Studying the Pakistani Shiʿa

The existing scholarship on Shiʿism in Pakistan can be divided into three broad categories. These include a study of political institutions and actors, the study of religious performances, and the study of objects.Footnote ⁶ Below, I briefly review the political and the religious approaches, largely due to their relevance to this article and due to the prolific body of work that they constitute among works on Pakistani Shiʿa.

The study of political Shiʿism has been an outsized presence eclipsing other facets of Shiʿi practice and experience. For instance, consider the oeuvre of work produced by the late French scholar Mariam Abou Zahab, where she details the rise of a Shiʿi political consciousness in Pakistan in the 1970s and the 1980s. Her work—whether on the city Jhang as a particular case study or Pakistan writ large—foregrounds intertradition competition between the Sunni and the Shiʿa where religious identity looms large.Footnote ⁷ Though Abou Zahab notes the contextual embeddedness of these conflicts, and her work is attentive to the role that class, caste, and belonging play in the social conflicts she writes about, the overarching emphasis in her writing remains on the primacy of religious identity and its political motivations, unfolding, and afterlives.Footnote ⁸ Similarly, consider also Laurance Louër’s chapter on Shiʿism in Pakistan, where a generalized Shiʿa identity, from prepartition British India to the turn of the millennium in Pakistan, is invoked to explain the “theater of sectarian violence” that animates the nation-state.Footnote ⁹ Andreas Rieck and Simon Fuchs both offer, in different ways, a longer and more complex political history of Pakistani Shiʿism.Footnote ¹⁰ Their works ground Pakistani Shiʿa in their local contexts, and are nuanced in their readings of the myriad, rather than a monolithic, reception of events such as the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Iran and its impacts on the Shiʿa communities in Pakistan.

From within the scholarship on political Shiʿism in Pakistan, there are three scholars whose work I have found productive to think with for this article. Mashal Saif has detailed, in her recent monograph as well as in an earlier article, the ambiguities that inhere within Pakistani Shiʿi scholar-leaders, with her interlocutors straddling a broad range of political commitments and ambitions.Footnote ¹¹ The multiplicity of aspirations thus belies an easy categorization of a given position as Shiʿa, reminding us to carefully excavate the contexts of the data that we handle. Noor Zaidi’s work on Bibi Pak Daman is similarly productive for further engagement: Zaidi argues that the shrine in Lahore is “a physical space onto which competing ideologies about religion and the state are mapped and conflicts over meaning are played out.”Footnote ¹² Zaidi’s recognition of the rival claims embedded in the narratives various interlocutors tell about the shrine emphasizes the diversity of voices present in any claims to national belonging. Simon Fuchs, too, attends to the intratradition diversity among the Twelver Shiʿa in Pakistan, tracking the normative debates between the two groups he terms the “traditionalists” and the “reformists.”Footnote ¹³ What I argue in this specific article is, in some ways, the complete obverse of Saif’s, Zaidi’s, and Fuchs’s close attention to plurality— I insist on the singular dominance of the statist historical narrative around the origins of Pakistan. However, my argument here should not detract from what I consider a timely blueprint that works by Saif, Zaidi, and Fuchs have provided for future scholarship on Pakistani Shiʿism.

Within the study of political Shiʿism, the omission of orators such as Rizvi is notable. This is despite the recognition by different scholars that it is khatibs (also referred to as zakirs in this scholarship) who are far more numerous, if not outright significant, than the ʿulamaʾ when it comes to shaping Shiʿi practice and opinions. Commenting almost in passing on these orators, Abou Zahab notes that “these skilled performers, famed as much, if not more, for their personality and eloquence as for their learning, have always been more important than the mujtahids (jurists) to the religious education of the community.”Footnote ¹⁴ Here, Abou Zahab identifies the centrality of these orators to the Shiʿa community at large: I would only add that these orators serve as educators in the broader sense, beyond the “religious” with which Abou Zahab draws a line around the expertise of these men.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, the epigraph to this article is one example of how a nonreligious theme was seamlessly integrated in a religious performance. An anecdote from Fuchs’s In a Pure Muslim Land succinctly captures the impressive crowd-pulling abilities of these orators, where Ibn-i Hasan Jarchavi, a mid-twentieth-century Urdu-speaking Shiʿa orator was “credited with having gathered around forty thousand people in Multan” for a protest against the destruction of Jannat al-Baqiʿ cemetery in 1926, thousands of miles away from Medina.Footnote ¹⁶ Orators such as Rizvi, with whom I started this article, regularly pulled crowds that, at their largest, exceeded well over a hundred thousand devotees, for nights on end in Muharram. The regularity with which orators address their audiences, as well as the star power that some of the orators wield, makes their rhetoric worthy of a critical analysis by scholars of Islam in Pakistan.Footnote ¹⁷

