Urdu-speaking Shiʿa khatibs (orators) in Karachi regularly speak on the origins of Pakistan, seeking to recuperate Shiʿi contributions to the foundation of the nation-state. In this article, I argue that such claims do not resist, subvert, or undermine statist historical narratives. Instead, the claims mimic, in structure and teleology, the very statist historical narratives that they attempt to challenge. I draw upon twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Karachi and demonstrate how thoroughly circumscribed such claims are. I read this minority rhetoric as an attempt to appropriate the majoritarian discourse, rather than as an attempt to challenge the dominant historiography of the origins of Pakistan. I turn to the domain of Shiʿi khitabat (oratory), a ubiquitous and public performance, and identify the important role played by such mass and physical gatherings in the articulation of historical claims. My works emerges from, and contributes back to, scholarship on South Asian Shiʿism, oratory, and the public sphere.

Despite the growth in scholarship on diverse religious communities in Turkey, little attention has been paid to Twelver Shiʿi Muslims. Since the founding of the Republic, the Turkish state's foundational secularist agenda has attempted to control and promote a single hegemonic form of Islam, and Shiʿa have faced continuous issues practicing their faith in public as a result. While the liberalization of the past three decades has allowed Shiʿism to enter the public sphere, the community has had to continue navigating limitations on their expression of religious difference. Based on fieldwork in Eastern Anatolia, this article deepens understandings of Islam in Turkey by showing how Shiʿa have negotiated their position vis-à-vis both secularist and Sunni-majority actors and policies across various religious and political currents. Rejecting categorization as either mezhep (sect) or minority, Shiʿa have demanded independence from state religious control while also asserting their allegiance to the Republic and nation as Turkish Muslims.

Over the course of the 18th–early 20th centuries, a curious narrative emerged in Central Asia wherein the Turko-Persian monarch Nadir Shah Afshar was converted from Shiʿism to Sunnism by a group of Islamic scholars outside of Bukhara. While this legend was rooted in Nadir Shah's theological ambitions to bring Shiʿism back into the Sunni fold as a fifth school of canonical law, the memory of that event in the subsequent two centuries was intimately tied to the establishment of several scholarly dynasties, which managed to perpetuate themselves all the way to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. This article engages the memory of this mythological conversion to explore sharpening conceptions of sectarian divisions and the role of genealogy in projecting spiritual authority. Most broadly, it argues that—far from a passing depredation—the Afsharid Empire profoundly shaped the geopolitical and social landscape of Persianate Asia.