Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranian authorities have sought to transform Iranian and Iranians into a “modern Islamic civilization.” This dissertation examines how this process has unfolded by focusing on a program to renovate Shia Muslim shrines that has affected thousands of sites across Iran as well in neighboring countries. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Middle East and archival research in British and Iraqi archives, this dissertation is an ethnography of the Iranian state and the forms of popular resistance that have emerged to this project to turn Iranians into a nation of “revolutionary selves.” The dissertation first examines how the modernization of these shrines was tied to a cultural project to re-narrativize Iran’s landscape as a sacred geography that drew on architectural and urban planning methods, in the process allowing authorities an opportunity to ‘correct’ Iranians’ practices of Islam, produce a new pantheon of political saints, and discipline bodies and minds. It then traces how this project entailed an economic transformation of Iran’s shrine cities, orienting them toward transnational religious pilgrimage and in the process uprooting local communities and their spatial narratives and memories. The dissertation examines the project in transnational context, examining how Iranian pilgrims’ and authorities’ experiences of violent conflict and attacks on shrines in neighboring Iraq, precipitated by the US-led War on Terror, increasingly securitized and sectarianized Iranian imaginaries. I argue that, in response to the militarization of the regional landscape, Iranian authorities constructed and promoted new models of revolutionary masculinity in Iran. I trace these by examining the political and economic dimensions of the “Shrine Defenders” paramilitary movement and how it became tied to military intervention across the region and over time to state repression domestically in the face of periodic uprisings inside Iran. Finally, the dissertation examines how Iranians and other Shia Muslims have drawn on religious rituals and imaginaries to create heterogenous spaces where alternative realities can be imagined and horizontal connections produced that challenge authoritarian political projects across the region. Throughout the dissertation, I shed light both on how the Iranian state wields power as well as how ordinary Iranians and others in the Middle East contest that power.