Introduction
Individual agency and religious orthodoxy often appear to be diametrical opposites, especially when it comes to Islam, but Chinese Muslims’ experiences in the Tabligh Jama‘at (or ‘conveying [the message of the Islam] group’Footnote 1) illustrate how participation in a transnational religious movement can empower individuals to transform themselves in ways that undermine local power structures. Instead of violently opposing the Han-dominated atheist state like some extremists among Uygur separatists in Xinjiang, this movement transcends sectarian affiliations, ethnic divisions, and national identities to promote inward-focused piety and ascetic withdrawal from the material world and its politics. Tabligh Jama‘at focuses on a highly structured system of practice that requires participants to promote it through speeches and study sessions while travelling on preaching tours around China in small, autonomous jama‘at (‘groups’), which the Chinese transliterate as zhemati (哲玛提). The ultimate goal through these behaviours is for participants to internalize the forms of piety the movement embodies. Thus, objective results like converts or new participants are not important as long as repetition and self-discipline successfully alter each participant's subjective habitus—a transformation he or she will strive to maintain after the preaching tour concludes.
Detailed ritual procedures structure Tablighi activities, and participants shape all aspects of their lives to conform to the ways of Muhammad and his companions as described in the Hadith, but members of jama‘ats enjoy a large degree of self-determination in planning their daily activities and determining the content of the oral performances that make up much of their study sessions. Thus, the Chinese manifestation of this movement that originated in South Asia provokes important questions about how agency and structure interact in the formation of Islamic subjectivities in relation to secular states and transnational Islamic movements.
During 11 months’ studying advanced Mandarin Chinese and basic Qinghai dialect in Xining during 2012 and 2013, I sought to understand China's Islamic revival by immersing myself in an observant Muslim lifestyle and undertaking intensive participant observation in the mosques, homes, and businesses of Xining's historically Muslim-dominated eastern district. I stumbled upon the Tabligh Jama‘at movement when an informant introduced me to a man, Yacub, whom he said was very active in da'wah Footnote 2 work. He was dressed in shalwar and kameez (South Asian-style, baggy, white pants and shirt) with a Western-style sport coat and Crocs, an interesting ensemble, but not too unusual for a devout Muslim in Xining. He introduced himself in English and invited us to his house, but first led us to a nearby housing development to visit Muslims in three different apartments. Afterward, he explained that 70,000 angels would congratulate us for these visits and led us into an apartment almost completely devoid of furniture. Then, I realized that he must be involved in Tabligh Jama‘at. I later learned that he owned a hotel that was a major centre for the movement in Xining and had extensive experience with the movement when he travelled abroad while working as a translator and businessman.
Yacub and others encouraged me to attend study sessions there, and I did so on a daily basis, tape recording their activities, and sometimes translating foreign preachers’ speeches from English to Chinese. I also conducted semi-structured, informal interviews with 25 men who participated in the movement to various degrees. These were usually conducted sitting on the floor of a prayer room or over meals either in restaurants or sitting on the floor of an unfurnished apartment in which Yacub housed visiting Tablighis. Sometimes I was able to work one-on-one, but I often had to interview groups of Tablighis who were travelling together. This movement practises a strict separation of the sexes, so my informants were exclusively male, but they informed me that parallel activities for women and excursions for couples also take place. Eventually, organizers invited me to participate in a preaching tour (which the Chinese call jama‘at but Tablighis elsewhere call khuruj), as they did everyone who attended study sessions, and I embarked on a three-day preaching tour to a village about two hours outside of Xining. Participation in the daily routine of studying and preaching was crucial to capturing an insider's view and compensating for my status as an obvious outsider. The presence of a white-skinned, blond-haired, American anthropologist among Chinese Muslims was certainly unusual and drew much attention, but I was not the only foreigner to participate in Tablighi activities in Xining. Groups of preachers from South Asia regularly pass through Xining on preaching tours and study with Chinese Tablighis, who saw my and other foreigners' presence as evidence that Islam and the movement embrace all nationalities and ethnic groups.
Tabligh Jama‘at has quietly become the most widespread and influential new modality of Islam to arrive in China since the Communist Party began liberalizing religious policy in the early 1980s. Tablighis seek to revive Islamic practice among nominal Muslims and combat the materialistic effects of communism in much the same way as the movement challenged secularizing British colonialism when it began in 1920s South Asia. The movement uses evangelism and forms of outward comportment as tools for self-transformation, and global standardization of these behaviours circumvents local religious and secular authorities by providing a direct connection between individual participants and an imagined transnational community. I argue that participants gain agency, which I define in this case as acting autonomously from cultural constraints like familial, sectarian, and social authority in order to purposefully fashion one's perceptions of and interactions with external actors, events, and situations. I refer to the unconscious and conscious shaping and experience of such perceptions and interactions as subjectivity and argue that consciously shaping a more pious subjectivity is a primary means by which Tablighis assert agency. Belonging to a transnational movement both frees one from local constraints on agency and encourages one to assert agency by reshaping one's subjectivity to embody a perception of transnational orthodoxy.
Tabligh Jama‘at exists in China as a loose network of devout Muslims who occasionally travel in autonomous groups of four to ten people to preach to Muslims all over China (and occasionally internationallyFootnote 3). Certain mosques, hotel prayer rooms, and private apartments regularly host Tablighis and their activities, but the Chinese movement does not have dedicated institutions or the massive three-day gatherings called ijtima’ that can draw over a million participants in South Asia. Many Muslims who rarely, if ever, travel on jama‘at occasionally attend study sessions, and tireless enthusiasts guide visiting jama‘ats, organize locals into jama‘ats, and help run study and evangelism sessions on a daily basis. Focusing on basic practices and avoiding any divisive theological issues have made it the only Islamic movement to include members of all of China's fractious Islamic sects.
