T images are often associated with Iran in the popular Western media. The first is that of a repressed and stagnant society, a theocracy that rules according to anachronistic laws, and the second is that of a society characterized by what seems to be an almost unending power struggle between the so-called reformers and hard-liners. Afshin Molavi’s book Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys Across Iran is a thoughtful account illustrating that there is much more to Iran than these cliched portrayals. His book is an attempt to go beyond the headlines and the politics of the moment in order to capture the culture and mood of a nation in all its complexity, a task that he accomplishes successfully. An Iranian-born journalist, Molavi is in part inspired by Terence O’Donnell, an American writer who lived in Iran for some fourteen years in the 1950s and 1960s, who observed that the shrines that Iranians venerate are more often dedicated to saints and poets than to soldiers and politicians. Motivated also by his own impression that there was “more to the Iranian universe than the reformist-conservative power struggle,”1 Molavi decided to leave “a settled position with an international news agency” to travel across Iran, to find the “culture trail,” and to write a book about “Iran and Iranians.” In a sense, therefore, this book is more than a simple journalistic venture; it is also a journey of discovery for its author, who, far from being a detached observer, wants to make sense of the multi-layered richness of Iranian culture with all its seeming contradictions. In fact, a prevalent theme that is underlined in much of the book is that of the multiple identities—in particular the Islamic and Iranian identities—that have developed side by side throughout Ira-