Hizbullah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has become known for his oratory skills. Less explored are the speeches he gives during the Ashura ritual. These interventions have reinvented understandings and practices of the ritual while molding themselves to its basic structures. This paper investigates the effectiveness Hizbullah has deployed in blurring the boundaries between the religious, the social and political, and how speech “acts” have been central to this phenomenon. In so doing the paper will explore the last few years of Ashura commemorations, the spread of representations of the Syrian crisis and the fight against Sunni radical militant formations. The paper will argue that that main discursive strategy followed by Hizbullah is to “reclaim” an “authentic” Islam through ritual performance, re-writing history, and re-interpreting the prophet's legacy. This reclaiming process cuts through imaginings of community that is conducive to producing a form of non-secular nationalist discourse, which stands between ethical precepts and communitarian identity.