On the other end of the spectrum, in contradistinction to an emphasis on political Shiʿism, scholars have studied the wide variety of Shiʿi religious practice in Pakistan. The central ethnographic work in this vein is that of Vernon Schubel, who detailed the Muharram performances in early 1980s Karachi.Footnote ¹⁸ Roughly two decades later, Amy Bard’s dissertation and a handful of book chapters drew out the performance of the Urdu marsiyah, within the confines of a majlis, Shiʿi gatherings to commemorate their dead, and miracle-narratives, across formal and informal contexts.Footnote ¹⁹ There have also been more isolated case studies of Shiʿi practice, of which Mary Hegland’s work on the Shiʿa women in Peshawar, Karen Ruffle’s vignettes about women’s matam (self-flagellation) in Karachi, and Sara Rizvi Jafree’s conversations with Shiʿa women scholars are some examples.Footnote ²⁰ This scholarship has employed diverse heuristics for their data: to wit, Hegland, Ruffle, and Jafree are grounded in anthropology, religious studies, and social work, respectively, with these approaches influencing how the scholars approach their data. As such, though all comment on the importance of orators in Pakistani Shiʿi lives, no one work devoted to the study of oratory, whether that of the public sphere or that of the domestic private sphere, exists in secondary scholarship: indeed, even the Urdu sources themselves only speak piecemeal to this central ritual performance.Footnote ²¹

Attention to orators also helps redress the privileged place that the ʿulamaʾ, “the traditionally educated Muslim scholars,” have occupied in Islamic studies scholarship as the guardians of the Islamic religious tradition.Footnote ²² The attention to this class of men has varied over time. In the South Asian context, Peter Hardy captured the ʿulamaʾ as part of a larger “underworld” in colonial India, frozen in time and therefore out of place in the contemporary world.Footnote ²³ Barbara Metcalf, pushing against Hardy’s theorization, charted the birth and growth of the Deobandi ʿulamaʾ, demonstrating the malleability of the actors that many conceptualize as rigid and inflexible.Footnote ²⁴ Muhammad Qasim Zaman, in addition to his excellent The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, also draws out the relevance of the ʿulamaʾ, especially in their continuous prominence in the Muslim public spheres from Pakistan to Egypt.Footnote ²⁵ Attention to the ʿulamaʾ, however, comes at the expense of dismissing a plethora of epistemic rivals, of which the orators are one example, that animate the very efforts of the ʿulamaʾ to maintain, demonstrate, and cement their presence in Muslim imagination and practice. The khatibs I reference below occupy a middling ground between the ʿulamaʾ and the devotees: a small minority of khatibs is certainly formally trained in Islamic madrasas and seminaries, and most khatibs have some experience of attending, but not necessarily completing, curriculums either in Pakistani madrasas or in Iranian or Iraqi seminaries.

“The Shiʿa … material and foundational to the creation of Pakistan”

The Gregorian date of 14 August 2021, overlapped with the Islamic calendar date of Muharram 5, 1443. On this day, as on the four days before and on the four days after, my morning fieldwork consisted of attending the series of majalis (pl. of majlis) that the orator Shahenshah Naqvi was addressing in Soldier Bazaar, Karachi. The venue is formally called Mehfil-i Shah-yi Shahidan, but colloquially known and referred to by the Shiʿa devotees in the city as ʿAli Muttaqi House. The ʿAli Muttaqi House majlis has, over the years, cultivated a particular reputation of attracting an intellectually elite cadre of Urdu-speaking Shiʿa orators, including, but not limited to, Ayatollah ʿAli Naqi Naqvi, or Naqqan mian; Ayatollah ʿAqil al-Gharavi; Dr. Kalb-i Sadiq; and Rashid Turabi, to name some of the stellar orators that have climbed the ornate minbar in this gathering place. The audience, too, consists of individuals with significant recognizability in the city, if not the country writ large. To wit, in the course of my fieldwork in 2019 and 2021, I witnessed ʿAli Zaidi, then the Federal Minister for Maritime Affairs; Shehla Raza, Speaker of the Provincial Assembly; Farooq Sattar, a political leader and former mayor of Karachi; Maqbool Baqar, then a justice of the Supreme Court and, at the time of the writing of this article, the caretaker Chief Minister of Sindh; and many other politicians, bureaucrats, and literati regularly attend the early morning majlis at ʿAli Muttaqi House. I highlight these details to reinforce the seriousness of these gatherings and to drive home the importance of attending to the contexts in which particular claims are offered, including the one that I now examine.

