With Reference to the Meos of Mewat
By Yoginder Sikand
The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a number of movements for religious revival, revitalization and reform among Muslims all over the world. One of these, probably the largest Islamic movement in the world today, is the Tablighi Jama‘at (TJ). Although it has its roots in the South Asian Muslim environment, with which it is still closely identified, the TJ is now said to be active in almost every country with a significant Sunni Muslim presence (Faruqi 1992: 43). Its founder, the charismatic ‘alim, Maulana Muhammad Ilyas (1885-1944), believed that Muslims had strayed far from the teachings of Islam. Hence, he felt the urgent need for Muslims to go back to the basic principles of their faith, and to observe strictly the commandments of Islam in their own personal lives and in their dealings with others. This alone, he believed, would win for Muslims the pleasure of God, who would then be moved to grant them ‘success’ (falah) in this world and in the life after death.
Although not identified as a specifically Sufi movement as such, the TJ emerged from the reformist Sufi project represented by the renowned Dar ul-‘Ulum madrasa located in Deoband, a town not far from Delhi. It first took root in the mid-1920s in the area of Mewat, south of Delhi, among a community of Muslim peasants known as the Meos. The Meos continue to be closely involved in the work of the TJ, although their involvement has declined somewhat in recent years as the movement has assumed global proportions. Yet, as TJ ideologues and activists see it, Mewat is said to be the most successful experimental ground of the movement.
This chapter examines the reformist Sufi project of the TJ as it has come to be expressed among the Meos of Mewat. It begins with a brief description of the Meos and the early twentieth century Meo popular religion. It then discusses the intervention of the TJ in Mewat, looking at what this has meant for popular Sufism in the region. It goes on to examine the new form of Islam – reformist, shari‘ah-centred Sufism – that the TJ has sought to introduce in the region, examining ways in which the Meos have sought to incorporate the TJ’s project in their daily lives. It also considers the implications of this new conceptualization of Islam, and particularly what it has meant for how religious authority is imagined, understood and articulated. Finally, the chapter examines how, in the face of urbanization, education and the intervention of the modern state, Meo attitudes towards the TJ are gradually undergoing a transformation.
The TJ and the Reformist Sufi Tradition
The TJ has its origins, as mentioned above, in the reformist Sufi project represented by the Dar ul-‘Ulum madrasa at Deoband. Established in 1866, the Deoband madrasa set in motion a powerful movement to reform popular tradition, exhorting Muslims to closely follow the Prophetic model and to abandon what it condemned as ‘un-Islamic’ customs (Metcalf 2002). This entailed a fierce attack on beliefs, customs and practices that were seen to have no sanction in the shari‘ah and the practice of the Prophet, and which were consequently declared as bida‘at or wrongful ‘innovations’. It also entailed the definition of what constituted ‘orthodox’ Islam. As the Deobandis saw it, ‘true’ Islam lay not simply and entirely in the classical scripturalist sources, including the Qur’an and the canonical collections of Hadith or Prophetic traditions, but also in the writings of the Hanafi ‘ulama. As strict muqallids, the Deobandis insisted on rigid taqlid of the ‘ijma of the Hanafi ‘ulama, and even went to the extent of condemning inter-mazhab eclecticism. They were fiercely opposed to western culture, represented by the British colonial regime, which they saw as threatening the integrity of Islam and the Muslims’ commitment to their faith. They roundly condemned Muslim modernists who advocated reforms in the historical shari‘ah in the name of ijtihad. Yet they did not oppose modern technology or forms of organization as such, and in fact willingly embraced modern methods of communication, such as the printing press, to spread their doctrines to a wider audience.
While insisting on the need for Muslims to closely abide by the shari‘ah and internalize its norms, the ‘ulama of Deoband also sought to cultivate a rich inner life. Leading Deobandi ‘ulama also acted as Sufi shaikhs, serving as spiritual preceptors for many of their students, and initiating them into various Sufi orders. The Deobandis were particularly concerned to reconcile the tariqat with shari‘ah, the inner mystical journey with the externalist path of the law. This entailed new definitions of what constituted ‘orthodox’, and hence acceptable, Sufism in the Indian context.
The founder of the TJ, Maulana Ilyas, was himself a student of several of the leading ‘ulama of Deoband, including a number of its foundering fathers. He was born in 1885 in the town of Kandhla, in the district of Muzaffarnagar in the erstwhile United Provinces, not far from Delhi. His family claimed Arab origins, and was known for having produced numerous leading Islamic scholars. In 1897, at the age of 12, Ilyas travelled to the town of Gangoh, not far from Kandhla, then a major centre for reformist Islamic learning. After spending nine years there in the service of the renowned Deobandi ‘alim, Maulana Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1829-1905), he went on to Deoband. There he studied Hadith from Maulana Mahmud ul-Hasan (known to his followers as Shaikh ul-Hind or ‘The Teacher of India’), to whom it is claimed that he gave an oath (bai‘at) of jihad against the British. While at Deoband he also came into contact with other leading Deobandi ‘ulama, including Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi, arguably the greatest reformist Sufi of his times, and Maulana Shah ‘Abdur Rahim Raipuri. Later, Ilyas would refer to them as his ‘very body and soul’ (Sikand 2002:127). Ilyas’ years at Gangoh and then at Deoband instilled in him a deep reverence for the Deobandi ‘ulama and their mission, inspiring him to later launch his own powerful movement of Islamic scripturalist reform in the early 1920s. Ilyas would later insist that the TJ aimed at spreading the reformist doctrines of the Deobandis, albeit using different means of popular preaching.
The Tablighi Message
Ilyas wrote almost nothing about his own project of reformed, shari‘ah-centred Sufism, stressing that ‘practical work’ (‘amali kaam) for the sake of Islam was more important than merely writing about it. Here he followed the path of the early Sufi masters, who insisted that Sufism was, above all, a practical, rather than simply an intellectual, discipline. Nevertheless some of Ilyas’ disciples collected his letters (maktubat) and utterances (malfuzat), which they published after his death (Naumani 1991 and Bakhsh 1995). These are important traditional genres of Sufi writings and provide us with valuable insights into Ilyas’ own understanding of his work.
