The Role of Tablighi Jamaat in Islamic Revivalism
By
Moin Qazi, New Age Islam
5 September
2023
Let there arise out of you a band of people
inviting to all that is good, enjoining what is right, and forbidding what is
wrong: They are the ones to attain felicity. – (Quran 3: 104)
The Muslim
world is in crisis, and a biased media has added its biased colour to it. The
Tablighi movement is crucial to rectifying the misconstrued image of Islam. The
Muslim world is in crisis and a biased media has added its biased colour. The
negative stereotyping has created an impression that everything Muslim is evil.
However, away from public glare, there was a silent revolution with Prophet
Muhammad's mission placed at the top of all priorities – spreading the
authentic message of Islam. Called da'wah – the concept of propagation of the
Islamic faith- a massive cadre of preachers is silently striving to make
Muslims more perfect practitioners of their faith.
Da'wah
and its Meaning and Importance
Missionary
activity has always been central to the propagation of the Islamic faith. The
act of da'wah (Da'wat in its South Asian form), which means call or
invitation, is enjoined by the Qur'an and is supposed to have been the way of
the prophets throughout history. Call to the correct path has been more
specifically described by the Qur'an as the twin duties of 'commanding good'
and 'prohibiting wrong'. Da'wa is, hence, an integral part of the faith.
Tabligh, derived from an Arabic root meaning 'reach', literally means
'intimate' and has been one of the terms associated with preaching
historically. A tradition of the Prophet uses the same word while urging the
faithful to transmit from him, even if one verse. Expectedly, such an
understanding of Tabligh blurs the strict binary of internal reform and
external conversion. Whoever is deemed wayward has to be brought back to the
right path, be it nominal Muslims themselves. However, internal reform and
Tablighi have taken precedence within the colonial context. Jamaat is one of
the many such movements that emerged in this period.
Islam is growing but ageing and slowing. That
will change the world. Although the estimated demographic changes, which
foresee the growth of the Muslim population as a possible threat causing
poverty in the future in India, are not based on scientific data, some against
the religion of Islam still try to cling to their estimations that are not
based on any concrete fact.
Renewal
of Islam
Islam is
today the religion of 1.8 billion Muslims occupying a wide belt stretching from
the Atlantic to the Pacific across Africa, parts of Europe, and Asia. According
to 2015 figures, Christians form the most prominent religious group by some
margin, with 2.3 billion adherents or 31.2% of the world population of 7.3
billion. Next come Muslims (1.8 billion, or 24.1%), Hindus (1.1 billion, or
15.1%) and Buddhists (500 million, or 6.9%).
Partly
because of the importance of the Muslim habitat (or Dar el-Islam) in
world affairs, the West has begun to take a particular interest in studying
Islam and is trying to understand its relation to the life of the Muslim. It is
no exaggeration to say that the Muslims themselves are showing a similar
interest in studying the reality of Islam to know to what extent they may be
able to adopt modern ways without losing their religion. Recently, there have
been two parties amongst the Muslims: one maintaining that religion should be
sacrificed for modernization, and the other that modernization should be
sacrificed for the sake of faith. There is now a third between these two
groups, whose number is increasing, which sees a possibility for reconciliation
between modern life and the old religion. Contemporary Muslim thinkers believe
that the principles of Islam have a flexibility that allows them to explain and
interpret with the greatest freedom while still keeping the faith intact.
Religions
have jostled with each other for millenniums. Many of today's missionaries are
returning to proselytizing practices that the mainline preachers abandoned long
ago. Armed only with sleeping bag backpacks and a simple message, da'wah
activists are going door-to-door in more than 200 countries. This mission
evokes tales of Prophet Muhammad's companions who trekked hundreds of miles and
braved bandits and armies to spread the word of Islam back in the 7th century.
Islam has a simple but highly effective
evangelical message that boils down to five points to mirror Islam's five
cardinal pillars of a practice: Grasp the true Meaning and implications of the
credal statement that there is no deity except Allah, and Muhammad is his
messenger; pray conscientiously five times a day; acquire learning and engage
in the frequent remembrance of God; honour fellow believers; and participate in
missionary work (da'wah) by spreading awareness of Islam. Da'wah is God's way
of bringing believers to faith. Historically, missionary da'wah accompanied
commercial ventures or followed military conquests.
The
"invitation", or call, to accept Islam has to be extended to
non-Muslims and Muslims who do not observe Islam in its complete form. Calling
non-Muslims and "inconsistent" Muslims to Islam is considered by
Muslim theologians to be an unconditional duty of every Muslim. Every Muslim is regarded as a missionary of
Islam.
The
story of Maulana Kandhlawi
The most
accomplished modern missionary is Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhlawi (1885-1944),
a Puritan religious scholar. When he began his revivalist movement called
Tablighi Jamaat ("Proselytising Group ") in a rural setting in Mewat
in northern India in 1927, it was a response to a dominant Hindu culture
influencing Muslims and their way of life. However, the seeds germinated in
British-ruled India, emerging from the Islamic Deoband movement active in South
Asia. From its inception in 1867, the Deoband movement fused some aspects of
Sufism with the study of the hadith and strict adherence to sharia, as well as
advocating non-state-sponsored Islamic da'wah (missionary activity). In the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Muslim minority in British India felt
caught between the resurgent Hindu majority and the small but British-supported
Christian missionary agenda.