Upon ascending the minbar and having recited the formal Arabic khutba that marks the beginning of oratory, Shahenshah Naqvi unfolded a small piece of paper and said, “The Shiʿa personalities whose roles were material and foundational to the creation of Pakistan” (tashkil-i Pakistan mein jin Shiʿa shakhsiyat ka asasi aur buniyadi kirdar raha). Naqvi then proceeded, for around three and a half minutes, to read a list of sixty-three names and thus render his initially ambiguous “Shiʿa personalities” graspable and concrete. The list included individuals whose names are easily recognizable to lay audiences such as His Highness Sir Agha Khan the III, the Maharaja as well as the Raja of Mahmudabad, Syed Ameer ʿAli, and Muhammad ʿAli Jinnah, and other names that historians of modern South Asia might be more interested in, which is to say, names that belie an easy identification at first hearing. Naqvi read the list in a fairly monotonous tone, his voice low and grave, and upon completion of the list, he requested the audience to join him in reciting a fatiha, an Islamic blessing of the deceased through the recitation of the first few qurʾanic verses, for the souls of these historical figures.

As Naqvi read through this list, it was not just his voice and his demeanor that captured the audience’s attention. Indeed, on the ornate minbar that Naqvi was seated on, was affixed a small Pakistani flag, one that was visible to three different audiences: First, the devotees inside the physical confines of the ʿAli Muttaqi house, in the courtyard where Naqvi was orating; second, the devotees that filled up the streets surrounding the venue, where a live video broadcast of the oration accompanied the loudspeakers that are more ubiquitous in such gatherings; and third, the digital audiences, whether those listening to Naqvi’s oration later that night when it would be uploaded onto YouTube and played on different television stations, or those listening to Naqvi’s oration at any other later point in time, for a whole variety of reasons.

The discursive framing of the list, “The Shiʿa personalities whose roles,” worked hand-in-hand with the material framing of the speech-event, the easy visibility of a Pakistani flag that had been absent from all past events, and the ideological framing of the event, that it was 14 August, the day celebrated as Independence Day in postpartition Pakistan. This triangulation of discourse, materials, and ideological structures lends itself to thinking about the performance of factuality that Naqvi undertook here. The otherwise ubiquitous act of reading from a paper, reciting a list in a neutral and distant tone, and simply presenting the data, rather than commenting upon it, all were in service of what might be read easily, but mistakenly, as nonchalant objectivity, rising above and beyond pettier intertradition differences. Much later, in the oration, Naqvi did offer some glosses on the list he had presented, but it is significant that he chose the beginning of the ritual performance, when the audience is waiting for him to begin his oration, to recite these names.

Naqvi’s list of names, framed by him as Shiʿi personalities pivotal to the creation of Pakistan, is not, however, a marginalized group offering an alternative history, or an inclusion of excluded voices into an inhospitable archive. The list was merely a regurgitation of the state’s version of the history of Pakistan, one where Pakistan is the inevitable unfolding of clearly linked historical causes and effects, with the teleology simple, identifiable, and unwavering. Let me illustrate with two quick examples from Naqvi’s list. Both Syed Ameer ʿAli and the Maharaja of Mahmudabad are no strangers to historians of modern South Asia. Though differing in regions, professions, and legacy, ʿAli and the Maharaja have been well-attended to in secondary scholarship in English and Urdu alike. Their credentials and achievements, however, are not at stake: it is the slippage of the tongue with which they are folded, here by Naqvi but generally in statist history broadly, under a “Pakistan” movement, despite having lived and died well before any ideas, however embryonic, of a separate nation-state for the Muslims were floated in public or private discussions.

A more complex inclusion in Naqvi’s list is that of Agha Khan the III. Beyond naming the Agha Khan in his list, Naqvi also commented later in his oration that the “Muslim League” was founded by an Ismaili, in the “1800 something.” Naqvi’s discussion of the Agha Khan centered on the latter’s religious identity, one which Naqvi recognized as Shiʿa, at least in this rhetorical performance, and one that Naqvi further noted was indispensable to the history of Muslim belonging in South Asia. Again, the empirical inaccuracy around the dates of the founding of the All-India Muslim League is not what should jump to mind when listening to the claim Naqvi makes; what should capture our attention is the linear logic that links the creation of Pakistan to the founding of the Muslim League, a logic that omits, if not outright denies, the presence of significant differences both around religious identity, and around alternative conceptions of Pakistan, voiced in British India.Footnote ²⁶ The identification of Agha Khan with the birth of the “Muslim League” is a narrative that state history in Pakistan promotes: arguably, it is Agha Khan’s advocacy in the League of Nations in the 1930s that comes closest, rather than his involvement with the origins of the Muslim League, to his participation in the movement for an independent nation-state.