Ilyas’ malfuzat and maktubat reveal a man passionately concerned with the fate of the Muslim community – both its worldly conditions and what he saw as its digression from the Prophetic model. The community’s fortunes, Ilyas was convinced, depended critically on strict observance of the shari‘ah. As he saw it, the Muslims’ plight owed simply to their having strayed from the path of God’s law and having ‘adopted’ the ways of the ‘disbelievers’(Sikand 2002: 64-71). Hence, he regarded the need to reform popular tradition as particularly urgent. In this view, of course, he was not alone. Early twentieth century Indian Muslim reformists of all hues, including the Deobandis as well as Islamists and Muslim modernists, railed against popular customary practices, exhorting Muslims to ‘return’ to the path of the ‘authentic’ Islamic tradition. Although the ways that they envisaged Islamic ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘authenticity’ varied considerably, and were often mutually opposed, the reformists were united in their opposition to custom, which they roundly castigated as ‘un-Islamic’.
Yet, whatever their concern for ‘orthodoxy’, the entire effort seems to have been deeply influenced by an overriding concern on the part of Muslim reformers to draw rigid boundaries between Muslims and others (mainly ‘Hindus’) as part of a wider project of constructing an ‘imagined community’ of Muslims. This must be seen in the context of Muslim marginalization following the collapse of Mughal political authority, and the growing challenge of Hindu ‘nationalism’ that threatened to absorb the Indian Muslims into the Hindu fold. In Ilyas’ particular case, it appears that the growing success of the Arya Samaj, a neo-Hindu revivalist group, in bringing into the Hindu fold large numbers of what were seen as ‘nominal’ Muslims (generally referred to as nau musalman or ‘new Muslims’) goaded him on to realize the importance of inculcating a deep sense of unity among Muslims of all classes based on a common commitment to the shari‘ah. Only in this way, he believed, could Muslims stave off the Arya challenge and preserve their faith and identity intact, as I discuss below.
In other words, the growing stress that late nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian Muslim reformists placed on shari‘ah-centred Islam and their attacks on popular custom must be seen as intimately related to the particular political context of colonial north India, one characterized by growing and increasingly fierce rivalry between Hindu and Muslim elites. Here it is important to note the concern of Muslim elites with the shari‘ah as a symbolic marker of identity, uniting Muslims while at the same time distinguishing them clearly from Hindus. This concern had much to do with the fact – which the reformists lamented – that the Muslims of India (like the Hindus) did not actually constitute a single community. Sharp divisions of language, locality, ethnicity, sectarian affiliation and even caste divided the Muslims of the country, and in no sense of the term could they be considered a single homogeneous, monolithic group. The attack on local customary practices, and their replacement by commitment to the universal, normative standard of shari‘ah-centered scripturalist Islam, thus served as a powerful symbolic resource in the process of constructing a pan-Indian Muslim community transcending internal divisions.
At the same time, by attacking customary practices that were condemned as borrowings from ‘infidel’ Hindus, the reformers helped undermine traditions of popular religiosity and religious culture that brought Hindus and Muslims together in a shared cultural universe. Stressing the distinctions between Muslims and their Hindu neighbours, based on a firm commitment to shari’ah-centred Islam, reformists exhorted Muslims to remain deeply conscious of their separate communal identity, for only then could Muslims effectively meet the perceived threat of being absorbed into the Hindu fold by organized Hindu revivalist groups. This had its counterpart on the Hindu side as well, as Hindu reformers strongly condemned the visiting of Sufi shrines by Hindus and the widespread observance of what were seen as ‘Muslim’ practices. In turn, these attacks on popular religious traditions bolstered the process of constructing sharply defined boundaries between Muslims and Hindus.
Ilyas’ own reformist Sufi project grew out of these powerful concerns for identity and normative Islam of the Muslim reformers of his time. As Ilyas saw it, the decline of Muslim political authority in India, and what he referred to as Muslim ‘degeneracy’ (Ilyas 1989), owed entirely to Muslims having strayed from the path of strict observance of scripturalist Islam. By abandoning that path, and ‘adopting’ what he saw as un-Islamic customs that he traced to their Shi‘a and Hindu neighbours, Muslims had courted God’s wrath. Also branded as ‘un-Islamic’, and occupying a central place in what Ilyas saw as ‘un-Islamic’ customary tradition, was the entire domain of popular Sufism. This included practices related to worship at the shrines of saints, such as prostration before their graves, musical sessions and unrestricted mixing of the sexes.
Equally condemnable were a range of beliefs and associated practices relating to the authority of the Sufis, whether living or dead. The notion that the buried Sufis were still alive and could intercede with God to grant one’s requests was fiercely condemned as ‘un-Islamic’ and as akin to shirk, the sin associating partners with the one God. It was also said to be a reprehensible innovation (bida‘at-i sayyah) that had no legitimacy in Islam. Likewise, the notion that one could attain unity with God, which the wujudi Sufis stressed, was branded as heresy. As Ilyas saw it, the shari‘ah was to be taken as setting down the parameters of normative Islam. Practices associated with popular Sufism that were regarded as exceeding those boundaries were to be regarded as ‘un-Islamic’, and hence to be abandoned.
In other words, Ilyas did not condemn Sufism outright, as did, for instance, the followers of the Ahl-i Hadith, a group of reformists who emerged in the late nineteenth century, who identified themselves with the Wahhabis of Arabia. Ilyas’ shari‘ah-centred Sufism insisted on the unity of the shari‘ah and the tariqat. Ilyas, like many of his Deobandi masters, functioned as both an ‘alim as well as a Sufi, and in the latter capacity as a guide to his followers on the spiritual path. His maktubat and malfuzat are replete with Sufistic terms, such as lutf (joy), sukun-i qalb (peace of heart), nur-i basirat (the light of insight), ma‘rifat (gnosis) and so forth (Metcalf 2003: 145). Yet these are to be understood as states that are experienced not in mystical flights of fancy and self-absorption, but in the course of missionary work, abiding faithfully by the shari‘ah and exhorting others to do the same. Several of the practices that Ilyas enjoined upon his followers are clearly associated with Sufism. The ‘six points’ (chhe batein) that he laid down for his followers, which now serve to encapsulate the Tablighi programme, have remarkably Sufi associations.
