freedom for all women looks like is quite vague,  other than the register of nontradition. The problem is that any human action,  when practiced repetitively through time, eventually becomes tradition. So what  exactly could non-tradition be? Freedom from that remains unclear. Based on  what women who call for a regime change in Iran describe, this life most likely  resembles what we imagine to be middle class sensibilities in Europe and North  America. Its very basic markers are women who have individuated goals for a  future that involves schooling as a means to these goals, women who have un hindered choices in dress and spouse, acquiring enough mobility to have a career  and, if so desired, to be publicly visible in her political, social, economic, and educational aspirations. In this call for freedom, it seems that outside Iran is where  this freedom exists. Out there is where women’s lives are conceived of as already  full with liberating possibilities. 

A universal kind of womanhood undergirded by a desire for autonomy is the  unspoken premise, and is assumed simply as common sense. It is an expectation  placed on women. The coupling of a universal good life and aspirations for autonomy is part of everyday common sense through this lens. To interrogate this,  Clifford Geertz writes, “The opposite of someone who is able to come to sensible  conclusions on the basis of them is a fool. . . . It is in short, a cultural system. . . . It  rests on the same basis that any other such system rests; the conviction by those  whose possession it is of its value and validity.” This expectation placed on women  as common sense is what makes feminism both an analytical and a prescriptive  project. If women do not have this common sense, they must learn how to possess it. This framing of womanhood hinders our understanding of the women in  this book. 

An example of this is how feminist research on Iranian women attempts to  establish causality in order to develop a prescription to overcome patriarchal  dominance in Iran. Haideh Moghissi argues that despite women’s refusal to prop erly observe mandatory veiling, their efforts lack gender consciousness and do not  do much against the injunction. Maryam Poya proposes that the oppression of  working-class women is ingrained in the workings of an Islamic state since Islam  propagates unequal access to resources, legal rights, and public space. Conformity is considered a nascent resistance since women bargain with patriarchy. Both conclude that the women’s movement in Iran continues to be defeated be cause women are too immersed in their subjugation. The solution, then, is to do  away with Islam, and for Iranian women to refuse to yield to the government. Another example is Islamist women’s participation as politicized resistance.  As a response to the charge that Iranian women are passive, this approach has focused on the role of Islamist women in interpreting Islamic text. The focus is  often on “elite” Islamist women who are working on changing the laws and social  conditions for Iranian women by engaging in acts of resistance against outdated  clerics. Yet while this approach successfully makes visible some women’s accomplishments, it does not escape the liberal expectation on women to move  toward an imagined autonomy. 

This expectation also informs the decision to categorize some women as either Islamists or Islamic feminists. Though these two groups have similarities,  they are not the same. Islamist women and Islamic feminists both work toward  bringing back the egalitarian conditions that are believed to have been created  by the Prophet Mohammad and his companions over one thousand years ago,  traces of which may be found in Islamic text and scholarly debates of the past. Yet  while Islamist women are said to work to establish and support a state governed  by Islamic law with the aim of preserving the Islamic Republic, Islamic feminists  work within different systems of state power and prioritize reinterpreting Islamic  knowledge from a gendered perspective. Islamic feminists locate their feminism  in Islam. Thus, reinterpretations of Islamic knowledge for them would be a vi able alternative to move toward women’s emancipation.

The framework of Islamic feminism, in particular, is often used to explore  women’s Islamic education in Iran. It holds that women must, in the end, work  to emancipate themselves and occupy publicly visible positions of power or authority. Roja Fazaeli, one of the few pioneer scholars on Islamic feminisms  across different generations in Iran, makes this move. She classifies Ayatollah  Khomeini’s supporters as Islamic state feminists and describes how religiously  conservative women who support the supreme leader have come to realize that  Iranian laws did not reflect the promises of the revolution, and by the late 1990s  “a new wave of more powerful state feminists was appointed to top governmental  positions.”

