Publications
MY BOOKS
Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran
My project on prayer and poetry was just published: Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran (Stanford University Press). I begin this book with the question of how we can avoid looking at revolutions as either failures or successes. The 1979 revolution in Iran resulted in a mass involvement with theological questions—most notably, what kind of Islam is the true one?
Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt
The cultures and politics of nations around the world may be understood (or misunderstood) in any number of ways. For the Arab world, language is the crucial link for a better understanding of both. Classical Arabic is the official language of all Arab states although it is not spoken as a mother tongue by any group of Arabs.
Sociolinguistic Market Of Cairo: Gender, Class and Education
MY ARTICLES
Notes on Ritual Prayer in Iran: Qunut Choices among a Group of Shi‘i Women
In Approaches to the Qur’an in Contemporary Iran, edited by Alessandro Cancian. Qur’anic Studies Series 18 (Oxford: Oxford University Press in Association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2019).
Review of: Alireza Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam and the Uncanny. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018). In International Journal of Middle East Studies, 51 (2019).
Unbundling sincerity: Language, mediation, and interiority in comparative perspective
This is an edited collection on comparative notions of sincerity in four religious communities that appeared in the journal Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. The article is called, "The sincere subject: Mediation and interiority among a group of Muslim women in Iran."
La Salât et son langage: Prier en dehors de la mosquée
In Le social par le langage: La parole au quotidien. 2015. Edited by Myriam Achour-Kallel. Karthala & IRMC[NH2] .
The Private Performance of Salat Prayers: Repetition, Time, and Meaning. 2013. Anthropological Quarterly 86 (1): 5-34.
Do we need the army's helping hand?
Le Monde Diplomatique, English Edition. October 14, 2011. (Article on Egypt's "bloody Sunday" when the army used violence to disperse demonstrators).
The Elephant in the Room: Language and Literacy in the Arab World
2009. Cambridge Handbook of Literacy. Edited by David Olson and Nancy Torrance. Cambridge University Press.
The uses and abuses of Classical Arabic
In Transeuropeennes, Vol. 23, special issue on Religions in Politics. 2003. (French-English bilingual journal published in Paris).
Form and ideology: Arabic sociolinguistics and beyond
2000. Annual Review of Anthropology, 29:61-87.
The Reproduction of symbolic capital: Language, state, and class in Egypt
1997. Current Anthropology, 38 (5): 795-805, reply: 811-816.