The first of these was the kalima shahada, the Islamic creed of confession of the faith (la ilaha il allah muhammadur rasul allah). Muslims were first to memorize the kalima shahada and learn to pronounce it properly. Then, they were to internalize it, seeking to realize its essence – that God alone is the Master of all, which means that His will alone, as expressed through His Prophet, should be obeyed. The second point was namaz (salah), or ritual worship. Muslims were to learn the rules of namaz and regularly perform it. This was to accompany the cultivation of the appropriate inner attitude, for it was not enough simply to go through the worship as a mere physical exercise. The third point was ‘ilm-o zikr (knowledge and remembrance). Muslims were to seek to acquire knowledge of the faith, particularly of the shari‘ah, and also to engage in various zikr practices, many of these being clearly Sufi in substance and form.
Fourth was ikram-i muslim, or ‘respect for [all] Muslims’. The ideal Muslim was one who loved and respected all fellow believers, overlooked their follies and ignored their bad qualities, focusing, instead on the good that they might possess. Fifth was tas-hih-i niyyat (‘purification of intention’). All actions, whether worldly or religious, were to be motivated by pure intention, that is, by the desire to win God’s favour, to do His will, and to earn merit (sawab) in the hereafter. This meant that one’s actions were to be untainted by any worldly motives. Finally, was tafrigh-i waqt (‘spending time’). A true Muslim was one who actively worked for the cause of the faith, taking time off from his worldly responsibilities to travel to engage in tabligh or missionary work, both in search of religious knowledge and to impart that knowledge to others. Ideally, a Muslim was to spend three chillahs (three forty days) a year doing tabligh work. Overall, the chhe batein reflect an activist, shari‘ah-centric Sufism that, while borrowing heavily from the Sufi heritage, seeks to root itself within the boundaries of normative or scripturalist Islam.
Popular versus Shari‘ah-centred Sufism
Ilyas’ reformed Sufism, as expressed in the form of the TJ, had crucial implications for the constitution of religious authority. By attacking popular custom, the TJ directly challenged the authority of the custodians of the Sufi shrines (sajjada nashin), who were seen as having a vested interest in preserving popular custom for their own claims to authority. Since a true Muslim was sought to be defined as one who carefully followed the shari‘ah in his own life, the claims of the sajjada nashin to authority on the basis of their special links with the buried saints, generally as desciples or descendants, were effectively challenged. As Kelly Pemberton perceptibly notes, by making access to fundamental texts and teachings of scripturalist Islam available to all Muslims, the TJ, like the Deobandis, ‘sought to undercut the intercessionary role of the Sufi shaikh’ (Pemberton 2002: 72).
This did not, however, mean doing away with the position of the shaikh altogether, but recasting his role from that of an intermediary between God and man, to that of a teacher of the shari‘ah. In other words, the TJ put forward a new basis of religious authority. Authority to speak for and to represent Islam was, Ilyas suggested, to be earned through personal effort – by strict compliance with the shari‘ah, rather than simply gained through inheritance from one’s ancestors. Ilyas suggested that every Muslim, no matter what his status in life, could be considered a true wali or friend of God, provided he followed the shari‘ah faithfully. One did not require the ‘right’ family connections for that, contrary to what many sajjada nashin claimed.
As Ilyas saw it, one’s faithful observance of the shari‘ah alone qualified one to be considered a wali. He therefore effectively dismissed as ultimately of little worth the claims to authority of the sajjada nashin, based on the reports of the miracles (karamat) performed by the saints whose shrines they tended. He stressed that punctilious observance of the shari‘ah, and not karamat, was the only way to rise in God’s eyes. Even ‘despicable’ non-Muslims were said to be capable of performing miracles, and so that could not constitute a basis for authority. One’s claims to religious authority, Ilyas suggested, also had nothing to do with mediating between God and man, as in the case of popular Sufi cults, for this was considered as ‘un-Islamic’. Rather, he seems to have believed, one earned religious authority by strictly following the shari‘ah and dedicating one’s whole life for the sake of the propagation of Islam. In other words, the role of the Sufi shaikh was now no longer that of an intermediary, but that of a guide. Alongside this, the ways in which the Sufi path was understood also underwent a crucial transformation. The shari‘ah, rooted in this-worldly practices, took over from the mystical quest of abandoning the world or absorbing oneself in God. There could thus be no contradiction between the shari‘ah and the tariqat.
In other words, attempts were made to transfer the locus of authority in the TJ from the deceased Sufi or the sajjada nashin to the charismatic community, the roving jama‘at or preaching party of Tablighi missionaries. The Sufi discipline was to be cultivated within the jama‘at, rather than in a Sufi hospice(khanqah) associated with a particular Sufi order (silsilah) . God was believed to grant His blessings and even sometimes to arrange for suitable karamat , in the context of working in the jama‘at. In a sense, then, the TJ represents a significant democratization of religious authority, at least in comparison to the closely controlled and steeply hierarchical cults of the Sufis centered on the shrines.
All Muslims were exhorted to gain knowledge of Islam, and access to the resources of scripturalist Islam was no longer to be regarded as a closely guarded monopoly of the ‘ulama or high-ranking Sufis. All Muslims could, indeed should, be actively involved in the ‘work’ for the faith. Tabligh was no longer to be regarded as the duty of the ‘ulama and Sufis alone. Earlier, the tabligh was considered a farz-i kifaya, a duty fulfilled if even a section of the community, in this case the ‘ulama and the Sufis, performed it. Now tabligh was to be considered as farz-i ‘ayn, a responsibility binding on every single member of the community, no matter how humble his or her origins. One’s stature in God’s eyes was said to be dependent not on family origins, wealth or power, and not even on Islamic knowledge, but simply on one’s dedication to Islam and to the work of tabligh, expressed in the form of faithfully following the dictates of the shari‘ah in one’s own life. Naturally, such a stance worked to undermine the influence of the sajjada nashin and of many ‘ulama, even as it sought to impose the vision of one section of the ‘ulama – those ulama associated with the TJ – as hegemonic.
