Abstract
After 1492, Spain emerged as opposed to the previous presence of Muslim rulers in the Iberian Peninsula. Consequently, Islam became a mythological past overturned by the emergence of a new nation. Today, scholars in the social sciences reproduce such distinction by focusing on circumscribed moments and spaces for the practice of Islam such as communal prayers at mosques. However, in Barcelona, the Islamic movement Tablighi Jama’at calls into question the segmentation of time and space dedicated to religion and daily activities. Working hours emerge as a central domain for proselytizing and the cultivation of everyday life virtues. Thus, the Tablighi Jama’at produces a creative way of experiencing Islam while engaging in city life challenging hitherto dominant orders of governance and representation of Islam in Spain.
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Notes
- 1.
As Fred Halliday (1993) pointed out, the insistence on the use of Arabic language to interpret the patterns of Islam through the study of its original sources is not exclusive to the Spanish Orientalist tradition. However, historian Eduardo Manzano Moreno (2000) has considered that a philological Orientalism (arabismo) is exclusory of other approaches to Islam in the Spanish case.
- 2.
According to the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (INE), in Catalonia live at least 300,000 thousand Muslims of diverse origins in 2012. In that year, in Catalonia, Muslims constituted around 5% of a total population of 7 million people. According to the INE, in Spain, the total population was more than 46 million people in 2014. Muslims are at least 1.3 million, around a 3% of the total population of the country. However, as argued in this paper, these figures probably underrate the total Muslim population both in Catalonia and Spain, as the census are made attending to the population of migrants and the registers of the converts Islamic associations, that in turn, do not include most of the converts of the Spanish-born Muslims.
- 3.
The Tablighi Jama’at first settled in Spain in the early 1970s, coming from France and Britain, through the north of the Iberian Peninsula, from Portugal through the west of the Peninsula, and from North Africa, through the southern part of the Peninsula. This is how, for decades, the Tablighi Jama’at has been mostly settled in Andalusia (Tarrés 2005, 2014) and Catalonia (Martín Sáiz 2014, 2015), in the south and the northeast of Spain, respectively. Today it is present in most of the regions of the country.
- 4.
Many of these Middle-Eastern migrants were Jordanians, Syrians, and Palestinians that came to Spain to pursue university careers in the 1960s. Some stayed in the country, forming a small Middle-Eastern community. Today there is even a third generation of Spanish Muslim descendants of those migrants.
- 5.
The South Asian community in Barcelona started to arrive in the city in the 1970s, coming not only from South Asia, but also from Britain (sometimes with British passports) or even from the Middle-East and North Africa. The community has experienced a tremendous growth in the city after the mid-1990s, and in particular since the 2000s, with the regularizations of migrants carried out by the Spanish Socialist and Conservative governments. Such a South Asian community is basically made of Pakistanis (many of whom come from the Gujrat district in Pakistan), but also, in lesser extent, of Indians and Bangladeshis. Most of the South Asians arrived in Barcelona as labor migrants, as entrepreneurs in particular, opening small food and fashioning businesses, for example, working as shopkeepers.
- 6.
The origins of the North African community in the city date back in the 1960s. Most of them, for example, were and have been so far labor migrants working in construction or small businesses. This community is mainly composed of Moroccans, many of whom come from the northern parts of Morocco.
- 7.
Some examples of these ethno-national Muslims’ centers are Minhaj ul-Qur’an and Dawat-e-Islami, in which Pakistanis are predominant; the Islamic Cultural Council of Catalonia, in which Moroccans are predominant; and the organization of the so-called Dahira Djazbul Khoulob, in which West Africans (Senegalese and Gambians) are predominant.
- 8.
Corporation for the Old Town Promotion by its Catalan acronyms (Promoció Ciutat Vella Societat Anònima).
- 9.