Similarly, in the brief gloss that Naqvi provided on his understanding (meri danist) of the “Pakistan Movement,” he shared what, in his reading, were the two basic tenets that undergirded the movement. These two topics (ʿunwan) chosen by the leaders (qaʾidin) were “A knowledge in Muslims of their rights” (musalmanon mein un ke huquq ka shuʿur) and “A knowledge of the unity and accord of the Ummat” (ittifaq aur ittihad-i ummat ka shuʿur). While the second of these aims lacks a locative term analogous to “in Muslims” from the first aim, presumably the knowledge is being raised in the same target demographic. Here, too, Naqvi’s narrative dovetails heavily with the state rhetoric around Muslims as an oppressed minority in British India, steeped in the darkness of tradition, and lagging behind other nations in the development of a national consciousness. In such a view, the distinctions of class, caste, language, and geography are subservient to an overarching, monolithic category Muslim that transcends all these other identity markers. The leaders, first the men from Naqvi’s list and then, presumably, the state that followed, also become leaders and guides of a people that know no better, that lack a knowledge of their own rights as well as the rights of, and their responsibilities to, their fellow Muslims. Naqvi’s point in invoking these foundational aspirations was to harken to a past that Pakistanis today, and not just the Shiʿa, had diverged from, and were thus in need of a reminder.

In both the list and the brief gloss on the Pakistan movement, and in the affixing of the flag to the minbar, and of the unspoken recognition of 14 August, we find how Naqvi, a prominent Shiʿi orator who has, in other places, claimed that “the Shiʿa got Imran Khan elected” and that “Pakistan was envisioned by a Sunni and executed by a Shiʿa,” merely articulates a history of Pakistan that is thoroughly statist in nature. This in itself is not surprising: Naqvi is, after all, a product of his time and place, and his attempts at wrangling space for the Shiʿa in historical imaginations of the country remain confined under the structural premises of state historiography. What is important is to note that though, on the surface, Naqvi’s claims look novel and appear to argue for a revisiting of the past by attending to religious identities, a deeper look at the form and content of the oration lays bare the state historiography mechanics and logics that structure Naqvi’s very narrative itself.

“Iqbal and Jinnah were both Shiʿa”

Let me return to the opening vignette for this article. Before I had arrived at Nishtar Park for the first majlis out of a series of five that ʿAli Raza Rizvi was addressing at the tail end of December 2020, I had certainly wondered if he would remark on the importance of the date, with 25 December being both Jinnah’s birthday as well as Christmas. Rizvi was up to the task: in addition to his comments on Iqbal and Jinnah, both of which I summarized in my opening vignette, Rizvi also proceeded to talk about Mariam and ʿIsa, the qurʾanic figures he rendered completely equal to the Biblical Mary and Jesus. The discussions of Mariam, in particular, were noteworthy because of Mariam’s comparison with Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, in whose memory the five-day majlis series had been organized. These comparisons have long existed in Shiʿi texts and practices, with Mariam often serving as a foil against which Fatima is imagined and aggrandized.

This large-scale commemoration of Ayyam-i Fatimiyya, or the Days of Fatima, in Karachi, in 2020, was an entirely novel affair. Middle-aged devotees, for example, could not recall this event, with such pomp and fare, in their childhood or teenage memories. I met many different individuals who each claimed to have played some part in making the event what it was today: these contributions ranged from arranging for Rizvi to orate, to shifting the venue to Nishtar Park, and to organizing sabils, stalls through which foods and beverages are distributed to devotees and participants of a gathering or procession. Though I did not get a chance to interview ʿAli Raza Rizvi himself, he too has put forward in other public orations, his claim to being the founder of these Ayyam-i Fatimiyya gatherings, having hosted the first one in the United Kingdom just before the turn of the millennium. I bring up the newness of this ostensibly old performance to underscore the ease with which devotees adapt old contents to new forms of practice, as well as the smoothness with which new practices incorporate old forms and contents in their performance.

Rizvi’s discussion of Iqbal and Jinnah lasted for around five or so minutes that evening. Rizvi noted that names, in and of themselves, were influential: what can be said of Jinnah who has both Muhammad and ʿAli in his name? Iqbal and Jinnah, Rizvi observed, were born into non-Shiʿa families but both became Shiʿa at a later point in their lives. Jinnah, Rizvi detailed first, acquired a “life membership of the imambargah in Bombay, and then in Karachi” (life membership li Shiʿa imambargah ki Bambaiʾ mein aur phir Karachi mein) and announced, “I am a Twelver Shiʿa from today, a believer of Twelve Imams” (Mein aj se Shiʿa Isnaʾʿashari hun, barah imamon ka manne wala). Iqbal, Rizvi continued, had become a Shiʿa after listening to the orations of ʿAllama Hairi (Sayyid ʿAli Hairi ki hi taqriron se, majalis sunne ke baʿd). A major public evidence, Rizvi suggested, was Iqbal’s poetry before and after his conversion. The criticism in Iqbal’s pre-Shiʿa poetry, Rizvi clarified, was of the mulla, and not the ʿulamaʾ.Footnote ²⁷ After becoming a Shiʿa, however, Iqbal penned religious poetry and wrote in praise of the Prophet’s family, even after many people started commenting that Iqbal was on the verge of going over to the other side (Bohat se log kehne lage ke lagta hai yeh us taraf chale jaʾin ge). Rizvi then repeated his claim that Iqbal, the ideologue of Pakistan (nazariyya paish karne wale), and Jinnah, the maker of Pakistan (banane wale) were both Shiʿa, and, for this reason at the very least, there ought to be a prohibition against the spilling of Shiʿa blood in the country.