The Meo Popular Tradition: From Bida‘at to Shari‘ah
Ilyas’ reformist project was first launched in a culturally distinct region south of Delhi called Mewat, comprising large parts of the Alwar and Bharatpur districts of the present-day Indian state of Rajasthan and the Gurgaon and Faridabad districts of Haryana state. Mewat is the land of the Meos, a Muslim community who are for the most part peasants, and who today number around one million. The Meos were regarded, and in some sense continue to be seen, as nau-Muslims, although their first contact with Islam goes back several centuries. The Meos claim to be of ‘high’ caste Hindu Rajput origin, but although some of them may well be of Rajput stock, the vast majority of Meos appear to be descendants of ‘low’ caste and tribal converts, who now claim a ‘high’ caste origin for themselves.
Mewat’s first encounters with Islam date to the twelfth century, when the Meos living in the vicinity of the imperial capital of the Sultanate of Delhi often came into conflict with the Turkish Sultans. Drought and famine sometimes forced hordes of Meos to attack and loot Delhi, which then brought violent reprisals upon them. On several occasions, the Meos were forced to convert to Islam as a punishment and as a means to combat Meo lawlessness. Yet, if the Sultans were apparently rather ineffective in converting the Meos to Islam, numerous Sufis who settled in the region seem to have been more successful. Today, scores of Sufi shrines dot the Mewati countryside, testifying to the many centuries of Sufi presence in the area. The vast majority of the inhabitants of Mewat came to identify with Islam, at least nominally, under the influence of these Sufis. Yet, Meo forms of Islam continued to be deeply rooted in popular traditions, leading observers to comment that the Meos were Muslim in name only. Thus, writing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Major Powlett, the British settlement officer of the Alwar state, observed:
The Meos are now all Musalmans in name, but their village deities are the same as those of the Hindus, and they keep several Hindu fasts… Meos, in their customs, are half Hindu. The Meo places of worship are similar to those of their Hindu neighbours… As regards their own religion [Islam] the Meos are very ignorant. Few know the kalima, and fewer still the regular prayers, the seasons of which they entirely neglect. (Powlett 1878: 38)
According to another source, in Mewat:
Reading of the Qur’an was less popular than reading the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. Hindu shrines far outnumbered mosques in Mewat. Few Meos prayed in the Muslim manner, but most of them performed the puja – worship at the shrines of the Hindu gods and goddesses. (P.C. Aggarwal, quoted in Sikand 2002: 113)
As an almost entirely peasant community, the Meos had few religious specialists of their own. Instead, they sought the help of Hindu pandits as well as Muslim faqirs, custodians of the Sufi shrines, for various ritual purposes. Meo religion was, above all, practical – rooted in specific life-cycle events and geared to the propitiation of deities. These included Allah, and a host of spirits and hidden saints for favours or to ward off misfortune. As for the way the Meos identified themselves, the notion of ‘Muslim’ as clearly excluding and being set apart from or against ‘Hindu’ was quite unknown.
From the late nineteenth century onward, and gaining particular momentum from the 1920s, a complex set of developments set in motion a process of radical redefinition of Meo self-perceptions, including religious identity. These developments included the introduction and spread of reified notions of religion and community identity popularized by colonial administrators, particularly census officers, as well as Muslim and Hindu elites; growing competition between Hindu and Muslim elites, leading to Hindu-Muslim conflict in large parts of northern India; a series of Meo peasant revolts in the context of the Great Depression of the 1930s that the Hindu rulers of the Bharatpur and Alwar states saw as ‘Islamic’ movements and accordingly sought to brutally crush; the role of external Muslim organizations and leaders in assisting the Meos in their revolt and articulating their grievances to a wider audience; and, finally, the role of Ilyas and his movement in the area from the mid-1920s, seeking to save the Meos from the threat of being absorbed into the Hindu fold at the hands of the Hindu revivalist Arya Samaj.
All of these developments appear to have fostered an increasing stress on the Islamic aspect of Meo identity. The TJ had a crucial role to play in this process. Its call for the Meos to identify with and observe the rules of the shari‘ah struck a receptive chord among many Meos, who now sought to distinguish themselves clearly from their Hindu neighbours. Yet, as I have shown in my study of the TJ in Mewat, the TJ really took off in a major way among the Meos only in the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947, after the bloody rioting in Mewat in which tens of thousands of Meos were killed. Faced with the fierce hostility of their Hindu neighbours, most Meos found in the TJ a source of strength, and its call to eschew ‘Hindu’ customs and beliefs were now certainly more acceptable than before (Sikand 2002: 147-56).
To understand the success of the TJ in Mewat, it is useful here to examine how the the TJ’s followers sought to root the movement among the Meos, and in particular how they related it to the Meo popular religious tradition. As we have seen, the Meo tradition had for centuries resisted pressure to conform to normative understandings of Islam. Ilyas therefore insisted on a gradual process of Islamization, following in the footsteps of his Sufi forebears. The Meos were not to be forced to accept and follow the entire edifice of the shari‘ah all at once. Rather, Ilyas stressed, they must be first encouraged to follow the chhe batein, based on a firm cultivation of their faith (iman) in Islam. Once their faith was sufficiently fortified, he argued, they would themselves work to create a ‘truly’ Islamic society, replacing their ‘un-Islamic’ practices and institutions with those in line with the shari‘ah.
