Khatib

The khatib delivers the sermon at the Friday congregational prayer, and the office rests on a precise point: the sermon is not an addition to that prayer but a condition of it.

The sermon as condition

At the Friday midday prayer, which replaces the ordinary noon prayer for the assembled community, the khatib mounts the pulpit and delivers the khutba, the sermon, and in the understanding of the law this sermon is a required part of the Friday observance rather than an optional adjunct, so that without it the special Friday prayer is not fulfilled. The khatib therefore holds an office integral to the central weekly act of Muslim communal worship, and the sermon, which combines praise, exhortation, instruction and prayer for the community, is a fixed element of it.

Who preaches

The role of khatib is often held together with that of the imam who leads the prayer, but the two functions are distinct, and the khatib is appointed or accepted by the mosque and the community rather than ordained, since Sunni Islam has no ordained clergy. The Friday sermon has historically carried great weight beyond the religious, for the mention of the ruler name in it was a mark of sovereignty, and the pulpit has long been a place where the concerns of the community, religious and political, are voiced. The office thus joins a required liturgical function to a public platform, and the khatib is the one who occupies it at the defining assembly of the Muslim week.

The minbar, the raised pulpit from which the khatib delivers the Friday sermon, developed from a simple structure into an object of real political and artistic significance in its own right, since commissioning an elaborate minbar for a major mosque was a visible way for a ruler to display piety and patronage at the exact spot from which his own name would be proclaimed during the sermon. The clearest example is the minbar commissioned by the ruler Nur ad-Din for the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem in the 1160s, intended from the outset for the day the city would be recaptured from the Crusader states; Saladin duly installed it there after retaking Jerusalem in 1187, and the same minbar stood in continuous use for nearly eight centuries until it was destroyed by arson in 1969, an act that provoked international outrage and led to a reconstruction completed decades later.

Government oversight of what a khatib may say from the minbar is now common across much of the Muslim world: several states issue approved sermon texts or lists of permitted topics for Friday khutbas delivered in mosques under their administration, a modern form of control over the same platform that historically carried the mention of a sovereign name, and khatibs who preach outside the approved bounds in these countries can face suspension or prosecution, showing that the office's old entanglement with political authority has changed its mechanism without disappearing.