Routine Tablighi practices include door-to-door preaching by untrained lay people and organized religious activities outside of state-recognized institutions, both of which violate religious policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The national government has not officially banned the movement, but its uncertain legal status makes Tablighis less visible than those in other nations. Chinese Tablighis are cautious about walking down the streets of Xining in large groups, and I witnessed several times a group of 20–30 men travel from the hotel prayer room to someone's apartment in small groups of four or five people. While many participants wear the loose, white, South Asian-style clothing common to the movement, such uniform dress is not as prevalent as it is in other nations. Informants who had travelled abroad also admired how Tablighis in other countries travel on foot and go on jama‘at without any financial resources, and they lamented that Chinese Muslims’ faith is not yet strong enough for this sort of ascetic practice.
The lack of ijtima’ and dedicated facilities makes it difficult to measure the size of the movement in China, but virtually all Muslims in Xining have encountered the movement's travelling preachers. Tablighis from regions throughout China also pass through Xining, and they assured me that it exists wherever there are Muslims. Most participants discovered the movement when a Tablighi knocked on their door or approached them on the street, and some core activists discovered it and/or further explored it abroad, usually in South Asia. In 2013, virtually every Muslim I talked to had at least heard of ‘da'wah work’ (达瓦工作)—a term Chinese Muslims inside and outside the movement use to refer to Tabligh Jama‘at and its practices. Most did not know the name Tabligh Jama‘at, which could be partly because the transliteration to Chinese (taiboli'e zhemati 泰卜里厄哲玛提) is rather awkward and nonsensical. However, Noor recalls that he went on a forty-day jama‘at at age 19 in Britain but did not learn the name of the movement until one year later.Footnote 4 This de-emphasis on identifying the movement downplays any notions of sectarianism or exclusivity. Participants describe doing da'wah work simply as the responsibility of all Muslims, not the modality of one specific movement.
I describe those who engage in Tabligh practices as participants rather than converts, reverts, adherents or members to capture the experiential nature of the movement and the varying levels of engagement with it. Noor points out that Tablighis themselves view participation in the movement not as constituting membership, but as ‘a state of being, a process of becoming’.Footnote 5 However, many Muslims sample the movement and decide that it is not for them. Noor discusses participation in the movement as a form of reversion, because those who participate in jama‘at seek to wholly alter their subjectivity, and a few extremely active participants effectively transform their lives.Footnote 6 However, most Chinese Tablighis continue attending the same mosques after becoming involved with the movement, and they view their participation as a deepening of faith and renewed devotion to the Islamic strictures they had previously acknowledged, rather than a conversion to something new or reversion to something different. Tabligh Jama‘at advocates an all-encompassing regime of behaviour, but only a minority of extremely active participants take part in study sessions and door-to-door visits on a daily basis. In Xining, many people drop in on Tabligh activities (held on a daily basis in certain hotel prayer rooms or private apartments) a few times each week or month, or go on a jama‘at once or twice a year. A lack of barriers to participation and avoidance of sectarian issues allows Muslims of all sects and social classes to engage with the movement at different levels and find their own means of reconciling Islam and modernity.
Tabligh Jama‘at and global Islamic revival
Tabligh Jama‘at has received increased scholarly and popular attention since the events of 11 September 2001, and public attention has grown even more since Tablighis in London announced plans to build what would be the largest mosque in Britain. Moreover, the movement's transnational nature, conservative interpretation of the Qur'an, and sheer number of adherents have prompted Western media and scholars of security studies to re-evaluate its self-professed apolitical and nonviolent nature. Some violent extremists have participated in Tabligh Jama‘at at some point in their lives, and some report that there have been instances of such people using the movement as a cover to travel internationally,Footnote 7 but these are exceptional cases of individuals defying the movement's precepts. A refusal to take a stand on political matters means that many Tablighis and the movement as a whole refuse to condemn or promote the use of violence. Some suggest that this professed neutrality provides safe harbour for extremists and cover for ultimately political goals,Footnote 8 but most social scientists agree that abstention from political and theological debates is merely indicative of how the movement focuses on universally agreeable Islamic values in order to appeal to and unite as many Muslims as possible.Footnote 9
The amorphous nature of the movement and lack of transparency among leaders contribute to fears of a hidden agenda or an eventual shift toward violence,Footnote 10 but those who participate in the movement preach inward transformation instead of attempting to directly affect the exterior world in any way. A young Chinese man who had studied in Pakistan recounted how he had participated in a jama‘at that preached to AK-47-wielding Taliban supporters, saying, ‘Brothers! Jews are not our enemy. Americans are not our enemy. Our enemy is our own nafs [ego/desires]’ (兄弟们!犹太人不是我们的敌人。美国人不是我们的敌人。我们的敌人是我们的 nafs). Tablighis strive to transform society one individual at a time but, at least collectively, they do not resort to force or politics. Instead, they focus on encouraging each Muslim to internally transform his or herself, and leave the question of action in the secular sphere up to each person's individual devices.
Beginning among DeobandiFootnote 11 scholars in northern India during the 1920s as a response to British colonialism and Hindu nationalist movements to ‘reconvert’ South Asian Muslims to Hinduism, Tabligh Jama‘at is a method by which Muslims can achieve and maintain a pious Muslim subjectivity amidst a sinful environment. The movement's founder, Maulana Muhammad Ilyas (1885–1944), advocated a return to the original Islam like many Muslim thinkers of his time, but Ilyas's means of doing so required emulating the lives of the prophet's companions, which he perceived to be filled with travel, asceticism, evangelism, and embodied piety. He also emphasized the importance of reciting dhikr,Footnote 12 or ‘remembrance’ of Allah, which most Muslims do after obligatory prayer and some Sufis do more extensively.
