Practicing Religion in a Religious City: Urban Transformation seen through Karachi’s Ashura Procession

This paper looks at the religious-urbanization process around the Ashura procession of Karachi, Pakistan, a practice that underlines the magnified visibility of urban religion and its effects on communities, public space, and the city itself. In this heavily religious landscape, the procession presents two interesting elements of the urbanization process: the questioning of how society and the city adjust to and negotiate the increasingly multicultural, multifaith dimensions of their urban society; and the consideration of urban religious aspirations that inspire people’s practices of being in, belonging to, and experiencing the city. In investigating the spatial, social, and religious dynamics that are particular to this interaction between the procession and the city, I explore how religious cosmopolitanism and urban aspirations affecting a multitude of faiths are enacted and transformed through Karachi’s Ashura procession.