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On any given day in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, tens and hundreds of Urdu-speaking Shiʿa khāṭibs (orators) address audiences that have gathered to listen to them. In this talk, I draw upon twenty months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Karachi to argue that khiṭābat (oratory) is best conceptualized as "intellectual practice." By intellectual, I refer to aspects of oratory such as designating topics of oration, presenting clear arguments, and providing citations as evidence for claims. By practice, I refer to aspects of oratory such as the materiality of the ritual space, the technologies that mediate between orators and their audiences, and the relationship between what is said in an oration with where and when the oration is taking place. In attending to khiṭābat as intellectual practice, I push back against dominant scholarly tendencies that divide “popular” practice from “elite” texts, often relegating practice as secondary to doctrine or belief. Attending to khiṭābat as intellectual practice is helpful because it shifts the methodological emphasis from an abstract or a solely discursive domain of ideas to the world in which such ideas are articulated, debated, and circulated. Additionally, rethinking khiṭābat as intellectual practice is also productive because it moves the conversation on Muslim ritual practice beyond mere functionalism (intended towards specific ends, like ideological dissemination or the reification of tradition) or mere phenomenology (reducing khiṭābat to bodily techniques or individual reception).

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Mohammad Nabeel Jafri holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. He is a scholar of Islam in modern South Asia, with a focus on Twelver Shiʿi practice in Pakistan. He received his PhD from the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto in 2024. His dissertation, Orating Knowledge: Urdu Shiʿi Khiṭābat in Contemporary Karachi, received the 2024 S. S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies, awarded by the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include ritual practice, semiotics, authority, and language use.