Shiʿa Ritual in Karachi: Religious Life in an Urban City

This submission is for the special Graduate Student session.

My dissertation broadly investigates the question of minority religious practices in public space amidst a complex context. Examining Shiʿism in Karachi, my dissertation explores the different ways in which Shiʿi religious life is imbued in the urban fabric of the city. I argue that Karachi’s Shiʿas negotiate a precarious relationship between public presence (visibility) and silence (invisibility) as a means to understand and negotiate their positioning in the city and within the larger discussion of what constitutes a “Pakistani Muslim.” My dissertation contributes to the growing field of urban religion, teasing out questions of religious presence, practice and visibility as related to changing contemporary cityscapes, and adds to much needed literature on Shiʿism in Pakistan and Muharram processions.

My dissertation highlights the Ashura procession in Karachi, Pakistan as a problem- space to investigate religious performances by minorities in public, urban spaces and their role in affecting social and political processes of change. Both Muharram and Shiʿism in the context of Pakistan have not been given due attention; Karachi in particular makes an exceptionally interesting focal point for the study of Shiʿism, as the rapidly growing megacity is a melting pot of diverse public rituals. The influx of Shiʿa immigrants post-Partition and more recently, the migration of Shiʿas from different parts of Pakistan, including Gilgit-Baltistan, Punjab, Balochistan, Sindh, and the northern Pashtun areas have brought their rituals to Karachi. This means that Karachi stands both as home to one of South Asia’s largest and most diverse Shiʿa populations and as perhaps the only place in the Indian subcontinent with such a diverse spectrum of Muharram rituals.

The Muharram procession has been studied in various contexts: it has been identified as a vehicle for political mobilization in Iran (Chelkowski 2010; Fischer 1980), Syria (Szanto 2013, 2018), and Lebanon (Norton 2005), and as a means of creating a communal identity in India (Pinault 1999; Nejad 2012). While the procession itself has not been studied in Pakistan, the rituals embedded in the procession have been analyzed for their role in the assertion of communal identity in the face of sectarianism (Pinault 1992; Abou Zahab 2008), subversion and transgression of gender norms (Hegland 1998), and display of allegiance (Ayoub 1978; Schubel 1993; Pinault 1992). Specific to Karachi, Vernon Schubel’s ethnographic work looks at Muharram rituals as role-playing for transformation through liminality and rites of passage. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in the 1980s, Schubel chronicles the public and private physical acts of mourning, demonstrating how Karbala is ritually recreated in the city of Karachi. Taking direction from these studies, my dissertation contributes to much needed literature on Muharram practices, processions, and Shiʿism in Pakistan.

My dissertation also furthers and builds on studies in the burgeoning field of urban religion, considering the ways in which religious presence and practice alter contemporary cityscapes. Taking the “urbanity of religion” as a starting point, this dissertation teases out the notion of how these practices “affect processes of urbanization as they are in turn inspired and changed by a cosmopolitan process” (Nejad 2015). It contributes to understanding the dynamics of the socio-spatial dialectic between religion and contemporary urban spaces.

Exploring “who belongs to the city and to whom the city belongs” (Burchardt and Westendorp 2018), scholars have looked at practices of religious minorities that “articulate claims to be recognized as worthy participants in urban society” (Bandak 2014). Looking at regimes of space and territoriality, scholars have researched contestations around places of worship, as well as the use of public space for religious festivals and processions, and how religion is related to questions of space through marking urban sites as religious (Bosco 2015; Tambiah 1996; van der Veer 1994; van Dijk 2001; David 2012; Burchardt 2017). Also of interest in urban religious studies are the materialities of religion and their impact on religious experience and practice, (Knowles 2013; Beekers and Tamimi Arab 2016), as well as questions about the visibility of religious groups in public space (Garbin 2013; Hancock and Srinivas 2008, Saint-Blancat and Cancellieri 2014). Burchardt and Westendorp (2018) posit that taken together, these recent studies in urban religion have formed “a paradigm that intertwines (1) the politics of belonging, (2) regimes of space and territoriality, (3) materiality and sensorial power and (4) visibility.” Questions around these themes frame my study of Shiʿism in Karachi, bringing together literature on Shiʿism and on Karachi (Gayer 2014; Verkaaik 2004; Khan 2017) as a way to understand religion in the city.