The art of public speaking (khaṭāba) has been a source of pride and identity for Arabs for over a thousand years. Already in the ninth century, al-Jāḥiẓ singled out Arabs as the only people to master the art of extemporaneous speech. Khuṭab feature prominently not only in adab texts but also historical works. The neglect that these texts face in modern scholarship belies their prominence the Arabic literary and historical landscape. While literary scholars have tended to focus on Arabic poetry, historians have largely disregarded the khuṭab as inauthentic “fictions from the beginning to the end” (Noth). As a result, khaṭāba remains, as el-Azmeh has noted, “a topic yet requiring a basic research.” This paper aims to help remedy this lacuna through a case study of the khuṭab of al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf al-Thaqafī, the fearsome Umayyad governor of Iraq across history and adab works (e.g. al-Jāḥiẓ, al-Mubarrad, al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Qutayba, Masʿūdī, Ibn Athīr). Through an analysis of these khuṭab, both as independent units and parts of larger texts, this paper aims to shed light on their function within Arabic historiography and adab as well as the purposes for which they were preserved. Al-Ḥajjāj’s khuṭab range from short matter-of-fact statements to long-winded pieces of prosimetrical persuasive art. Building on the work of Qutbuddin, Dähne, and Heinrichs I will classify them and argue that there are two main categories of al-Ḥajjāj’s khuṭab: While some seem to be literary devices following the late antique tradition of placing words into the mouths of historical figures, others—based on their literary and rhetorical qualities and their profuse appearance in many versions across genres—appear to drive the narrative. These are self-sustaining narrative units, which historians more likely collected rather than invented. I suggest that these latter khuṭab were collected first for their rhetorical value, and later preserved both as historical documents and proofs of the eloquence of the Arabs. The preservation of the khuṭab of al-Ḥajjāj—one of the most vilified figures of Arabic history—within adab texts alongside, for instance, the Prophet or imām ͑Alī, is somewhat puzzling and refines our understanding of adab's edifying nature and of the values that later Muslim historians attached to their “classical age”. Finally, I aim to show how historians and udabā’ used both categories of al-Ḥajjāj’s khuṭab to dramatize their accounts of the past and provide insights that otherwise would not have been preserved.