Ilyas also stressed some Hadith that claim reciting certain verses of praise specific numbers of times can earn specific, calculable blessings from Allah (including Yacub's reference to 70,000 angels). Some Chinese Tablighis even carry electronic counters to help tabulate their blessings. Such beliefs endow common lay Muslims with the ability to achieve and calculate such blessings through individual effort. Entrusting them with the responsibilities traditionally reserved for Islamic scholars, like teaching and representing the ideal Muslim lifestyle, effectively brings Islamic revival to the masses. Forged in the post-colonial context of South Asia, the movement has spread all over the world and has proven especially popular among Muslim minorities, including the Muslims of post-socialist China.
Tabligh Jama‘at rejects many forms of religious action on a collective level, such as political activism, Sufi rituals, theological debate, and sectarian claims of exclusivity. Instead, the movement embraces a strict code of behaviour placed on individuals so that ‘The life of a Tablighi is a permanent ritual, and his conduct is regulated in its minutest detail so that it conforms in every detail to the life of the prophet’.Footnote 13 This ritualized existence allows an individual to remove himself or herself from a world perceived as rife with sin and temptation—a separation created and reinforced by physically going on a spiritual journey with other similarly focused people. The standardized behaviours, activities, and language of the movement unite believers from all sects, languages, and homelands in a common system of praxis. Ali shows that these practices challenge negative aspects of modernity, but the movement is not anti-modern because it construes Islam in a personalized, engaged, and instrumental way that is more compatible with modernity.Footnote 14 While Tablighis extol a set of codified virtues in the streets and in study circles, the exact content of these oral performances and the daily activities of a jama‘at are determined by participants themselves, leaving ample room for individual expression within a well-defined structure. Even though many Muslims who receive Tablighi visitors react with hostility to the presumption that one needs the intervention of strangers to increase one's faith,Footnote 15 the Tablighi strategy to generate increased piety from the bottom up appeals to many Muslims disillusioned with attempts to impose orthodoxy from above through the sometimes grating authority of imams, Islamic governments in some nations, or the party's bureau of religious affairs in China.
The practices of Tabligh Jama‘at constitute a zone in which individuals can negotiate between individually determined religious subjectivity and conventional modes of socially and structurally determined moral subjectivity that is similar to Simon's description of the function of salat (Islamic prayer) in Indonesia.Footnote 16 Participants in Tabligh Jama‘at attempt to subsume their individual subjectivities within standards of Islamic comportment perceived to be universal but, to achieve this universality, they must engage as individuals with the local standards they see as lax, sinful, or heterodox in order to promote the ‘true’ Islam they perceive in the global Tabligh movement. SimonFootnote 17 insightfully describes the dynamic and variable formation of Islamic subjectivities through an interplay between individual agency and socio-cultural structure. This study of the Tabligh Jama‘at in China shows how individual imaginings of and participation in a transnational community play a role in this process by enabling Muslims to form, express, and promote subjectivities, sodalities, and forms of orthodoxy that challenge local Islamic norms.
Xining: religious rumblings in China's Hui Muslim homeland
Xining, a bustling city of two million (small by Chinese standards) and capital of China's largest, least populated, and westernmost province (excluding the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang), is a central hub of China's Islamic revival and Tabligh Jama‘at activities. Qinghai Province also sits between China's two most restive regions, Tibet and Xinjiang, with its capital situated at the confluence of Han, Tibetan, Mongolian, Uygur, and Hui cultural realms. Most informants in this study are Hui, which is the most populous ethnic minority in Xining at 16 per cent of the population, as well as the largest of China's ten Muslim ethnic groups. Hui are phenotypically and linguistically indistinguishable from Han Chinese, but they trace their ancestry back to Arab, Persian, or Central Asian traders who came to China in numerous waves beginning in the Tang Dynasty. They maintain an ethnic identity based on traits associated with Islam. Hui live scattered all over China in virtually every major city, but the largest concentration of them stretches from eastern Qinghai Province, through southern Gansu Province, to Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
Islam is certainly the most visible religion in Xining, but Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity are also quite influential. Ta'ersi, a major Tibetan Buddhist monastery, lies 40 minutes south-west of the city, and a museum dedicated to Tibetan medicine draws tourists to the city's northern fringes. Numerous foreigners reside in Xining while studying Tibetan language and culture, and even more come to covertly preach Christianity while teaching English, studying Chinese, and/or running small businesses. There is one Protestant and one Catholic church in town, as well as underground Christian congregations that are difficult to enumerate. Just before the predicted ‘end of the world’ in December 2012, Chinese public security officials arrested about 400 members of the ‘Almighty God’ (全能神) sect for illegally printing and distributing millenarian literature. Numerous self-immolations among Tibetans in rural Qinghai as well as several violent incidents in Xinjiang throughout 2012 and 2013 contributed to an atmosphere of religious disquiet that would likely make Tablighi disengagement from the material world seem even more appealing by comparison.
The Muslim population of Xining is largely concentrated in the historic eastern districtFootnote 18 and unified by the Yihewani (伊赫瓦尼) sect, a revival movement whose name is a transliteration of Ikhwan, or ‘brotherhood’, that has challenged syncretic Chinese practices since it arrived in 1893. Muslims throughout the north-west admire the way most of Xining's Muslims converge on Dong Guan Great MosqueFootnote 19 for Friday prayers, drawing tens of thousands each week and hundreds of thousands on holidays. This unity largely results from historical repression and modern ostracism of non-Yihewani sects, including Sufism and especially Salafism, but Tabligh Jama‘at offers an inclusive respite from sectarian strife. The movement also welcomes Muslim migrant workers, who flock to Xining like all Chinese cities, providing a means for these sojourners to assimilate to and find a role within the urban Muslim community. One's status in the material world is immaterial, and all Tablighis can play an equal role in the higher purpose of spreading of orthodoxy to other regions, combatting the assimilation of China's Muslims, and countering the spread of other religions.