A problem with the classification of Islamic feminist is that it disregards the  possibility that some women who do the work of bettering women’s status may  not think of themselves as Islamic feminists, or may even see it as an affront to be  called one.29 The women in this book fall under this category. Although they did  not identify themselves as Islamists, most if not all of them refused to be called  feminists and found the label offensive to their project. They see feminism as a  form of Western invasion and a symptom of immorality. Elizabeth Buccar, who  conducts research on religious women’s moral agency, writes of a similar experience when she referred to Shahla Habibi, the special advisor on women’s affairs  under former president Hashimi Rafsanjani, as an Islamic feminist. In response,  Habibi became upset and said, “I am not a feminist. Do not call me a feminist. I do  not believe in your feminism.” Buccar, in reflection, writes, “A scholar assuming an autonomous model of the moral life would most likely focus on Habibi’s arguments that seem to resist her local conditions. This was essentially what caused  my faux pas with her.”

Confining the concept of participation to politicized resistance produces at  least two kinds of analyses. First, an Islamist woman can be seen as deficient  in womanhood because she does not meet what is expected of her: to naturally  desire to be free from her limitations. As Janet Afary writes, “Women like them  are classic examples of what Fromm and the Frankfurt School called authoritar ian personalities . . . individuals, who, fearing the insecurities that the freedoms  of modernity bring, seek to escape from their anxiety by joining authoritarian  movements.” Because dissent against authority is believed to be innate in all  women, all Iranian women are expected to have predictably similar desires when  male authority is absent; that is, inside every Islamist woman in Iran is a poten tial awakening to become a non-Islamist. Had the 1979 revolution not happened  in Iran, they would naturally choose not to be Islamists as they are today. They  would choose to keep their Islam in the privacy of their homes. Until then, the  Islamist woman can be thought of only as complacent because she is, in essence,  a carrier of male authority over women. She is an instrument of her own oppression and the oppression of other women. 

This framework positions an Islamist woman in a double bind. She is either  deficient or ill-fated for not wanting to be in positions of publicly visible authority  or held suspect if she so desires for her association with those we have come to  know as the enemy of the free world. Through this lens, Ma’ede and her friends  would be considered failures, wrong sorts of people, insufficiently self-governing  and individuated. They fail to reject the invisible male-centered ideology that has  taken hold of their entire being, which they themselves could not see, but I, as a re searcher, could. In the context of but not unique to Iran, the Islamist woman then  continues to remain blind until and unless she enters a “new self-consciousness.”

Signs of this new self-consciousness may come in the form of bargaining with  patriarchy or participating in purposeful subversive work, which brings me to my  second point. Another kind of analysis produced out of this framework is to look  for these signs of new self-consciousness out of the ethnographic experience, a  deductive top-down approach. Nahid’s attempt to put on makeup at the gathering  in the park; women beautifying themselves by wearing dresses and shorter coats;  women debating their teacher about marriage, learning English, or laughing at  jokes about men can all be read as signs of a hidden desire to be autonomous. This  analytical take assumes desires are fixed states and are not part of whole spectrum  of desires that compete with one another. Thus, in the context of the howzevi,  this analysis disregards other complicated aspects of their lives, which I illustrate  in the following chapters.

Introduction 13 

The framework of politicized resistance underlines contemporary Iranian  feminist discourse, and rightly so because countless Iranians have had to live in  exile and women’s rights have been transformed drastically since 1979. It helps  us understand those who seek to break away from any status quo. However, it  prevents us from understanding the women of this book. 

From the Ground Up 

The usefulness of a theoretical explanation depends on how it is deployed, either  inductively or deductively or both, in order to produce different kinds of analyses.  Prioritizing the interlocutors’ experience and staying true to the totality of eth nographic accounts on the ground will produce an explanation that is different  from looking for specific instances to support an already existing theory. That  is, receiving information is a different experience from looking for or expecting  specific information. A prior commitment to feminism produces the latter. My  ethnographic work, however, focused on inviting the howzevi to teach me about  themselves and their education. 