The positing of Iqbal as the ideologue of Pakistan is completely consistent with the origins narrative that the statist historians have espoused in Pakistan. In this version, Iqbal is the poet-philosopher of the immediate nation-state as well as the broader Muslim civilization writ large. Iqbal is referred to as having diagnosed the ills that befell the Muslim nation, such as a reliance on blind customs, an epistemic inertia, a fetishization of the past rather than active attempts in the present, and so forth. Of course, the modernist rhetoric that Iqbal espouses is consistent with the criteria Francis Robinson identified in the Islamic reform movements in South Asia; these include renewed attempts at making revelation meaningful in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the inward movements (toward entities such as “will” or “spirit”), new modes and methods of rationalizing texts, and the reenchanting of the present by critiquing the disenchantment heralded in by secularisation.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, we can witness how Robinson’s markers of modernity are evident in the brief exposition that Rizvi offers for Iqbal himself.

Briefly, note the role that rationality, broadly defined as an ability to evaluate multiple claims and to reassess one’s initial position in light of new information, plays in Rizvi’s oration of Iqbal. Iqbal, to think back to Rizvi’s vignette, had become Shiʿa after listening to a Twelver Shiʿa orator. The implication here is twofold. On the one hand, the orator, as well as oratory, are imagined as committed to reason and logic, to articulating their ideas in the public sphere in a register that is accessible, meaningful, and forceful. On the other hand, the listener, of which Iqbal is the ideal type, must in turn be normatively committed to pursuing truth, receptive to new arguments, and be able to either defend their claims or to concede to stronger ones. The “sense of personal responsibility and the centrality of action on earth” are evident in the depiction of Iqbal’s conduct: Iqbal actively chose to seek out the right path, here that of the Ahl-i Bayt, rather than remain mired in the darkness of the tradition of his birth.Footnote ²⁹ As Rizvi narrated for his audience, Iqbal, when faced with questions later, did not back down or shy away from his devotion: he doubled down on his love for the Prophet’s family and embraced it in his personal life and his private life.

Similarly, the depictions of Jinnah in this narrative are framed, first and foremost, in terms of enchanted signifiers, the very names of Muhammad and ʿAli themselves. The idea that names are powerful is a long-standing Muslim doctrine, beginning with Allah and continuing all the way to Muhammad, whose name, to this day, demands a talismanic “peace be upon him” after each invocation. The insertion of this power of names into the historical figure of Muhammad ʿAli Jinnah thus renders the Quaid a quasi-divine actor, one whose actions were perhaps orchestrated not at his sole behest but at the wishes and commands of his creator. Here, it would be apropos to revisit Stanley Wolpert’s famous quote about Jinnah— “Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three” – and suggest, in line with Rizvi, that perhaps Jinnah’s achievements benefitted, if not directly arose, from the power of his very name.Footnote ³⁰

Consistent with my previous vignette of Naqvi’s oration, Rizvi’s oration is only superficially laying a claim to, or marking out, difference. Though Rizvi sees his contents as potentially disruptive, even as it is not quite clear what exactly he is disrupting, and sufficient grounds for a refusal for future entry into the country, the logic, structure, and teleology of his narrative is completely consistent with that of statist history. The reduction of the plurality of ideas, visions, events, and trajectories that culminated with the partition of British India in 1947 are here reduced to a singular, monolithic ascription to Iqbal and Jinnah, respectively. There is no denying that Rizvi focuses on the religious identities of these two men: however, as I have demonstrated above, the claims Rizvi advances do not delineate Iqbal or Jinnah as peculiarly Shiʿa, but as simply modernist. Of course, for the crowd of devotees listening to Rizvi, these distinctions between Shiʿa and modernist do not matter; what matters is Rizvi’s affectively persuasive argument, peppered with myriad evidence, and one that corroborates the overarching statist historical narrative that the devotees, too, have internalized in their young and adult lives in Pakistan.

