Islam nuanced: transcending Shi’a clerical authority among Iranian Americans in rural Kentucky

In this article, I show how a group of Iranian Muslims in Trump-era rural Kentucky conceptualize their Islamic practices in relation to the dominant American social, political, racial, and economic norms to compromise Americanness with Muslimness in order to claim cultural citizenship. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork involving participant observation and in-depth interviews conducted with Iranian-American Muslims in rural Kentucky, I develop an argument regarding how these individuals conceive of Islam differently from the monolithic Islam promoted by both Islamic clerics and the post-9/11 dominant discourse that has racialized Muslims. By examining a theoretical and analytical category that can conceptualize the unauthorized practices of Islam, I explore how Iranian Americans in rural Kentucky negotiate some of the most established Shi’i practices independent from clerics and reconcile their Islamic practices with the sociocultural and religious norms and values of the South rather than pursuing orthodox or heterodox Islam. Iranian Muslims in Kentucky are surrounded by multiple transnational Muslim communities that have created a diasporic condition, empowering them to foster a collective identity not by conforming to homogeneity, but rather by developing a nuanced web of intersecting bonds that unifies them through differentiation while confronting Islamophobia and the Muslim experiences of racialization.