Hence, TJ missionaries were asked in their preaching work simply to focus on the great divine rewards (faza’il) that the Meos would receive if they followed the shari‘ah, with promises of immense blessings (sawab) assured for those who ‘revived’ even the most minor sunnat or practice of the Prophet. In matters other than ritual worship, the missionaries were to clearly avoid the masa’il, the detailed aspects of Islamic jurisprudence and law that in many respects conflicted with Meo customary practice. This approach was particularly important given the deep-rootedness of the Meo tradition. It reflected Ilyas’ astute awareness that even though this tradition flagrantly violated the shari‘ah in many crucial respects, attempting to combat this tradition directly would inevitably result in stern Meo opposition to his? the TJ movement. Put differently, Ilyas insisted that in their missionary work, TJ activists avoid all reference to what he called ikhtilafi matters that might promote dissent and conflict. Instead, he stressed, they must focus only on ittifaqi issues, such as the need for piety and prayer, on which there could be no dispute or opposition (Sikand 2002: 83-89).
With Ilyas’ pragmatic missionary strategy, the TJ was able to establish a firm foothold in Mewat by the end of the 1940s. This process responded to the Meos’ quest for a more unambiguously ‘Muslim’ identity built in opposition to what they had come to see as the menacing Hindu ‘other’. The bloody events of 1947, when several thousand Meos were slaughtered by Hindu mobs, provided further boost.
We can thus appreciate that with the growing spread of Hindu militancy in large parts of India today, including in Mewat, association with the TJ and its programme of shari‘ah-centred Islamic reformism has much to do with Muslim insecurities and fear that their lives, faith and identity are under grave threat. Formal affiliation or identification with the TJ has become, in a sense, an integral part of Meo identity. However this does not mean that the TJ has made much headway in bringing the Meos to lead their personal and collective lives in accordance with the shari‘ah. Several pre-Islamic customs and institutions of the Meos remain deeply rooted, and the commitment of many Meos to TJ-style reformism is nominal.The TJ’s own style of missionary activism appears largely responsible, since it leads most Meos to only a very partial acceptance of the movement’s total message.
As noted above, TJ workers are strictly forbidden from raising ‘controversial’ (ikhtilafi) matters and must restrict themselves to the ittifaqi masa’il matters on which all Muslim groups agree. In the Meo case, stressing the faza’il and the ittifaqi, as opposed to the masa’il and the ikhtilafi, has enabled the TJ to gain accommodation in Mewati society without major controversy. But the deep-rooted ‘un-Islamic’ traditions and institutions of the Meos that TJ activists see as ‘un-Islamic’ are not directly challenged or opposed. [ These include the traditional Meo prohibition of cross-cousin marriage (the preferred form of marriage for many other Muslim groups in South Asia), the custom of dowry paid to the groom by the bride’s family, the practice of women working in the fields in the presence of unfamiliar men, and the almost complete denial of inheritance rights to women, all of which have no sanction in the shari‘ah.
The TJ and Modernity
The TJ’s response to the manifold challenges that modernity poses is a complex one, fraught with tensions and ambiguities. On the one hand, in line with the general Deobandi position on the matter, the TJ enjoins strict taqlid or imitation of past precedent in matters of fiqh or Islamic jurisprudence. [On the other hand, the TJ explicitly condemns ijtihad, or creative reasoning and development of fiqh in accordance with changing conditions. The TJ sees ijtihad as a threat, since while claiming to reform the shari‘ah (which followers believe were revealed by God), it regards unrestrained ijtihad as diluting Muslims’ faith and undermining the shari‘ah. he TJ regards such changes as dangerous bida‘at or ‘innovations’ that are to be fiercely condemned, for every such ‘innovation’ is said to lead to hell-fire. In other words, in several crucial respects the TJ appears to be vehemently hostile to the changes that modernity brings in its wake, including changing value systems and laws. Notwithstanding, Meo identification with the TJ today also has much to do with distinctly modern concerns. Thus, the TJ’s opposition to the cults centred on the Sufi shrines ties in with contemporary Meo aspirations for equality and self-respect. As a Meo respondent, an active TJ worker, put it:
In the past, we served the faqirs of the shrines, for they insisted that they were of pure Muslim descent and that we were Hindu converts. They claimed that they had special access to the Sufis whose shrines they looked after, and through those saints, to God. We would serve them to pass on our requests to God through the saints. In return we had to pay them regular sums of money and a share in their harvest. Despite that, they treated us as lowborn, almost like their own servants, and looked upon us as uncivilized and uncouth.
In contrast, the TJ is seen as considerably more ‘democratic’, challenging the notion of the privileged access of the Sufis and the faqirs to religious knowledge and authority. As the Meo respondent quoted above continued:
In the work of the jama‘ats there is no high and low. All of us are equal, being fellow Muslims. It does not matter in Allah’s eyes how much money you have, how much land you own, how many degrees you have earned or even how many books you have read on Islam. Without faith and willingness to work for the sake of Islam, all such things are useless. Here, in our movement, even the poorest Muslim feels he is the equal of a rich landlord and can even exercise the right to gently admonish him when he does something wrong.
The shari’ah-centred form of Islam that the TJ represents is also seen as relieving the Meos of a heavy economic burden, which has come to be associated with popular Sufism. The TJ makes no financial demands on its followers, other than exhorting them to spend on going out themselves to conduct tabligh work. Generally, this is not very expensive, as activists sleep in mosques and cook their own food or are entertained by local Muslims. This is often presented as in sharp contrast to pre-Tablighi Meo popular religion centred on the Sufi shrines. Thus, a Meo respondent explained:
In the past, each time we went to a shrine, which was very often because we always wanted something from the saints who are buried there, we were expected to pay something to the faqirs and the other sajjada nashins. Sometimes we would give them wheat or vegetables or maybe a chicken, and at other times cash. If you didn’t pay you sometimes were made to feel that you were not welcome. Some faqirs would even quarrel with us, demanding to be paid more. And then, we had an extra burden of expenses each time we organized a festival, and there were so many, as we celebrated both Hindu and Muslim festivals. There are so many dargahs [Sufi shrines] in Mewat, and each shrine has its own large annual festival. So, sometimes poor Meo families landed deep in debt to meet the expenses involved in these festivals and the payments to the shrine custodians. But there’s nothing of this sort at all in the Tablighi Jama‘at. In fact, it seems that Allah has sent the jama‘at to rescue us from our economic plight.