Assessing orations

In the two examples I have shared above, we see how orators seamlessly integrate statist historical narratives into their oratory. In both instances, orators privileged these historical discussions by inserting them into the opening part of their oratory. The enthusiastic responses of the crowds, too, evince an appreciation by the audience of the orators’ choices of acknowledging the importance of the days on which these orations happened to be taking place. In this section, I draw together my examples to tease out three analytical engagements salient to my argument. These include oratory as a site of national belonging where Shiʿi orators and audiences emphasize, in equal parts, what makes them similar to the imagined nation; oratory as “atmospheric citizenship,” where the inculcation of origin stories is central to how different groups integrate themselves into the broader body politic; and oratory, ultimately, as an archive where we see the majoritarian aspirations of a minority group—aspirations that are consistent with, rather than an inversion of, existing majority rhetoric in the nation-state.

The limited attention that has been paid to oratory in Pakistan has approached the genre as hermetically sealed and restricted largely to “religious” or “political” topics.Footnote ³¹ This methodological orientation allows for an easy instrumentalization of oratory in service of broader explanations around mobilization, religious parochialism, and epistemic inertia. My examples do not lend themselves to easy categorization of oratorical content into “religious” or “political”: instead, both vignettes demonstrate the intertwining of themes that complicate, if not outright render impossible, scholarly attempts at distilling particular signifiers as either “religious” or “political” in nature. Repeatedly, in the course of my fieldwork, I observed examples that were similar to the aforementioned evocations of Iqbal and Jinnah, or the unidirectional understandings of the Pakistan movement. For example, a recurring topic in the orations in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest urban center, was the critique and ridicule of rural oratorical sensibilities, both of the speakers and the listeners. Similarly, in many other orations, literacy became an operative category through which orators and their audiences typologized other orators and audiences, across intra- and inter-tradition lines. The discursive and performative contents about urban/rural or literate/illiterate are not just Shiʿa in nature and scope, but familiar tropes evoked by people in Karachi regardless of religious, ethnic, and caste backgrounds. While ostensibly about difference, a closer reading of these vignettes, in the vein I have pursued above, renders clear the overlaps, rather than differences, that orators inadvertently identify. As such, even as Shiʿa orators and their audiences purport to be different from their Sunni counterparts, by insisting that Iqbal was a Shiʿa as one example, it is their similarities with other groups around them that stand out in the logic, structure, and teleology of the histories espoused in Shiʿi khitabat.

The structural similarity in the oratorical content lends itself well to thinking about oratory as one medium where “atmospheric citizenship” is performed by the devotees. Patrick Eisenlohr argues, in the case of present-day Mumbai, that sonic atmospheres, such as processions, are central to a constitution of cultural citizenship.Footnote ³² By attending to atmospheres, scholars can identify the “felt dimensions of such citizenship… highlighting its somatic dimensions that often evade discursive rendering.”Footnote ³³ Eisenlohr’s argument is that inclusion into the body of the nation is not merely at the level of signifiers or discourse, but is felt, literally, by the bodies of the citizens who constitute public gatherings. This is where my emphasis on physical oratorical events is important: the historical vignettes that both Rizvi and Naqvi offered were not simply information that was received and filed away by the devotees. In both cases, as in the many other instances of such oration, audiences responded vehemently and positively with vocal appreciation, coupled with a waving of their hands in an approving gesture, and the physical movements of their bodies as they looked around and made intimate eye contact with other devotees present. It is in these moments where oratorical events become a physical modality in and through which the nation is not merely imagined, it is enacted. The iterative aspect of oratory thus renders the genre a productive venue to observe and feel how the nation is made alive.

My argument has also been that both vignettes demonstrate how oratory serves as a vehicle where minority rhetoric articulates an aspiration to appropriate majoritarian discourses. In making this argument, I am pushing against long-standing depictions, whether emic or etic, that paint the Pakistani Shiʿa with a broad brushstroke, labeling them as “largely defenseless.”Footnote ³⁴ At other times, such scholarship renders the Shiʿa, writ broadly, as coterminous with the Ahmadi and the Hazara in terms of institutional and systematic persecution, and thus collapses important and significant distinctions of class, caste, language, and geography all in service of some uniform and broad Shiʿi identity.Footnote ³⁵ The location of my ethnographic examples – large, public events open to all and sundry – invites a reconsideration of the place that the Urdu-speaking Shiʿa occupy in Karachi, and encourages scholars to turn to self-representations, such as the ones I have discussed above. I have not taken the claims I examined at face value, but rather interrogated and embedded them within a broader struggle for hegemony, one in which the minority is as invested and as willing to internalize and imbibe the logic and structure of majoritarian discourse.