Tabligh Jama‘at: spreading Islamic revival even unto China
The earliest record of the Tabligh Jama‘at movement in China is an account written in Urdu by a member of a group of travelling preachers from Malegaon, India, who travelled in China for four months in 1986. This group was appalled at the unorthodox practices and lack of gender separation or differentiation among Chinese Muslims, and they also felt that local Muslims were reluctant to assist their movement for fear of the CCP.Footnote 20 Nevertheless, Chinese Muslims returning from hajj or study or in Muslim-majority nations (especially Pakistan) gradually built the Tabligh Jama‘at movement within China. An imam who participated in the 1990s recalled that virtually no one in China was familiar with the movement, and many mistook wandering Tablighis dressed in foreign garb and advocating strict orthodoxy for Salafis (who also seek to return to the original Islam, but focus more on textual study than experiential methods). None of the dozens of Tablighis I interviewed had even heard of the movement or its methods before the mid-1990s, and most discovered the movement after 2000. Most mosques welcomed wandering preachers to sleep in their prayer rooms in the 1990s, whereas, most urban mosques and many Chinese Muslims today are wary of the movement's evangelical methods and fear that supporting it could arouse the ire of CCP religious authorities.
There are no major English-language studies focusing on the Tabligh Jama‘at in China, but its rapid growth in the past couple decades has inspired a few Chinese-language sources, which provide basic facts about the movement's history and practices, review literature about the movement abroad, and recount the aforementioned first arrival of the movement in 1980s.Footnote 21 Qian suggests that the movement will seek to expand its operations in China,Footnote 22 and other sources written by Chinese Muslims observe that this is taking place, but their works mainly illustrate how little is known about its history and activities in China.Footnote 23 In personal communication with Ma Zhi Qiang, an anthropology graduate student, he offered anecdotal evidence of professors telling graduate students not to study this movement. Alles and her collaborators refer to Tabligh Jama‘at preachers arousing official discomfort with ‘inflammatory preaching tours’, but they do not discuss popular Chinese participation in this movement and the larger impact it has on individuals and Islamic networks.Footnote 24 Veselič noticed Tabligh Jama‘at-style practices among university students in China's Qinghai and Gansu in the 2000s, but the students never mentioned the name of the movement, and she only discovered the existence of ‘two popular Tablighi proselytizing centres’ by chance late in the course of her research.Footnote 25
Today's Communist Party tolerates the practice and study of Islam (along with the four other recognized religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism, and Protestantism), but it forbids religious activities that are conducted by untrained personnel or take place outside of state-approved institutions. Fortunately for Tablighis, such regulations are rarely enforced outside Xinjiang. In Xining, I encountered several groups of Tablighis that had travelled from Xinjiang, and they told me that da'wah work is very dangerous there, and many people have been imprisoned for it. Websites of local governments outside Xinjiang occasionally feature accounts of Tablighis being sent back to their home provincesFootnote 26 or of local officials preventing their citizens from going on jama‘atFootnote 27 but, in Xinjiang, Tablighi organizersFootnote 28 and participants face imprisonment.Footnote 29 The Tulufan (Turfan) government in southern Xinjiang labels Tabligh Jama‘at an ‘evil cult’ (邪教), the damning term applied to Falun Gong and other movements that are strictly forbidden all over China.Footnote 30 Tabligh Jama‘at possesses a degree of religious fervour that arouses government scrutiny, but the movement actively rejects the hierarchy; charismatic central leaders; and novel, radical, or millenarian beliefs that tend to provoke government crackdowns on other unrecognized sects.
Unlike the Tabligh Jama‘at in other countries, the Chinese movement lacks exclusively dedicated mosques, imams, and educational institutions, but its system of ritualized behaviour constitutes a more distinctive and identifiable way of life than some more clearly defined and institutionalized sects. Chinese Muslims are generally divided into five sectarian groups: (1) mainstream Sunni Muslims called Gedimu (格迪目 from the Arabic qadim, ‘old’) or simply ‘old teaching’ (老教) to contrast them with other more clearly defined sects that arrived later in the history of Chinese Islam; (2) Sufi brotherhoods that began arriving in the late Ming and Qing Dynasties and are divided into four main sects and dozens of subsects; (3) the aforementioned Yihewani movement (a minority nationally, but the majority in Xining); (4) the scripturalist Salafiyya movement that dates to the 1930s in China and makes up a small and growing minority; and (5) the Xidaotang (西道堂, ‘Western Way Hall’) movement that began in the early twentieth century as a fusion of Islam with Confucianism and is primarily relegated to Lintan County, Gansu today.Footnote 31 SikandFootnote 32 argues that Tabligh Jama‘at's emphasis on the unity of all Muslims and its ability to transcend divides among sects and madhabs (schools of law) make it an appealing means of unifying the marginalized Muslim minority of India, and this seems to hold true for China as well.
In Xining, many imams and members of the Yihewani are fiercely opposed to Salafism, to the extent that they call Salafis unbelievers and react angrily at the mere mention of the Salafi mosque. However, no one looked askance when I mentioned the Salafi mosque or prayed in the Salafi style among Tablighis. Most Muslims exclusively belong to one of these sects, but no one refers to him or herself as a ‘Tablighi’. Instead, my informants say that they ‘do da'wah work’ or ‘have gone out on jama‘at’ (出过哲玛提). Most devout Chinese Muslims I met had attended a Tabligh study session at least once and many participated in these sessions or went on jama‘ats occasionally.
