Delivering the khutbah in a ruler's name was, for much of Islamic history, a recognized public sign of political sovereignty, a practice known as the khutbah being read for a particular caliph or sultan, so that a change in whose name was invoked from the pulpit during the Friday sermon could itself announce, and sometimes precipitate, a shift in political allegiance within a city or region well before other news traveled. A khatib delivering the sermon under those conditions was, in effect, participating in a public act of political recognition as much as a purely religious one, which is part of why the office of khatib in major mosques was historically often a position of some standing, sometimes held by, or closely tied to, the ruling authority itself rather than filled purely on religious credentials.
The khutbah's own two part structure, a first sermon typically covering religious exhortation and reminder followed by a seated pause and then a second, often shorter sermon that in earlier centuries commonly included this kind of formal political invocation, still shapes its traditional form today even in contexts where the political dimension has faded and the khutbah's content is understood almost entirely as religious teaching and communal address.