The Ethics and Aesthetics of Islamic Oration Between ʿAli and al-Azhar

ʿAli ibn Abi Talib (d. 40/661) is widely known as a master orator famous for his rhetorical eloquence. A collection of his orations appears in the 11th century collection, Nahj al-Balāghah. Despite ʿAli’s prominent role in the Shiʿi tradition and rampant anti-Shiʿi sentiment in Egypt today, his orations continue to serve as models and citational sources for Egyptian preachers. Taking genre as an organizing thematic, this presentation explores connections, ruptures, and continuities in Islamic oration across time. It examines the aesthetic and ethical work of oration, asking what classical oratory can tell us about the genre of Islamic oration when put in conversation with contemporary preaching. I argue that Islamic oration is characteristically marked by the marriage of the aesthetic and the ethical, but not linearly. That is, the rhetorical and ethical force of contemporary oration is dependent on the construction of classical Islamic oration.