The Beginnings of the Tablighi Jamaat

Around 1926, in the Mewat region of small farming villages south of Delhi, a Deobandi scholar named Maulana Muhammad Ilyas al-Kandhlawi (rahimahu Allah) began the quiet effort that would grow into the Tablighi Jamaat, one of the largest grassroots Islamic movements in the world. Distressed that the Muslim peasantry of Mewat, though Muslim in name, knew little of prayer or the basics of the faith and kept many non-Islamic customs, he concluded that scholars preaching from their madrasas and mosques were not enough; the people themselves had to be moved. His method was revival from below: ordinary Muslims, not only the learned, would form small groups and go out, khuruj, for set periods, travelling on foot to villages and mosques, living simply, and calling their fellow Muslims back to prayer and the essentials of the religion by gentle exhortation and personal example, then returning to their ordinary work. The movement was deliberately apolitical, avoided doctrinal disputes and any role in worldly affairs, and asked nothing of the state, focusing entirely on personal piety and practice. From the Mewat villages it spread quietly across India and, over the twentieth century, became a vast transnational movement with millions of participants and one of the largest annual gatherings in the Muslim world, all without ever becoming a formal organisation in the ordinary sense. This scene depicts its humble beginnings, a plain village mosque in Mewat with a study circle of ordinary villagers and the bundles of those preparing to go out.