Rashid Turabi remembered

Let me highlight one last example to hammer home my argument. During the course of my fieldwork in Karachi, the specter of Rashid Turabi (1908–1973) loomed large. Turabi, arguably the single most influential Urdu Shiʿi orator in contemporary South Asia, was remembered by my interlocutors, as well as in the many texts and writings on his life, not just for his oratory, but for what he had contributed to the early growth and eventual stability of the nascent nation-state.

On 11 January 2022, I interviewed an orator who I will call “Muhammad.”

After I had finished introducing myself and my dissertation project, Muhammad suggested that we begin with Rashid Turabi. Turabi, Muhammad noted, had been in Hyderabad, Deccan, on the eve of partition and was specifically invited to Karachi by Jinnah and the Raja of Mahmudabad. The reason for this invitation was simple: both men desired for Turabi to translate ʿAli’s letter to Malik Ashtar so that the letter could serve as the basis for the soon-to-be drawn-up constitution for the country. Turabi was not quite willing to make such a journey, but was eventually persuaded by being gifted an ʿashra, a series of ten majalis where Turabi could orate on any topic of his choosing, that was organized just for him to address in Karachi in 1947–1948.

Two days later, I interviewed another orator whom I will call “Hasan,” perhaps the most senior orator in the city today. Shortly into our conversation, Hasan appreciated the foresight (wasih nazar) of the Raja of Mahmudabad, who convinced and got the approval from Jinnah, in 1947, to invite Turabi to Karachi to translate ʿAli’s aforementioned letter. To this day, Hasan shared with pride, that the translation of the letter is given to officers who reach the level of colonel or higher in the Pakistan Army. Hasan’s discussion of Turabi was full of specific details concomitant to Turabi’s first visit to Karachi, such as the hotel Turabi stayed in, the places where Turabi orated, and the topics Turabi discussed in his orations.

Whereas the earlier ethnographic examples from Naqvi and Rizvi had focused on the public figures well-known in Pakistan, whether Sayyid Amir ʿAli, the Maharaja of Mahmudabad, the Agha Khan, Iqbal, or Jinnah, my conversations with Shiʿa orators consistently highlighted Rashid Turabi’s activities in and around the partition of 1947. The two conversations I have shared above are united in their insistence of why Turabi was invited: this is because the incipient nation-state could find no better paradigm to guide its constitutional aspiration than a letter attributed to a seventh-century figure from Arabia. Of course, the stories recounted by both Muhammad and Hasan raise more questions than answers. If the letter was not yet translated, how were Jinnah and the Raja so sure that its contents would live up to their expectations? To invite a translator from Hyderabad, Deccan, also suggests that Jinnah and the Raja did not have faith in the many other prolific ʿulamaʾ of the time who had already made the move to Karachi, including some renowned Shiʿa translators, such as A. H. Rizvi. Yet, to ask these questions is to miss the affective work that such narratives do. Turabi is important in these narratives because he provides a richer texture to the histories Shiʿa tell, but what really anchors these narratives is the linkage of Jinnah’s constitutional aspiration with ʿAli’s letter to his commander.

Both interviews above memorialized Turabi’s involvement with the Pakistan movement and were consistent with how Turabi is remembered in Shiʿi texts produced in Pakistan. The Tazkirah ʿulamaʾ-yi Imamiyyah Pakistan, a leading biographical dictionary of Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ in Pakistan up until the mid-1980s, depicts Turabi as having a keen interest in politics (siyasat se khas shughaf tha) and as having participated in the Pakistan movement alongside Muhammad ʿAli Jinnah.Footnote ³⁶ Historian Reza Kazimi heralds Turabi himself as a constitutional wizard who, through his speeches and writings, solved the problems of “siyasat-i mudun aur dastur sazi” (civics and constitutional design).Footnote ³⁷ Turabi is also credited with pioneering the use of the 9 Muharram majlis in Nishtar Park as a markazi (central) platform from which to articulate qaumi masaʾil (national issues), a practice that continues to this day.Footnote ³⁸ Shahenshah Naqvi, for example, regularly reminds his audiences on 9 Muharram that it was Rashid Turabi who pioneered the use of the majlis as a platform for articulating Shiʿi concerns around civil, political, and national issues to the government.Footnote ³⁹