The growth of this demand has always been related to the growth of the Muslim community in Spain and Barcelona and the growth of the migrant populations coming from Muslim-majority societies. In Spain, there is no official census reporting the religious beliefs of the current population. Rather, in order to calculate the number of Muslims living in Barcelona, the Statistical Institute of Catalonia (IDESCAT) and the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (INE) use the register of migrants living in the city. The statistics tend to consider Spanish Muslims through the registers of the Converts’ associations (as the Catalan Islamic Council). This underestimates the relevance acquired by Spanish Muslims (and not only Spanish coverts to Islam), especially beyond the converts’ Islamic associations, and continues to reify the representation of Islam as a foreign religion, and of Islam of the migrants’ as opposed to Islam of the converts (Martín Sáiz 2014; Rogozen-Soltar 2012). In any case, after a look into the statistics, what is important to emphasize is that the increasing demand for more and larger places of worship needs to be understood in parallel to the imbalance between the growth of the Muslim community and the lack of communal spaces for daily prayers or for the Tablighi weekly meetings.
- 10.
In Barcelona, community spaces are sometimes the arena for the debates held by different groups reproducing the rivalries between them. Barcelona hosts the Tablighi Jama’at, but also other movements such as Minhaj ul-Qur’an (founded by the Muslim scholar Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadri in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1980) and Dawat-e-Islami (founded by the Muslim scholar Muhamma Ilyas Attar Qadri in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1981). The participants in all these movements were first attendants to the communal prayers and the weekly meetings organized by the Tablighi Jama’at at Tariq ibn Ziyad mosque. After the 2000s, both Minhaj ul-Qur’an and Dawat-e-Islami opened their own headquarters in Barcelona. Both movements are mainly composed by Pakistani migrants. Dawat-e-Islami has its main headquarters in Karachi, Pakistan. Minhaj ul-Qur’an also has its main headquarters in Pakistan, in Lahore, and has had an active participation in politics in Pakistan since its origins in the 1980s. Both of them are mainly defined by their ethno-national dimension and audience, basically Pakistani. However, the Tablighi Jama’at has a rather diverse audience in terms of nationality. It includes Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indians, Moroccans, and Spaniards. Whereas some of the regional rivalries among South Asians were to some extent transferred to Barcelona, resulting in the opening of centers of Minhaj ul-Qur’an, Dawat-e-Islami, or the Shah Jalal Jame Bangladeshi center, the minority of Indians have played a main role in reconciling rivalries and tendencies among the participants of the Tablighi Jama’at. Such role of Indian migrants is common in other cases, such as among Muslims in Deobandi centers in Britain (Bowen 2016).
- 11.
According to the Statistical Institute of Catalonia (IDESCAT), in 2012, migrants were 50% of the population in the Raval (at least 40,000, many of whom are not registered in the municipal census). More than 50% of this migrants’ population were South Asians (mostly Pakistanis, but also Indians and Bangladeshis), and only a 20% North Africans. The rest of the migrants’ community was composed, for example, by Filipinos (around 10%), West Africans (6%), and South Americans (4%).
- 12.
Although all these small groups refer to the authority of Tablighi ‘amirs located abroad, as for instance in the Markazi Masjid of Dewsbury, in northern England, all the groups in Spain (and not only in the area of Barcelona) enjoy a broad freedom to make decisions regarding the times and places to organize meetings or even the election of the main speakers during the preaching on Saturday evening.
- 13.
The round table focused on Eduardo Manzano Moreno’s article ‘A difficult Nation? History and Nationalism in Contemporary Spain’, co-authored with historian Juan Sisinio Pérez Garzón, and referenced in the present paper. The meeting was held at Danforth University Center at the Washington University in St Louis in November 21, 2014.
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Martín-Sáiz, G. (2017). Islam and the Tablighi Jama’at in Spain: Ghosts of the Past, Limits of Representation, and New Developments. In: Mapril, J., Blanes, R., Giumbelli, E., Wilson, E. (eds) Secularisms in a Postsecular Age?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43726-2_4
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