Islamist terrorism, the ideology of the supremacy of Islam and the Tablighi Jamaat?, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Islamist terrorism, the ideology of the supremacy of Islam and the Tablighi Jamaat?

What is the Tablighi Jamaat?

By Jenny Taylor

8 Sep 2009

He's right in that the Tablighi Jamaat copy Muhammad in all his customs, even it is reported, eschewing beds for sleeping and toothbrushes for cleaning teeth; they use a twig. But he is wrong about their interest in non-believers, indicating the serious religion "blind spot" that bedevils coverage of world affairs now.

If it were the duty of the Tablighi Jamaat to convert non-believers, there might be a freer debate than there is. The cut and thrust of open engagement might encourage a truer encounter between neighbours. As it is, the Tablighi Jamaat is a revivalist group – interested only in other Muslims and therefore particularly inward-looking – which accounts for their danger to gullible young men.

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, and creates an atmosphere of spirituality, solidarity and purpose among themselves that proves extremely compelling. Deobandi-inspired, adherents are interested only in reviving the faith of weaker Muslims, and thus helping to ensure either a passport to paradise, or the rule of Islam on earth, whichever comes soonest.

Neither is the Tablighi Jamaat "ultraorthodox" – in fact rather the opposite. Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, founder of the Muslim Institute and godfather of the Quilliam Foundation, is against the huge 12,000-capacity mosque the sect wishes to build in Newham because, as he told me, he believes they peddle "fairy tales".

Their reliance on unorthodox stories of mythical heroes, their other-worldliness and pietism, their veneration for the founder and his family, and their ritualisation of certain select scriptures and practises like the chilla – 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 completely condemn.

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