Association with the TJ today also represents new and distinctly modern ways of imagining Muslim communal identity. In the years after the Partition, Mewat gradually opened up to the wider world and the developments taking place within it. This led to an increasing crisis of Meo parochial religious identity tied to local cults of the saints and various folk heroes and deities, and a consequent further shift to a ‘world religion’ as represented by the shari‘ah-centred Islam of the TJ. The Meo popular tradition was clearly inadequate in confronting the new challenges that modernity posed for the Meos, for which the tools provided by the reified Islam of the TJ seemed far more effective and useful. Before the Partition, literacy was almost non-existent among the community. Post-Partition, the state established a number of schools in the region, which led to the gradual emergence of a class of literate Meos. This, and improved means for communications with the outside world, meant that Meos could now seek to establish closer links with the wider Indian Muslim community. These links were often facilitated through the Tablighi network, for by this time the TJ had gradually expanded from its confines in Mewat to become an India-wide movement with a significant presence in several other countries as well.
Influenced by the TJ, growing numbers of Meo students took admission in madrasas or Islamic schools in other parts of India, thus facilitating a crucial process of geographical as well as upward social mobility for many Meos. Going on missionary tours to other parts of India and increasingly abroad has led many Meos not simply to new understandings? del: as] of Muslim identity, and a growing commitment to global Muslim unity and to Islam. It has also brought distinct worldly benefits for several Meos. As one Meo respondent explained:
In theory Tablighi activists are meant to travel simply to increase their knowledge of Islam and to impart that knowledge to others. Indeed, that is what many of them actually do. However, travelling to other places on tabligh work naturally opens up the minds of many of the activists. They see new places, new things, and meet new sorts of people, and come to know how other people live. They come to know of the whole world outside Mewat, about new developments in the rest of the world, which can really open their minds. Some of them might even strike business deals with people they might meet on their journeys or establish business contacts or get new business ideas, although the Tablighi elders actually strictly forbid this.
In matters of education, gender relations and inter-community relations – three areas of particular concern to Muslims living as a minority in India today – the TJ advocates what some observers may see as a rigid conformism and a stern refusal to recognize the need for change or reform. Thus, for instance, Ilyas himself is said to have condemned as a ‘Satanic institution’ the first modern school in Mewat, set up in 1923 at the town of Nun (Sikand 2002: 121), warning the Meos to stay away from it and to send their children to Islamic madrasas instead. Even today, many TJ leaders insist (quoting a Meo ‘alim) that ‘the only form of education that is valuable in God’s eyes is knowledge of the shari‘ah, which alone can win success for Muslims in this world and in the hereafter’. In Mewat’s leading madrasa, the Madrasa Morin ul-Islam at Nun, founded in the early 1940s by Maulana Ilyas himself, no ‘worldly’ subjects are taught, and students are forbidden from reading newspapers for fear that they might be attracted by the snares of the world (Sikand 2002: 164). Some Meo mauves associated with the TJ are said to go so far as to declare that learning English and Hindi are harem, strictly forbidden in Islam (Sikand 2002: 165).
The TJ also exhibits a distinctly anti-modernist impulse in matters of gender relations. It represents an extremely patriarchal understanding of Islam, one in which women are clearly subordinate to men. Many Meo TJ leaders and activists continue to condemn modern education for girls, seeing that it threatens to tempt girls away from commitment to Islam and opens the doors to all manner of fine, worldly, including sexual, temptation, strife and insubordination. Female Meo literacy rates remain among the lowest in India, estimated at no more than 5 per cent, and this owes much to the distinct lack of enthusiasm by TJ activists in Mewat for girls’ education.
In matters of inter-community relations too, the TJ’s position might seem to militant against modern sensibilities. It refuses to recognize the truth claims of other faiths, insisting that Islam, as the TJ understands it, is the only way to win God’s favour and enter paradise. All other religions are regarded as either human creations or representing distorted versions of divine religions that have become corrupted over time. Other religions are therefore false and their followers, consequently, doomed to hell. TJ activists are constantly reminded that non-Muslims, no matter how pious and noble they might be, are all veritable ‘enemies of God’. Nevertheless, TJ activists are expected to behave with courtesy and kindness towards non-Muslims, although strictly within the limits set by the shari‘ah. This derives from the hopethat non-Muslims might be thereby suitably impressed by Islam and even consider accepting it.
A common refrain heard in TJ circles is that the movement is concerned ‘only about the heavens and the brave below, and never about the world in-between’. This is often employed as an argument to convince others that the TJ has no political or worldly motives. Yet precisely because of what is seen as the TJ’s distinct lack of concern for the worldly affairs of Muslims, today a small but growing number of Meo youth increasingly voice their protest against what they see as the TJ’s rigid understanding of Islam. These youths have been influenced by ‘modernist’ as well as Islamist understandings of Islam, and, ironically, helped by the TJ in their first exposure to Islamic structuralism. They regard what they see as the TJ’s indifference to the this-worldly concerns of the community as wholly ‘un-Islamic’. In their view, the TJ’s obsessive concern with the ritual minutiae of the shari‘ah, and its silence on the social, economic and political affairs of the community, have only contributed to the further backwardness of their community.