Despite Tabligh Jama‘at's neutrality and openness, many Muslims of different sects find fault with the movement's methods. The more scripturally focused Salafis (in China and elsewhere) claim that Tabligh Jama‘at's emphases on experience, emotionalism, endlessly repeating dhikr, as well as its origins among Sufi-influenced Deobandis, amounts to Sufi heterodoxy. Indeed, the son of the movement's founder, Maulana Yusuf, took over leadership of the movement after his father's death (as is common in Sufi brotherhoods) and he also performed Sufi initiation ceremonies in India.Footnote 33 Ali goes so far as to say that the movement ‘is a derivative of Sufism and in a way could be perceived as new-Sufism’.Footnote 34 Tabligh Jama‘at shares with Sufism an emphasis on dhikr but, while Sufi dhikr is often part of a collective ritual at a mosque or tomb, Tablighis recite and carefully count dhikr while walking down the street or sitting by oneself as a means of ritualizing and Islamicizing daily life.
On the other hand, Sufi, Gedimu, and Yihewani adherents sometimes argue that Tablighis’ narrow interpretation of scripture and strict standards for behaviour are equivalent to Salafism, which they consider to be misguided and extremist. Tablighis join Salafis in criticizing Muslim participation in non-universal local practices and commemorations such as a deceased Sufi saint's birthday celebration in the Surat district of Gujarat, India,Footnote 35 or ritually burning incense and commemorating anniversaries of relatives’ deaths in China. Both groups also deny the ability of Sufi saints to intercede with Allah and the hereditary descent of spiritual powers.Footnote 36 Tablighis believe that spiritual gifts are earned through sparing one's time and treasure to take part in preaching journeys and especially through maintaining the good conduct practised on these journeys after they are over. In spite of some commonalities, most Salafis I met accused the Tablighi movement of bid'a (using the Arabic term for innovation) in that Tabligh Jama‘at canonizes specific virtues of the prophet's companions and a distinct methodology of emulating them that are not specifically enumerated in the Qur'an or Hadith.
Despite Tablighi opposition to some allegedly unorthodox practices, the shared practices and attempts to gloss over often acrimonious sectarian divisions help to build unity among Muslims, and the movement's evangelical nature and transnational prestige seem to be contributing to its growth amidst a period of religious revival in China. Tabligh is part of a larger trend of Muslims rejecting passive acceptance of religion as an inherited ethnic trait and consciously seeking a deeper understanding of and engagement with it. Similarly to how the movement functions in Australia,Footnote 37 Tablighis reshape Chinese Islamic identity to emphasize being a part of the transnational ummah instead of a local ethnic group. This is part of a generalized religious revival over the past three decades in China that includes a surge in conversions to Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, and other religions.Footnote 38 The popular perceptions of moral decay within the Chinese populace that many scholarsFootnote 39 associate with post-Mao capitalist materialism and the transparency of the party's claims to socialist morality most likely contribute to this trend—an association that many Tablighis echo. Yacub and other Tablighis often stress the need to pass religion on to one's children, saying that people who merely pray five times a day should not wonder why their children do not carry on the faith. He said that simply practising religion is not enough; one needs to ‘struggle’ (using the Chinese translation of the Arabic term jihad, 奋斗) in order to build one's faith and show the next generation the meaning and importance of Islam. Many Tablighis present the movement's call to individual action as a modern improvement on more passive forms of traditional religiosity that is also a return to the ways of the sahaba.
Methods of jama‘at
Several scholars have dissected the literature of the Tabligh Jama‘at to explore the discursive foundations and unifying principles that guide the movement's practices.Footnote 40 My research focuses on performances of these texts and the activities they codify as well as the subjective experiences of jama‘atis who enact them. These activities reinforce and enact the Six Points canonized in Tablighi texts: shahada (profession of faith), salat (prayer), ‘ilm and dhikr (knowledge and remembrance), ikram i-Muslim (respect for all Muslims), ikhlas i-niyat (intention), and tafriq i-waqt (sparing time). A collection of Hadith explicating these has been translated into Chinese, and organizers occasionally read from it, but they place far more emphasis on action than texts. The most distinctive Tabligh activity besides the preaching tour itself is gasht or jola (‘preaching visits’). My informants exclusively use the Chinese term, ‘ordinary visits’ (普访) to refer to the more common mukami jola, which consist of a group meeting and listening to lectures while sending out a small group to knock on doors and invite other Muslims to attend a ritualized study session that will end with an exhortation for each person to go on jama‘at. This practice contrasts with what my informants always referred to with the Chinese term, ‘special visits’ (专访 or khusisi jola), which consists of a smaller group conducting a targeted visit to one or more people to urge them to study Islam with Tablighis or follow through on an expressed intention to embark on a jama‘at.
When participants embark on a preaching journey, they engage in these practices every day, and many locals also visit Tabligh centres several times a week to partake in these rituals with travelling preachers. Tablighis conduct what the Chinese call ‘study circle’ (学习 圈), but most other Tablighis refer to as ta’lim (Arabic and Urdu for ‘learning’), every day immediately after dawn prayer, often on the floor of a prayer hall. The movement encourages each Muslim to ‘spare time’ (one of the six points) to engage in study for at least 2.5 hours each day, and Tablighis often assert that it is a man's responsibility to lead his wife and children in doing this at home. All of these practices are highly ritualized, beginning with participants sitting in a circle on the floor and listening to someone recite the proper procedure and division of labour for the practice at hand, then people volunteer or are nominated to perform different roles, including individually determined oral performances. These procedures are published in texts that are widely available, but Chinese Tablighis almost always recite rather than read them.
