Shia Voicings of History

Abstract

Drawing on linguistic anthropology, and based on my over two years of fieldwork (2021-24), I explore the Shia voicings of history by attending to the ways Shia identities are semiotically constituted and mediated by the performers drawing on the works of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, an eighteenth-century Sindhi Sufi poet. They could be seen as what Anthony Smith calls “Neo-traditionalists” who are attempting to counter modernist versions of the history of Sindh/Pakistan through their performances. For them, Latif’s poetry and his Risalo are a source of Shia history, a poignant narrative of their sufferings and their beleaguered history, including the tragic incident of Karbala. In contrast, the modernists, and nationalists have for long used Latif to project the image of Sindh as Sufi, secular, and peaceful to counter religious extremism, and the state sponsored religious orthodoxy. Such a vision of Sufi Sindhi identity is, however, based on and inspired by orientalist understandings that projects Sufism as asocial and apolitical as opposed to radical Islam. The Shias through their performances, not only contest the official history of Sunni Muslim Pakistan, and nationalist project of Sindhis but also perform their own history by associating themselves with the Shia in Iran, Shia imams, and the wider world of Shias. Such performances link them indexically to the global community, and position them transnationally.