Public oratory in Pakistan

My attention to Shiʿa male orators builds upon a wider history of the importance of oratory in Pakistan, beyond a ritual performance peculiar to the Shiʿa, with two notable examples from just before and after the partition of British India in 1947, driving home how oratory has been central to political events in the region. Farhat Haq, in her Sharia and the State, notes how ʿAtaʾullah Shah Bukhari’s orations during the Rangila Rasul events in the 1920s found their way into a biography of ʿIlmuddin, the protagonist at the heart of the affair in prepartition Lahore.Footnote ⁴⁰ Similarly, Agha Shorish Kashmiri, a well-known Urdu editor and journalist in the 1960s and 1970s, central to Jamaʿat-i Islami’s opposition to Islamic socialism, both of the Maulana Bhashani and the Z. A. Bhutto kind, and at the forefront of multiple anti-Ahmadi agitations, authored one of the definitive treatises on public speaking, his Fann-i Khitabat.Footnote ⁴¹ Also relevant within the genealogy of oratory in Pakistan is Kausar Niazi (1934–1994), a politician belonging to the Pakistan People’s Party who became famous as “Maulana Kausar Niazi” in part because of his prowess in public speaking, and the author of Andaz-i bayan, an Urdu history-cum-treatise on public speaking in the subcontinent as well as on the Muslim tradition broadly.Footnote ⁴² Lastly, contemporary Shiʿa orators proudly commemorate the role played by Muhammad Ismail Deobandi (1901–1976), an orator who converted to the Twelver Shiʿi tradition and who, in the stories recounted from the Shiʿa pulpits today, single-handedly convinced the Parliament of Pakistan, including the then president Z. A. Bhutto in the audience, to declare the Ahmadis as kafir via the constitutional amendment of 1973.Footnote ⁴³ The examples of Bukhari, Kashmiri, Niazi, and Deobandi illustrate the role that oratory has played in the Pakistani milieu and imagination alike, beyond the confines of a circumscribed religious performance.

These instances, concurrent with the Rizvi epigraph with which I began this article, foreground what Bernard Bate noted, in the context of early twentieth-century South India, as the intertwining of “the press and the platform.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Here, platform refers to the stage from which the Tamil orators that Bate studied addressed their audiences: in the Pakistani context, both the minbar, a set of stairs used as a pulpit, from which the Shiʿa orators speak to the devotees gathered in front of them, or the more generic “stage,” set up in a whole array of public gatherings, from political rallies, to concerts, to weddings, from which different speakers make themselves visible and audible, transpose onto Bate’s invocation of the platform. By coconstituting the platform and the press, Bate harkens to the centrality that print capitalism has enjoyed in the scholarship on the construction of “large-scale modern social imaginaries such as the public sphere, the people, or the modern nation-state.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Bate notes that the press and the platform are “utterly different modes of communicative production that operate through very different political economic modalities and social processes.”Footnote ⁴⁶ While the press – the novel, the newspaper, the pamphlets – relied on reading ability, access to printed materials, and technologies of production, the platform – of which political oratory is one example – “spread in South Asia (and far more broadly) largely through motivations of the heart, in appeals to the imagination, in promises of salvation and of the reconciliation of God and man and the reconciliation of man and man in the universalization of the concept of natural or human rights.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Orators set up shop at street corners, parks, beaches, thoroughfares, and spoke to whoever would listen to them. In contrast to an emphasis on the rational and deliberative debates that marked Jurgen Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere in modern Europe, orators participated in an economy of affect, speaking in what William Connolly called, in a different context, “the visceral register of intersubjectivity.”Footnote ⁴⁸ While Bate’s attention to oratory is in service of the interpellation performed by an elite political class of “people utterly unlike themselves,” I take a different route in this article.Footnote ⁴⁹ I insist that in the Urdu Shiʿi orations, people who orate are exactly like – in their understanding of history – the people they orate for, and that taken together in this particular regard, the speakers and the audiences, both Urdu-speaking Shiʿa, are exactly like the group that scholars so often try to distinguish them from, the Sunnis writ large.

My attention to oratory also complements the recent encouraging trend in scholarship on Pakistan to center the role of affect in the construction of belonging to the nation-state. Nosheen Ali and Shenila Khoja-Moolji have both turned, in different contexts, to the conceptual apparatuses of feeling and attachment with which to understand the imbrications of statehood, sovereignty, and belonging. Ali details how religious identities are interspersed with national identity, or lack thereof, in Gilgit Baltistan.Footnote ⁵⁰ Khoja-Moolji reads the cultural texts and public performances of sovereignty by the state as well as by rival claimants such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.Footnote ⁵¹ Elsewhere, Maria Rashid has unpacked the relationship between sentiment and sacrifice in the Pakistan Army, and Omar Kasmani has identified the public architecture of intimacy evident in the shrines at Sehwan.Footnote ⁵² These studies have been rich, precise, and productive: my article is a small contribution to this ongoing conversation. My recourse to the orations I attended – large public events in Karachi, though primarily dominated by Urdu-speaking Shiʿa – during my fieldwork helps bridge between microscopic ethnographic work with interlocutors and with broad analysis of state institutions. In particular, my physical presence among crowds helps think about the concrete ways in which belonging to the nation-state, albeit of the statist historical narrative kind, is orated, felt, and celebrated.