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Since the early 2000s, local development associations, the shorâ yâri, have been spreading throughout the neighbourhoods of Tehran. Although their members are elected, participation within these organisations is mainly defined as a depoliticised form of charity shaped by plural religious socialisations. As a borderline case of confessional NGOs, shorâ yâri prove to be a rich site in which to observe, from below and from the margins, the many ways in which religion shapes local participation and politics. They display a porosity and polysemy of the religious register that invite us to question the usual frameworks that rigidly oppose state to civil society, politics to associations.