Islamic Revival and Emergence of Tablighi Jamaʻat in India

Abstract

Islah (reform) and tajdid (revival) are religious imperatives that aim to return Islamic faith, its texts, principles, methodologies, understanding and inference to their original pristine state and remove any properties that effaced their essence and disfigured their reality. During the course of Muslim history a rich revivalist tradition expressed itself in the lives and teachings of individual reformers and in the activities of a host of movements. From the eighteenth century great movements of revival and reform swept throughout the Muslim world to halt the further decline. In the contemporary period Tablighi Jamaʻat is the most popular reform movement in the Islamic world on the whole. Tablighi Jamaʻat, a religious movement, was instituted in 1926 by Muhammad Ilyas al-Kandhlawi in India. The movement primarily aims at spiritual reformation by working at the grass root level, reaching out to Muslims across all social and economic spectra to bring them closer to Islam. This paper attempts to examine the Tablighi Jamaʻat in the context of Islamic revivalism and in order to better understand this movement a historical emergence of this movement is important.