Paths Made by Walking: The Work of Howzevi Women in Iran

What can women’s scholastic pursuits tell us about what building an Islamic state looks like for women who are loyal to its project? And what can an ethnographic study of women who are using Islamic education to transform their conditions in Iran teach us about our own humanity?

Paths Made by Walking provides insight into these questions by examining how Iranian women have participated in Islamic education since the 1979 revolution. This groundbreaking ethnography on Iranian howzevi (seminarian) women reveals how ideologies of womanhood, institutions, and Islamic practices have played a pivotal role in religiously conservative women’s mobility in the Middle East. Applying over a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Amina Tawasil analyzes how the Islamic education of seminarian women has propelled some of them into powerful positions in Iran, from close ties with the state’s supreme leader and chief justice to membership in the Basij (voluntary military organization). At the same time, these women often choose to remain ＂hidden＂ or to otherwise follow practices that seem inscrutable or illogical from a framework of politicized resistance. By centering the howzevi women’s senses of self and revealing their complex interpretations of their beliefs, Tawasil offers a fresh perspective on forms of feminine identity that do not always mirror supposedly universal desires for recognition, autonomy, leadership, or authority.

Taking readers into the classrooms, living rooms, and compounds where howzevi women participate in intellectual discourse, Paths Made by Walking invites readers to reconsider their conceptualizations of the women who support the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Amina Tawasil is a faculty lecturer in the Programs in Anthropology, Teachers College, Columbia University.