There are scholars who choose similar theoretical approaches to women in  Iran—those who develop propositions from the ground up, whose approaches  are more in line with the purpose of this book. They shift the focus to providing  context to the varied conditions of women, prioritizing the women’s perceptions  of their work and bringing these into conversation around the overall discourse  on Iranian women, women in the Middle East, and women in Islam. Of these,  there are studies that complicate the compliance-resistance paradigm by way of  historical analysis and localizing the objectives of transformations. In a study of  written work at the turn of the century, Afsaneh Najmabadi traces the develop ment of the “educated housewife” and argues for a more profound understanding  of transformations as not just emancipatory but also regulatory or disciplinary. In  a later work, Najmabadi argues for a reconfiguration of the ways in which Iranian ness is thought of. For as much as secular feminists have worked to undermine the  government with great strides, Najmabadi puts forth the contribution of Islamist  women. She asserts that the “muddled” hybridization of both groups of women  working on common ground issues is advantageous for women. In this complex  relationship, both groups are able to work together.

The political discourse on the status of women in twentieth-century Iran is  Parvin Paidar’s focus. Specific to this research, Paidar shows that the state plays  a significant role in establishing a link between notions of gender and nation  through policies affecting women and families. By recognizing women’s par ticipation in both formal and informal social networks, she demonstrates that  women have power in various spheres and networks. She points out that when research focuses solely on formal power structures, other types of participation  are bound to be overlooked. Roksana Bahramitash looks at way the Iranian gov ernment mobilized the majority of women as volunteers, which paved the way for  future changes. She shows that nationwide literacy campaigns mobilized women  in great numbers, and as a result women who had no access to education under  the previous secular regime became literate.

Grounded analysis is a marker of many prerevolution ethnographies of Iran  from the 1970s. In particular, these seek to develop an understanding of women’s  experiences with Islamized spaces. Mary Hegland and Erika Friedl, who did  ethnographic fieldwork in the rural areas of Iran in the late 1970s, problematize  public-private roles when analyzing the status of women. They blur the differ ence. Hegland conducted ethnographic research among women in Aliabad and  demonstrates the significant role of women in the political process, where women  traders were expected to be politically active and wives of political figures made  their presence known in social networks. “By maintaining social interaction with  enemy factions, women could facilitate reproachment later,” Hegland writes. Friedl provides several examples of women’s political orchestration within and  outside the domestic space, from a fight over the operation of a flour mill, to  a teacher’s refusal to comply with a new order, to bride price negotiations. “A  woman’s political acuity and power are partly a function of her husband’s (fa ther’s, sons’) political standing. . . . In turn, however, a politically astute . . . woman  will use her network of relatives . . . to empower her husbands or sons, thereby  broadening her own power base,” she writes. Anne Betteridge, who conducted  fieldwork in Shiraz in the late 1970s, shows that women dominate local pilgrim age shrines. For this reason, the practice of visiting them is held suspect. But it  is also valued and necessary since shrines are sites where both men and women  seek help from saints. 

In the 1990s, Zahra Kamalkhani and Azam Torab looked closely at women’s  participation in the jaleseh, the neighborhood religious meeting group. It became  a transformative space for women after the revolution. Kamalkhani’s ethnogra phy on women’s religious participation in ritual performance and Islamic revival ism in the city of Shiraz shows that women’s participation provides opportunities  for forming new religious identities.39 Torab, who spent time with predominantly  lower middle-class women who participated in Islamic rituals in south Tehran  argues that persons are not bound by gender constructs.40 Through an analysis  of over seventy rituals and religious gatherings, Torab demonstrates that gender  construction is inherently in flux and vague. 

Arzoo Osanloo writes that Iranian women have been talking about human  rights as locally conceptualized since the mid-1990s.41 She contextualizes wom en’s conceptions of rights as influenced by other factors that they experience  around them, as these rights are intertwined with local practices and regulations. 

Introduction 15 

She shows that although these rights hint at liberal values, they are localized in  application and definition. For the Iranian women she conducted research with,  Islam, not liberal values, authenticates equal footing with men. 

