Abstract
This ethnographic paper builds on previous research on the Tablighi Jama‘at by delving deeper into the ways in which the movement creates identity and community among Muslims living in modern/post-modern urban spaces. The paper is grounded in the theoretical framework provided by Robert Orsi in his introduction to Gods of the City (1999). In his lengthy introduction, Orsi describes contemporary urban cultural theory. This theory posits metropolitan regions as comprising “complex networks of “pathways” that city people travel in” (51). Along these “pathways” city dwellers create networks of association that in turn become ways of life and communities. Orsi notes that, “urban religious idioms have responded to the spatial dilemmas created by the circumstances of diaspora and dislocation” (51). These urban religious idioms often involve intra-communal outreach that seeks to inculcate community members with a cognitive “map” of the surrounding urban spaces, marking off both desirable and forbidden places. I argue that this is precisely what the Tablighi Jama‘at seeks to engender in urban spaces such as Southwestern Ontario, and this study is undertaken to better understand this process of identity construction and community creation.
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Notes
Sardar makes the cogent observation that “casual callers are rare on the seventeenth floor of a tower block of council flats,” and that this social vacuum is one of the unintended results of the utopian urban planning behind such housing projects (Sardar 2004: 2).
Although the Tablighi Jama‘at is generally focused on reviving the practice of Islam among Muslims, as per its founding ideology, Marc Gaborieau (2000: 121) notes that, since the late 1970s, members of the movement have also attempted, with some success, to engender conversions to Islam among non-Muslims.
Muhammad Khalid Masud (2000: 10) disputes this date, and argues that, although Ilyas had begun da’wa work among the Mewatis in the 1920s the program of the Tablighi Jama‘at was not officially launched until 1934.
Although women also participate in tabligh activities, though separate from men, my experience has been exclusively with men, and as such, my account and analysis of the Tablighi Jama‘at is limited to male participants. For a good discussion of women in the Jama‘at, see Barbara D. Metcalf (2000), “Tablighi Jama‘at and Women.”
As Reina Lewis has noted, there is always an element of illegibility in clothing. We can never be entirely sure of the wearer’s intentions, or the wearer’s sense of what their clothing means or represents. Reina Lewis, “Consumption and Cosmopolitanism: The Veil, The Body, The Law,” (presented at the Association of Muslim Social Scientists third Canadian Regional Conference, Waterloo, Canada, November 24th, 2007).
Although the Tablighi Jama‘at is avowedly apolitical, this should not forestall recognizing the implicit “political vision” of the movement, and the “political roles” movement activists have exhibited in various countries around the globe. Politics clearly transcend state power, and in these extra-state, or ‘soft’ political contexts, Jama‘at activity can readily be interpreted in political terms; even the refusal to participate in state politics has political implications. (Sikand 2006: 176-177).
These texts are the ubiquitous Fada’il-i-Amal and Hayatus Sahaba (Talib 2000: 71).
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Dickson, R. The Tablighi Jama‘at in Southwestern Ontario: making Muslim identities and networks in Canadian urban spaces. Cont Islam 3, 99–112 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-008-0072-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-008-0072-9