Recent scholarship on Pakistani Shi‘ism draws on a historical archive that it primarily textual: books, journal articles, pamphlets, etc. authored by Shi‘i ‘ulama and notables. However, as the field of oral history rightly asserts, the textual archive can never capture those historical facts that are only accessible through oral sources. This article at times challenges and at other points supplements and reinforces the textual archive through the creation of a new archive: an oral history archive based on multiple interviews with two leading Shi‘i ‘ulama in contemporary Pakistan. At the heart of these interviews lies the question of how these ‘ulama conceptualize and remember their country’s political past and assess their present, considering their minority status and sectarianism. Through undertaking the above-mentioned examination, this article inaugurates the use of oral history as central to scholarship on Shi‘i ‘ulama and underscores the importance of the study of this overlooked primary source.