The procedure for ‘ordinary visits’, essentially a microcosm of a preaching journey, illustrates the simultaneously structured and autonomous nature of the movement. The group sent out during ‘ordinary visits’ consists of four to ten men led by an amir (for which the Arabic term is used), just like a jama‘at. These small groups also contain a dalil or ‘guide’ (translated as 带路的人 in China), a local person to walk in front, guide the way, knock on doors, and introduce the group; a mutakallim or ‘speaker’ (translated as 说话的人 in China) to actually talk to people about why they should join a study session; a ‘doer of dhikr’ (做 dhikr 的人) to silently recite praise for Allah throughout the group's mission; and a ‘speaker of bayan’ (讲 bayan 的人) to deliver a sermon (for which Chinese Tablighis use the Arabic word bayan, meaning ‘talk’ or ‘lecture’) focusing on one or more of the Tablighi Six Points upon the group's return. In the course of a preaching tour, each participant will play each of these roles during various sessions.
The guidelines recited before beginning visits require that everyone walk single file on the right side of the street and sidewalk with eyes cast downward to avoid seeing anything that could cause impure thoughts, removing any obstacles from the path that could cause others harm, and reciting subhan'allah when going down stairs or hills and Allahu akbar when going up.Footnote 41 When visiting a home, the group should stand about three metres from the door, with each person's body turned 45 degrees to the side and looking downward to avoid looking inside the door when it opens. The guide should knock loudly three times and say, ‘Asalaam alaykum’. If a woman comes to the door, the jama‘atis should avoid looking directly at her and ask for the man of the house.Footnote 42 If a man comes to the door, the talker should introduce the group as guests coming in the name of Allah, ask the man his Arabic name,Footnote 43 urge him to join them for the subsequent lecture, and list the benefits of it. If he refuses, they should urge him to state his intention to do so in the future and move on to the next apartment. Tablighis believe that only Allah has the power to change minds, so it is more important to elicit Allah's help by reciting dhikr than to attempt to persuade people with human language.
Several people in the group remaining at the prayer room during these ordinary visits are also assigned responsibilities to continue lecturing and listening, stand at the door to welcome new participants, and usually an older man is given what is described as the most important task of all: to sit alone in a corner and pray for the session's successful outcome. After about 20 minutes, the group(s) return and one of their number delivers a sermon, which ends in a call for all those present to embark on preaching journeys as well. Next, someone else stands up, retrieves a small notebook, and begins tashkil (for which organizers use the Arabic term meaning ‘recruitment’) by asking who will commit to a four-month preaching tour. Some raise their hands, state their Arabic names in turn, give a spirited ‘Insha'llah!’ (one of several Arabic phrases common among Chinese Muslims) and proclaim when they plan to leave. Their contact information is recorded in the notebook, so they can receive prayers and visits. Next, the man with the notebook asks for volunteers to go out for 40 days, ten days, and then three days, each time recording names and contact information of volunteers. Sometimes, the speaker will call out people by name, suggesting they should go, and first-time attendees are always urged to volunteer for a three-day excursion.
No more than 40 minutes after the meeting began (this time frame is also mentioned in the introductory description), the assembled Muslims recite a prayer in Arabic, repeating after an organizer or imam, and adjourn. When these sessions take place in a private home, food is served at this point. Eating is an essential part of all social activities in China, but it has to wait until the official Tabligh rituals are concluded out of deference to the movement's ascetic ethos.
Tabligh Jama‘at emphasizes expressing devotion through completing every action, in jama‘at and daily life, in a ritually correct manner without regard for uncontrollable outcomes. Participants view da'wah as a means of ensuring the perpetuation of Islam by renewing the faith within themselves through experiencing the life of the prophet's companions and encouraging others to do so the same. As part of the point about sparing time, Tablighis recommend going on a three-day trip once a month, a ten-day journey every four months, a 40-day trip once a year, and a four-month tour at least once in a lifetime. They also stress the importance of having good ‘intention’ (for which they use the Arabic term niyat) to do this. Eliciting and stating the intent to go on jama‘at produce a more pious subjectivity even if it never comes to fruition. Tablighis view the world as a sinful place filled with unbelievers, which parallels the time Muhammad spent in Mecca before he fled to Medina, and they consider every one of their preaching tours to be a recreation of the transformational journey of the hijra.Footnote 44
Going out and looking in: a jama‘at among Chinese Muslims
Sitting in on countless study sessions (as the Chinese call all of the aforementioned Tabligh activities) made it clear that, to grasp the subjective experience of Tabligh Jama‘at, I had to join a jama‘at of at least three days and partake in the communal living and daily regime of prayer and preaching. Yacub urged me to go on a preaching tour, as he did everyone else, and was delighted when I agreed. About one week later, he told me that three other men would depart with me the next day after dawn prayer. The next morning, another organizer (who wore the same baggy, white, South Asian-style clothing favoured by Yacub and others heavily devoted to the movement) introduced two middle-aged menFootnote 45 and me to each other and reviewed some of the principles and procedures of jama‘at. They did not give this process a name, but it is known in the movement as hidaya bayan or ‘guidance speech’.
Many jama‘atis, including my two companions, are what I call ‘reaffirmed Muslims’; they were born into Hui families (or those of other traditionally Muslim ethnicities) that do not strictly practise Islam, but they have independently rediscovered their faith later in life. Some jama‘ats include all age groups, from pre-teens to octogenarians; others consist solely of middle-aged and older men. I also encountered a couple of jama‘ats comprising entirely undergraduates—what an organizer enthusiastically called ‘college student jama‘ats, the best kind of jama‘at’. In my jama‘at, Housseini was 46 years old and had moved to Qinghai from Shanxi Province as a young adult, and Ersa was a 47-year-old Hui first-time participant from a small town (Ledu) an hour outside of Xining. Both were unskilled labourers who were married with children, but none of us discussed families or worldly pursuits during our jama‘at. However, Housseini did mention that he had taken his wife on a preaching tour previously. Both Ersa and Housseini wore white hats typical of Muslim men. None of us had the shalwar and kameez typical of Tablighis internationally, none of us brought a change of clothes, and no one ever mentioned our clothing.