The Ethnographic Objective 

My contribution to this body of work comes from what my work does not do as  much as what it offers. As an anthropologist, I do not make a case for what takes  place cognitively or what individual intentions are. I avoid writing on motivations  like selfishness, vanity, or the intent to manipulate or deceive others because I  simply do not know what goes on in someone else’s thoughts at any given mo ment. Instead, I assume all of these and all sorts of other motivations to be part  of social interactions that are always in motion. In other words, the women, with  all kinds of motivations, are participants in activities couched in a set of continu ous social relations between themselves and the world around them. The closest  thing to describing motivations here is that I explain the role of Islamic teachings  in terms of what constitutes their common sense or logic. 

Further, this book does not aim to verify and evaluate models of analysis. For  instance, I neither predict nor interpret how the Iranian government makes deci sions or responds, or how it has conceived of its citizenry. Shirin Saeidi’s work is  of great import here. Saeidi investigates everyday encounters to make a case for  the way the Iranian government is pushed “toward a balancing act to pacify its  female population.” Her focus is on how the government produces different kinds  of citizenship—“citizens who cross, abide, and [at times] manipulate the state’s  formal boundaries.” Additional important research concerned with women  and governance is Nazanin Shahrokni’s distinct work on state policies after the  Iran-Iraq War and gender-segregated spaces. She develops her own theory on  how the state’s mode of regulation on gender segregation, from prohibition to  provision, has also resulted in a discursive shift—from protecting women accord ing to Islamic morality to protecting women’s rights and safety along the lines of  secular liberal citizenship.

Neither of these is what I have set out to do. This book is an ethnography about  people and possibilities—that is, what howzevi women do with themselves and  each other in the context of their Islamic education. The work to describe these  involved what Renato Rosaldo referred to as “deep hanging out,” or research  work that required the spatial practices meant for interpersonal relationships.44 More importantly, it is not a study of the howzevi. Rather, I learned from them by  way of repeated visits, collaboration, observation, conversation, apprenticeship,  and friendship. 

My writing is descriptive and interpretive; thus it details processes, rela tionships, situations, systems, and people. Processes point at what is of value. 

Relationships tell us what people do for and with each other. Situations provide  context that is specific to a setting and interpretation of histories. Systems inform  us of logics in operation, and a description of people teaches us how they consti tute and reconstitute these logics. As I explain further, this work develops newly  learned concepts from those I spent time with and elaborates on existing ones  from previous research. 

Critique, therefore, is a necessary component of detailing processes, relation ships, situations, systems, and people in these chapters. It is embedded in the  context of the women’s Islamic philosophies and teachings. One such example  of critique is the exclusionary nature of the social interactions in the seminaries, which contradicts the work of khod shenasi. In order for this critique to be  recognized, it must be located in the phenomenon that made it possible. Without  positioning critique in its particular, we are left with only one kind of learning  from research: how others are wrong. 

Good ethnographic writing, which includes critique as an essential compo nent, is dependent on showing possibilities that are an invitation to return the  gaze onto the audience in contemplation of their conditions. These possibilities  include the positive, the negative, and those in-between. This is part of anthro pology’s tradition. Therefore, rather than being concerned with representation,  deduction, or motivation, my ethnographic work is grounded in the telling of  possibilities. It shows that possibilities in one place can help us think about dif ferent possibilities elsewhere in a deep and meaningful way. 

Finally, what I write in the following chapters is not a representation of all how zevi or a prediction of what might happen to them. It applies only to the women  I spent time with in Iran as examples of what was and continues to be possible  among them. My ethnographic examples and analyses are only for the moments I  share. As I noted earlier, I witnessed violence and experienced extremely difficult  situations during my fieldwork, not from the women themselves but from pro government and government actors. Time and again these moments reminded  me of the precarity of my situation. But I made a conscious decision to write  about this elsewhere so I can center the narrative around the howzevi, away from  centering it on myself. Therefore, what I write here is not meant to represent all  of what I experienced during my fieldwork.