Kandhlawi
graduated from the central Deoband madrassa in 1910 and, while working among
the Muslim masses of Mewat, India (just south of Delhi), questioned whether
education alone could renew Islam. He eventually decided that "only
through physical movement away from one's place could one leave behind one's
esteem for life and its comforts for the cause of God." Indeed, some have
even described his movement as the missionary arm of the Deobandis. Other
Muslim groups in the subcontinent, notably the Barelvis, had previously
developed the idea of itinerant missionary work—Tabligh—to counter Hindu (and
Christian) conversions of Muslims. Still, it was Ilyas's genius to teach that
Tabligh should be the responsibility of every individual (male) Muslim. He
aimed to recapitulate the alleged piety and practice of Muhammad and his
companions in the 7th century A.D., and as such, was concerned not just with
Hindu or Christian inroads into the Muslim community but with stemming the
rising tide of Westernization and secularisation. Unlike other contemporary
Islamic revivalists, Ilyas did not believe Islam could be reconciled with
Western science, technology, and political ideologies.
Ilyas
wanted to take his teachings from the classroom to the ordinary people. The
mission was meant to devote itself mainly to the business of preaching. The
Meos, the community where Ilyas began his work, were Muslims but mostly
followed several Hindu traditions. The adherents of the organization are
popularly known as "Tablighis". The movement grew out as an
offshoot of Deobandism, a socially conservative school of Islam. The Tablighis
lead spartan lives, shunning the outside world. They strive to create a
compelling ambience of spirituality, solidarity, and purpose for the youth.
The
Philosophy of Tabligh
The
Tablighi Jamaat is the most successful of the many such groups to form after
the Mutiny (known to India, where it comes from, as the Uprising) in the
mid-19th century. Eighty million strong today, the group shuns the harsh
outside world, creating an atmosphere of spirituality, solidarity and purpose
that proves highly compelling. Deobandi-inspired adherents are interested only
in reviving the faith of weaker Muslims, thus helping to ensure a passport to
paradise or the rule of Islam on earth, whichever comes soonest.
Neither is
the Tablighi Jamaat "ultraorthodox" –rather the opposite. Their
reliance on unorthodox stories of mythical heroes, their other-worldliness and
pietism, their adoration for the founder and his family, and their
ritualization of certain select scriptures and practises like the Chhilla
– a 40-day preaching tour all are obliged to undertake annually – has led one
scholar to conclude that they function like a Sufi order, something that the
"ultraorthodox" Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia for example thoroughly
condemns. It is because they are not activist enough that frustrated young
zealots become fodder for the shadowy jihadi groomers who infiltrate their
ranks,
Over the
past century, what began as a revivalist movement has transformed into a global
phenomenon. It has seen a massive surge recently, heightened by an intense
religious zeal in the new generation of Muslims. Instead of adopting the frayed
coarse discourses, the Da'is use exciting anecdotes from the Islamic
scriptures to enthuse the initiates. The enlightened elders also engage in deep
theological discussions.
Transnationalism
and travel are two distinct characteristics of this movement. It adopted global
travel and physical movement as a means of da'wah. For God's sake, the most
important and frequent activity of an adept of the Jamaat is going out. A
combination of time and space, 'travel' has a special meaning in the Tablighi
discourse. Tablighi Jamaat members leave the comfort of their homes for 3-4
months to serve God.
The
movement is comparable with the concept of hijra, both in the sense of
migration and withdrawal. It is travel within one's self. One temporarily
migrates from Dunya (worldly pursuits) to din (religious concerns), a favourite
dichotomy among the Tablighis. It is a migration from corruption to
purity, drawing away from worldly attachments to the Path of God. A spiritual
period in da'wah work, in other words, reduces the desires for worldly
pleasures and sets the individual on an authentic moral and spiritual path.
Lessons
of the Tablighi Movement
In their
lessons, drawn from Quranic verses and the recorded sayings of Prophet
Muhammad, da'wah supporters lay out two simple aims. First, they encourage
fellow Muslims to return to what they believe are the standards and morals of
the Prophet's companions. Second, they recruit members to join da'wah and
participate in Kharooj (preaching tours). Kharooj is a designated
mission defined by the number of days involved in the spiritual journey,
typically three days, 40 days, or four months. The exercise aims to lure the
weak into the mosque, where they can repeatedly be subjected to the 'six
points' programme. Tablighi Jamaat acts as a beacon to those lost in Jahiliya
(the state of ignorance of guidance from God), but it stops short of that.
As
Travelers in Faith puts it: "Man is a ship in a tumultuous sea. It is
impossible to repair it without taking it away from the high seas where the
waves of ignorance and the temptations of temporal life assail it. Its only
chance is to come back to land to be dry-docked. The dry dock is the mosque of
the Jamaat."
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Moin Qazi is the author of the bestselling book,
Village Diary of a Heretic Banker. He has worked in the development finance
sector for almost four decades.
URL: https://newageislam.com/debating-islam/tablighi-jamaat-islamic-revivalism/d/130602