We chose Housseini as our amir because he was the only one who had previously gone on a preaching journey. Neither Ersa nor Housseini had formal education in Islam,Footnote 46 but I was constantly surprised at how Housseini's extreme devotion drove him to constantly preach to anyone who would listen (and some who would rather not). His father left a Muslim community in Henan Province at the age of 18 to seek work in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, where he became immersed in Han society and ceased to practise his faith. Housseini said his father intended to return to Islam in his later years, but sickness overtook him too soon. Then, his father said that he would become devout if Allah cured him, but this never happened, and Housseini regretfully related how his father never made it back to the mosque. Housseini went on his first jama‘at soon after his father's death; he did not want to make the same mistake as his father did. Most Tablighis seek to improve on the faith of their fathers, but usually not in so literal a sense.
We each agreed to contribute 100 RMB (about $17) to a communal fund to cover our expenses for the next three days, and we selected Ersa to hold and disperse it. I recognized Ersa from the previous day's session of ‘ordinary visits’, during which Yacub had sat next to him and persistently prodded him to volunteer for a three-day jama‘at. He was very quiet, functionally illiterate due to only receiving two years of formal schooling, and was unable to recite even the most basic verses of the Qur'an (which must be done in Arabic). He had brought his family to Xining in search of work and lived in a tenement around the corner from the hotel where Tablighis regularly met. During the first of the daily sessions of recitation practice we held during our preaching trip (a standard part of the preaching journey called tajwid by Tablighis elsewhere), we discovered that Ersa could not recite even the first surah of the Qur'an, which one must recite when performing every prayer. Housseini was distressed, but not surprised because many Chinese who are born Muslim do not pray or simply go through the motions of prayer without silently reciting the appropriate Arabic verses and supplications. When we returned to Xining, Housseini took Ersa to buy an electronic pen that played Quranic verses in Arabic and Chinese when one touched it to a page of a magnetically coded Qur'an.
The detailed briefing that took place before our departure made it clear that we would be responsible for independently implementing the movement's guidelines during our trip. We were given ‘four things to keep in mind’ (四个注意) during our jama‘at: (1) that we were sent by Allah, (2) we must correct our faults, (3) we must tell everyone that there is no god but Allah, and (4) we should internally cultivate our faith and emanate it outward. Housseini and I both began taking notes, and the organizer told us not to, saying that, if we wrote it down, it would not be in our hearts. Housseini told him that he had to write it down, so he would not forget, and the organizer acquiesced as he continued to describe our mission. He went over ‘six essential elements’ (六个要素) of our work: we must (1) adopt the identity of students, (2) follow the amir to work as a team, (3) seize the time we have, (4) be of service (called khidma by Tablighis elsewhere) to our hosts, (5) prioritize our activities, and (6) schedule our time carefully. Time should be allotted each day for activities such as studying Qur'an, Hadith, and the sahabas’ lives for at least 2.5 hours; participating in ‘ordinary visits’ under the guidance of locals; and sleeping for a predetermined amount of time in the manner of the prophet.Footnote 47 Housseini led us in consulting among ourselves (a process known as mushawara by Tablighis elsewhere) to budget time for each of these activities, from planning how long to sleep in our daily nap to deciding when we should clean the mosque's washing room to fulfil our obligation to serve our hosts.
During our orientation session, we learned that we should buy groceries and prepare our own food, so we would be self-sufficient and not burden our hosts. We expressed our intent and attempted to do this, but members of our host congregation repeatedly treated us to meals, and we never cooked for ourselves—a case of Chinese cultural requirements of hospitality infringing on the movement's ascetic method. I witnessed numerous travelling Tablighis being treated to meals in Xining, but I more often sat on an unfurnished apartment floor and shared in simple meals travellers had prepared themselves. It is likely that the presence of a foreigner made my jama‘at receive more frequent and sumptuous hospitality, but all of those travelling on a preaching tour are treated as guests from afar—a category for whom the Qur'an recommends special hospitality. My travelling companions always introduced me as an American, but they also introduced themselves as people from Shanxi and Ledu (even though both had permanently settled in Xining), emphasizing our foreignness while encouraging others to travel with a jama‘at to visit our original hometowns.
We travelled to a village in Hualong Hui Autonomous County about two hours outside of Xining—a typical distance and common destinationFootnote 48 for a three-day trip. Local organizers of the movement and the imam of the mosque that would be hosting us ushered us into an approximately 300-square-foot room, nearly half of which was filled by an oversized kangFootnote 49 (炕) capable of sleeping at least ten people. Blankets were neatly folded, covered with prayer rugs, and stacked on one side. There was a coal stove in the centre of the room, and laminated posters describing Tabligh principles, procedures, and guidelines covered the walls.Footnote 50 This mosque and the surrounding village might have been more welcoming to Tablighis than most; one of the organizers in Xining later referred to it as ‘our model mosque’ (我们模特清真寺). Upon our arrival, we sat on the kang in a big circle with about ten locals, and our escort and the host mosque's head imam each made an impassioned speech stressing the importance of the da'wah work we were undertaking.
This was the first of our journey's many oral performances. Each of us gave multiple speeches in study groups and on the street, and several local imams and Tablighis gave similar speeches during our study sessions. We also read some written materials aloud (Ersa and I both stumbling over Arabic words transliterated into Chinese characters), including selections of Hadith and stories of the sahabas’ lives common to the movement, as well as descriptions (written on our walls) of the proper procedure for studying, using the restroom, eating, sleeping, praying, entering a mosque, leaving a mosque, and so on. As a veteran Tablighi, Housseini brought with him a selection of Hadith for use during study, but only a few Chinese Tablighis carried such texts.
