Since the early 1970s, ethnographic studies addressing Muslim women in Iran have demonstrated that they engaged in a variety of private and public ritual practices. In urban environments these activities include formalized prayer and commemoration gatherings, such as rawza khvānī (congregation for mourning), and pilgrimage to local shrines (Betteridge 1985, 1989, 1993). Village women have few possibilities of receiving religious instruction and engage in communal religious activity (Friedl 1989). Marginalized in the gender-segregated…