Comparisons are often drawn between the Meos and their Hindu Jat neighbours. For the most part the Jats are associated with the Hindu revivalist movement Arya Samaj, which took off in the region at almost the same time as the TJ. The Jats, like the Meos, were traditionally a peasant community. In recent years, the Jats have made impressive strides in education and economic development, and today they are a powerful political force . Their development owes partly to the work of the Arya Samaj, which set up a number of schools, hospitals, orphanages and training centres in Jat territory. Contrasts drawn between the TJ and the Arya Samaj often lament that the TJ has done little for the Meos; as a Meo informant puts it, the TJ is almost ‘completely blind’ to the real-world concerns of the Meos. This approach is said to be profoundly ‘un-Islamic’, for in Islam, it is claimed, there is no distinction between religion (din) and worldly affairs (duniya). As some Meos see it, the TJ appears to make such a distinction to the point of insisting that the two realms are mutually opposed to each other. They therefore claim that the TJ is propagating an ‘un-Islamic Sufism’ (ghayr islami tasawwuf) or ‘monasticism’ (rahbaniyat) that has no legitimacy in Islam itself. A Meo student opined:
The division that Tablighi activists make between deen and duniya is itself un-Islamic, for in Islam the world is part of the din. They see the din as lying simply in prayers and fasting and going on tabligh tours, the rest being duniya, and these two are perceived as fundamentally opposed to each other. That is why they do not pay any attention to the worldly concerns of the Meos, dismissing them as duniyavi, and hence of little worth. In fact, I have often heard Tablighi maulvis in Mewat lament in their lectures the little economic progress that we have experienced, saying that when we were poor and nearly starving we were very pious Muslims, but that today some of us are a little more comfortably off but we have forgotten God. This attitude of the maulvis is something that many educated Meos resent today. Undoubtedly, this has caused a growing disillusionment with the movement on their part.
There are various interpretations of the TJ’s perceived indifference to the worldly concerns of the Meos. Some explain it as a consequence of an ‘un-Islamic’ Sufism that encourages flight from this world, while for others it is the product of a distinctly this-worldly concern of TJ leaders and ‘ulama to enhance their own authority and their access to, and control over, the Meo’s community resources. Thus, it is often alleged that while TJ leaders preach the virtues of poverty and exhort Muslims to remain content with the bare minimum of worldly goods – only enough to survive – many of these leaders run what one Meo respondent claims are ‘large religious rackets of their own’. These rackets are said to operate through the institutions that the leaders manage, which are financed by donations from the Meo community, from Muslims elsewhere in India, and some even from abroad. The TJ leaders are also often accused of preaching against modern education, which their critics claim to be a fundamental Islamic duty. The critics explain this move as inspired by the TJ leaders’ fear that educated Meos might challenge their own claims to leadership of the Meo community.
Yet, despite its apparent lack of concern with the this-worldly affairs of its followers, the TJ has been able to accommodate some of the challenges that modernity is bringing about in Mewat today. Indeed, some of the values that the TJ sees as central to Islam bear a striking resemblance to the Protestant work ethic that Weber ties in with the spirit of modernity in his classic work on the evolution of capitalism (Weber 1930). In a manner similar to the Protestant case, in some respects the TJ might be said to effectively be promoting an inadvertent modernization, albeit with a suitable ‘Islamic’ gloss. As the TJ sees it, the individual believer is armed with an instrumentality in realizing the Islamic mission in this world. The fortunes of Islam are thus seen to be determined not by the presence of a Muslim ruler, as in the past, but by the active and conscious involvement of every Muslim individual, all of whom are charged with a new sense of agency and mission to change the world by working to implement God’s will on earth.
Some of the values that the movement stresses, such as punctuality, the value of time, cleanliness, the equality of all believers and concern for others, derive from certain strands of Sufism. These values have powerful echoes in modernity and tie in with what the TJ sees as its ‘civilizing’ mission, rescuing Muslims from both ‘superstition’ and ‘corrupt’ and wasteful practices. Its? The TJ’s attack on the mediational cults of popular Sufism, and in the case of the Meos, on the widespread belief in spirits, ghosts and local deities, represents a distinct, albeit limited, rationalization of the world that modernity also seeks to promote. The TJ’s stress on Islamic scripturalism and the universal Muslim ummah works to undermine locally rooted identities. In Mewat and in much of the rest of India, these identities are predicated on caste and sect, major hurdles with which modernity has to contend.
Travelling on tabligh work outside one’s own locality to other villages and towns and even to other countries promotes a new sense of shared Muslim identity that transcends the local. It thereby promotes what could be called a ‘transportable Islam’ that is at home all over the world, since TJ missionaries carefully seek to make TJ practices and methods uniform and standardized wherever they are active. This represents a standardization of Islam rooted in Islamic scripturalism, bringing together Muslims from different regions in a shared universe of discourse and with a common commitment to the Tablighi project. It also serves to undermine local forms of Islam that are seen to divide the universal ummah. In these senses, then, the movement represents a novel form of Islamic modernity.
Two factors in particular facilitate the TJ’s ability to come to terms with some of the most pressing challenges that modernity poses in its wake. One is the movement’s lack of a centralized organizational structure and the other is the nature of its missionary strategy, seeking to steer clear of ikhtilafi issues and focusing on the faza’il instead of the masa’il. Since the TJ issues no official statements and has no official publications of its own, at the local level TJ activists are somewhat free to interpret the TJ message in their own ways, albeit within certain broad limits. Thus, while some TJ activists today lament many Meos’ growing enthusiasm to send their children to modern schools, the movement as such does not explicitly condemn this. Indeed, some TJ leaders actually welcome this development, although they insist on the primacy of Islamic education, and argue that Meo children studying at modern schools must also receive traditional Islamic knowledge so that their faith in Islam is not diluted or compromised by studying in general schools that often betray a distinct Hindu bias. Indeed, today some TJ activists may go so far as to insist that Muslim children acquire modern education, for only then can Muslims establish their supremacy over other communities. In a similar vein, they argue that if pious Muslims armed with knowledge of the world excel in various fields of worldly activity, the non-Muslims with whom they come into contact may be suitably impressed and even consider embracing Islam. Thus, modern education is grudgingly accepted by some TJ activists, and warmly embraced by others. Both camps regard this as a means to promote what they see are the interests of Islam, and not simply as an end in itself.
In political matters too, the TJ displays a remarkable flexibility despite its apparent rigidity. Here it follows in the general Deobandi tradition. The elders of the Deoband madrasa, while rigid in matters of religion, were flexible pragmatists in matters of politics. They stood for strict conformity to the shari‘ah, as they understood it, condemning Muslim ‘modernists’ as veritable apostates, and seeing all religions other than Islam as pathways to hell. Yet most of them were also enthusiastic supporters of the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress and its project of a united India. Numerous Deobandis were in the forefront of the Indian independence movement, and were among the bitterest critics of the Muslim League and its demand for a separate Muslim state of Pakistan. The rector of the Deoband madrasa, Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madni, went so far as to insist that nationality (qaumiyat) was determined not by religion but by common land of birth. The Hindus and Muslims of India, he insisted, arguing against the claims of the Muslim League, were members of one national community.
