In the second book of his Masnavi, Rumi tells the story of a shepherd's conversation with God that evokes Moses's wrath upon overhearing it. The shepherd addresses God intimately and promises to clean His house, rub His feet, comb His hair, and kill His lice if he ever finds Him. Upon hearing this, Moses vehemently chastises the shepherd for his outrageous blasphemy sending him away crushed and mortified. God instantly sends a revelation to Moses reprimanding the prophet for failing to distinguish between qāl (the external form of words) and ḥāl (the sincere feeling of the divine presence) and separating a sincere servant from Him. Moses goes after the shepherd and tells him, “Don't search for manner and rules/Say what your longing heart desires.” This is the origin of Niloofar Haeri's book title. The subtitle has another interesting origin story. It comes from a seemingly simple declaration of a relative of hers that her evening ritual prayers “had gone well.” What does it mean, Haeri asks, for a ritual with prescribed rules, for these “authorless scripted acts” to go well?

Haeri pivots the issues about the nature of communicating with God towards the meaning of being a “Muslim” in contemporary Iran. Say What Your Longing Heart Desires is the result of an almost decade long ethnography in Iran in the 2000s and 2010s and provides the reader with a vibrant scene of religious debates in the country, not by the scholars of religion or state officials, but as conversations that unravel among the laypeople with a focus on six Shiʿi women. One of the most important contributions of the work to the study of Islam in post-Revolutionary Iran is the interconnection of poetry and religion among Haeri's interlocutors. In mainstream studies on the topic, “the religious” and “the literary” are viewed as two separate spheres with a tacit claim that if there ever is a connection, it is the former (or reactions against it) that influence the latter. But Haeri masterfully illustrates how understandings of literature deeply inform understandings of religiosity in this context. In doing so, not only does the book exemplify how the secular and religious are co-constitutive, but it also blurs the line between the public and private.

The book examines the different ways in which these believing women communicate with God through namāz (ritual prayer), duʿā (spontaneous prayer), Qur'an recitation, and prayers composed by the Shiʿi Imams. Topics that are discussed around the nature of communication with God include the companionship of literary and religious knowledge and how the former influences the latter, the issue of sincerity in communicating with God, especially through repeated practices and words, and the ways in which these “authorless acts” are authored by the practitioners through their states/ḥāl. Haeri explains the complex mystical concept of ḥāl through presence, an affective element in language that evokes experiences and memories beyond the mere meaning of words, which helps her to illustrate that even the seemingly mindless and repetitive acts of ritual are imbued with excessive and altering meaning through the varying intentions of their practitioners. One major question of the project, then, is “What does it mean to create a presence in a scripted ritual?” (p. 66). Haeri’s response with regards to her interlocutors is that “these women make the ritual their own—they tell God what they want or need to, they manage to concentrate and be in the ritual’s sacred time-space, and they make a connection to the divine so that they may be co-present” (ibid.). Put differently, there is something present beyond the semiotic meaning, which “makes the sign a more complex matter than a pairing of meaning and abstract sound image” (p. 67). All these processes of meaning-making represent the imaginative and paradoxical ways laypeople in Iran are thinking about religion and their role in building it.

Chapter 1, sets the scene for the audience about the place of poetry in modern Iranian society and the education interlocutors received as children and adolescents in Persian literature, poetry, and mysticism/ʿirfān. One of the brilliant parts of the chapter is a focus on the similarities and differences between the embodiment of poetry recitation and performance of prayer for the women. While the performance of prayer is accompanied by certain expectations with regards to acts and time, for the women both poetry and prayer evoke “aesthetic pleasures” (p. 36). Haeri's analysis illustrates how classical literature continues to shape modern understandings of religion in Iran through which a specific notion of mysticism is constructed that “troubles the binary of secular and religious” (p. 55).

Chapter 2 deals with what makes for a good namāz, the question that set the whole research project in motion. The main element is presence, or “presence of the heart” more precisely. The technicalities of prayer are just a small part of the rituals and the women take creative measures in talking to God through the fixed words and acts of the ritual prayer. It is these acts that make the seemingly repetitive act of praying a ground for the play of imagination and attesting to the fact that the form/content relationship is not fixed. “It is crucial to realize,” Haeri maintains, “that even with a script, the reciter cannot know in advance when she starts the prayer how the performance will turn out” (p. 83). Therefore, prayer is analyzed as a process rather than mere repetition. In this view, the meaning is not bound to the semiotic message conveyed through words but rather the constantly changing meanings that the performer puts into the fixed and repeated words. Therefore, “there is no constant, necessary, and predictable relation between form and meaning” (p. 88, emphasis in original).

Chapter 3 focuses on spontaneous prayer/duʿā which according to the author can be somewhat paradoxical, because “it is neither required nor a ritual in the usual sense of the term, but doing it shows perhaps a stronger commitment to the existence and presence of God than ritual prayer does because one is addressing an invisible being voluntarily and at a time of one's choosing” (p. 100). Another aspect of duʿā is the language element and the fact that these conversations take place in Persian rather than Arabic, complicating the ritualized aspect of the obligatory prayers. It is in duʿā that the women feel the joy of presence and connection to God and universe even more, an emotional state that is understood to be crucial from the ʿi rfān mysticism viewpoint of ḥāl. These spontaneous communications with God exemplify the diverse ways in which God is conceptualized and worshipped in this context.

Chapter 4 deals with the duʿā that are attributed to the Shiʿi Imams and are printed in different forms and media. The chapter goes over the history of two of the most popular of such prayer books (Sahifa and Mafatih) and contemporary attempts at revamping the genre for the younger modern middle classes. The author illustrates that an emphasis on ḥāl is a central element of the new prayer books implying the dominance of the mystical discourse informed by poetic interpretations of the Qurʾan and the Imams. Haeri goes back to her group who do not necessarily use such texts for communicating with God but as what Haeri refers to as “movable mosques.” These texts “give specific instructions about what to do on every day of the year” and “offer ideas about how to undertake religious acts that do not have to be performed inside the mosque” (pp. 148, 151). The concept is a great example of how the public/private boundaries are blurred through the potential of the texts to turn the space of “home” into a gathering space for collective acts.

Say What Your Longing Heart Desires is a pleasurable read that provides enough background for the unfamiliar readers without overwhelming them with too much information. In a simple, clear, yet highly nuanced language the book illustrates the complexity of Muslim subjectivity. The focus is mainly on the experience that communication with God (ḥāl) creates in the believer. The subjectivity is built and rebuilt through communication with God and God changes through different interactions of the practitioners who imbue the repeated acts and codes with their own meanings. For the general audience interested in Islam, the book provides a perfect example of the ongoing debates among the “laypeople” on the nature of religion in general and awareness of the absence of one ultimate meaning of the Qurʾan in particular. As one of the best examples of works on “lived Islam,” the book showcases how much analysis, critical thinking, and self-reflection is involved in the construction and performance of “religious” acts and will be helpful to both students and experts in the fields of religion, ritual, and literature.