On the other hand, a minority among the Deobandis, led by Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi, lent its support to the Pakistan demand, insisting that the Muslims and the Hindus were indeed two separate nations. Ilyas was influenced by both groups among the Deobandis, with several of his teachers and mentors from either group. Yet even at the height of the Pakistan movement in the mid-1940s, Ilyas steered clear from overt political involvement, preferring to focus on strengthening and reinforcing Muslims’ commitment to Islam. This, he believed, was the only way in which Muslims could regain God’s favour and establish their political supremacy over others in the future, as the people charged with spreading God’s chosen faith.
In Mewat today, the TJ’s silence on political affairs enables its followers to make pragmatic political decisions. They can thus accommodate themselves to a non-Islamic and non-Muslim state, implicitly accepting the principle of secularism and the personalization of religion. The Meos are left free to decide which political parties to vote for and with which groups to enter into alliances. Thus, most Meos vote for political parties that are largely controlled by non-Muslims and have no commitment to an Islamic state, which is what Ilyas himself believed to be a central component of an ideal Islamic society.
The TJ justifies this accommodation to practical politics and acceptance of secularism [del: in terms of what it regards] as a necessary step in the path of ultimately establishing an Islamic state in the distant future. TJ leaders and activists believe that Muslims are today living in a state similar to that of the Prophet at Mecca (makki daur). This was a period when Muslims were learning their faith in the face of active persecution by their enemies, and when the Prophet lacked political power. The culmination of the Prophet’s life was the establishment of an Islamic state at Medina, ruled according to the shari‘ah. Muslim societies should thus aspire to establish the Medinan period (madni daur) as the ultimate state. However, to reach that goal, they must first eschew all concern with politics. They must focus, as the Muslims in the Meccan period are said to have done, simply on cultivating their faith in and knowledge of Islam, for only then will they win God’s pleasure. Political power represented by the Medinan phase of the Prophet’s life is not something for which one should struggle actively. Rather, it is a gift that God gives to Muslims if they strictly abide by the commandments of the faith.
Contemporary Muslims the world over, who are seen as still in the Meccan phase after ‘straying’ from the path of Islam, must therefore concern themselves with strengthening their faith. In effect, the establishment of an Islamic state – the ushering in of the Medinan phase – is postponed into the indefinite future. As the TJ sees it, the cultivation of faith which is the defining feature of the Meccan phase is a long drawn-out process virtually without end, given the constant presence of worldly temptations and distractions. The followers of the movement in Mewat and elsewhere are thus able to conduct their politics on pragmatic, as opposed to ideological, lines and to come to terms with the absence of non-Muslim rule and the presence of a secular polity. Here the TJ stands in marked contrast to Islamist movements that see their primary and immediate goal as the establishment of an Islamic state, ruled in accordance with the laws of the shari‘ah.
Conclusion
As this general survey of the TJ in Mewat suggests, the emergence and development of the TJ in Mewat is a distinctly modern, although not quite modernist, phenomenon. The launching of the TJ movement by Maulana Ilyas in the 1920s in Mewat was prompted largely by distinctly modern developments. These were primarily the obtrusive presence of the British colonial state and the competition between Hindu and Muslim elites for numbers, leading to new understandings of community identities and confessional boundaries. The TJ was not opposed to Sufism as such, and following in the general Deobandi tradition in which it is rooted, the TJ sought to redefine Sufism by bitterly critiquing what it saw as ‘un-Islamic’ influences and insisting on the need to conform to the commandments of the shari‘ah. In turn, this shari‘ah-centred scripturalist form of Sufism helped further galvanize the process of redefining Muslim identity, seeking to clearly demarcate Muslims from their Hindu neighbours, in part to meet the grave threat of Hindu missionaries working among nau-Muslim groups.
The TJ’s reformed Sufism has had important consequences for religious authority and how this authority comes to be imagined and articulated. It therefore ties in with distinctly modern concerns. In challenging the claims of the custodians of the Sufi shrines as intermediaries, in insisting on the need for every Muslim to be armed with a knowledge of the faith, and in stressing the duty of all believers to carry out the work of tabligh, the TJ promotes a de-centring of authority, or what can be called the priesthood of all believers. Consequently, the role of the Sufi shaikh comes to be imagined differently. From a spiritual guide who leads his disciple on the mystical path or tariqat, he is transformed into a teacher who instructs his followers on the path of the shari‘ah. The ideal Sufi is no longer one who escapes the world into mystical, transcendental states. Rather, he is one who actively works in this world for the realization of God’s will on earth. The charisma of the medieval Sufi shaikh and the silsilah or Sufi brotherhood is now sought for endowment upon the charismatic community of Tablighi activists as a whole, although within the community those with more knowledge or experience of tabligh work are accorded a special status and respect.
The TJ’s message of scripturalist reform, which it sees as a civilizing mission, promotes certain values that bear a distinct resemblance to those associated with the project of contemporary modernity. Further, while not uncritically embracing all that modern life brings in its trail, its conscious refusal to address ikhtilafi masa’il enables its followers to make pragmatic adjustments to the challenges and prospects of living under a non-Muslim state, including accepting, in practical terms, the principle of secularism. Given the loose organizational structure of the movement, its activists are able to adjust within broad limits to what might otherwise be seen as ‘un-Islamic’ institutions. Here they are free from the rigid controls of a central authority, which makes the TJ unlike most Islamist movements. These circumstances help to promote a distinctly Tablighi approach to modernity. While not fully approving of all or even most of what dominant contemporary forms of modernity entail, this approach is nevertheless willing to accept some aspects of them, suitably reinterpreted. The TJ then makes these an integral part of what it sees as its own divine mission, as the movement charged with spreading God’s chosen faith.
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