Tablighi guidelines require each participant in the jama‘at to speak to a study group about Allah's ‘almighty nature’ (大能), which includes describing his role as creator, manager (管理者), protector, and provider, as well as discussing specifically enumerated methods and benefits of studying this principle. These talks took place in a study session after dawn prayer to members of the congregation sitting in a circle on the floor of the mosque. The information is part of the canon of the movement and many people simply memorize and recite standardized bullet points written in Tablighi texts (and on our walls); however, no one gives specific guidance on the structure or length of such speeches. My speech seemed to be too short, because Housseini filled in more on the topic when I stopped talking. Ersa was very nervous and tried to convince Housseini that he could not give this talk, and he only managed to avoid doing it because a member of the congregation wanted to treat us to breakfast after dawn prayer on the day he was to discuss Allah's almightiness.
The host mosque serves as a place to pray, rest, and study, but much of one's waking hours on a preaching tour are spent in public spaces, meeting and talking to other Muslims. Our work began when we walked through a street market to purchase some fruit for our hosts, and Housseini stopped to talk to every male Muslim vendor. We greeted each Muslim man with a handshake and a hearty ‘Asalaam alaykum’, and Housseini urged them to take the salaam (peace) home and share it with their wives and daughters, as apparently some rural Muslims believe this greeting is only to be exchanged among males. Housseini told everyone we encountered that, even though we were outsiders in their village, when we recite ‘La illaha il Allah’, we are all brothers. Then, he would invite them to join us for evening prayer and a subsequent study session at our host mosque. We never mentioned the name of the movement or said that we were in town to do da'wah work. Instead, we proclaimed that we were there to ‘visit’ (探望) our Muslim brothers. Most people were happy to meet a friendly group of Muslims, especially one including an exotic foreigner, and they smiled and nodded patiently at Housseini's speech. Several even showed up at the mosque to hear us and others speak.
In spite of our benevolent message, we did encounter some animosity on our first outing. When Housseini greeted one of several motorized rickshaw drivers waiting outside the market, the man interrupted Housseini's spiel to say, ‘Don't preach/proselytize to me’ (不要传我). Housseini and he got into a rather heated exchange in which the man argued that having faith in one's heart is enough, so one did not need to attend prayer in mosques or listen to preachers like us. Afterward, Housseini was visibly disappointed by this attitude, but just shook his head and said, ‘We don't have the qualifications to spread the faith, we can only correct ourselves’ (我们没有传教的资格, 我们只要改变我们自己). We discussed how the Qur'an states that it is a Muslim's responsibility to share faith with unbelievers, but also makes it clear that most will not listen. As such, the Tablighi missionary endeavour is an outward performance that does not require positive reception or knowledgeable participants in order to help participants embody a pious and humble habitus.
Male jama‘atis generally focus their efforts on Muslim men (who are often readily identifiable by their white hats) but, at least in China, they do not pass up opportunities to share their message with male unbelievers. In my three-day experience, we greeted every Muslim man and only Muslim men as we walked the streets but, if a non-Muslim accompanied a Muslim, Housseini would not pass up the chance to preach to him as well, even urging non-Muslims to recite the declaration of faith in hopes that it would sink in. We also made special visits to two Han men whom our local contacts considered to be prospects for conversion—a mission that Tablighis elsewhere would reserve for those with special qualifications. In one case, a member of our host mosque took us to visit his sister's Han neighbour in a predominantly Tibetan village an hour's bus ride away. He had been waiting for someone who could communicate with the old man, who could not understand the local dialect, and Housseini's family was originally from the man's native province of Henan. Even though standardized Tabligh methods attempt to transcend place and culture, regional and linguistic identity was still very important in this context. The principal local organizer tried to dissuade Housseini and us from taking this excursion because he had a dinner and a session of ordinary visits planned for us, but Housseini insisted that we should make time for this special visit.
The target of our visit was an old grandfather whose daughter had converted to Islam. He was staying in her house and caring for his grandchild while his daughter worked at a noodle restaurant in eastern China (as many ambitious young Muslims do). When our local guide and Housseini went up to the door together, the old man hostilely met them before they could even knock, saying, ‘What are you doing? I am not from here; I don't understand what you say’ (你干吗?我是外地人. 听不懂). He obviously had been approached before, and he laughed derisively at Housseini's claim that he was just coming to ‘visit’. He repeatedly said that he did not want to hear about Islam because he was Han and too old to change his ways, but the fact that the old man shared a home province with Housseini's parents prevented him from turning us away entirely.
The old Han man clearly viewed Islam as an inherited attribute of Hui ethnicity, a dominant characterization of religion in China that Tablighis criticize as shirking individual responsibility. He called it ‘Hui religion’ (回教, the term used for Islam in China before the mid-twentieth century when it became transliterated as Yisilan jiao 伊斯兰教 in). He associated Islam with this village that was not his home, repeatedly saying he would be leaving before long. For this old man, there was no difference between Islam, Hui religion, and Hui ethnicity. He stubbornly clung to atheism as part of his Han identity and did not want to hear Housseini translate the call to prayer when it sounded from a nearby mosque. He declared, ‘I am Han, I don't want to hear your Hui language [Arabic]!’ (我是汉族人, 我不要听你回族话). Nevertheless, Housseini and our local guide viewed the mission as a success. A religious message was delivered across ethnic boundaries. Even though it was emphatically rejected, we had fulfilled our responsibility.
Cultivating a sacred self in a worldly nation
To isolated Muslim minorities, marginalized Muslims, and disillusioned or restless youth, Tabligh Jama‘at offers an artificial kinship network, an avenue for self-expression, and something of a salve for the ails of modernity. One young man who had discovered the movement while studying in Pakistan shared with me that he came to study sessions to lift him up when he had a rough day at his white-collar office job. Another old man told me how he had just embarked on a preaching tour after taking his son from Hualong Hui Autonomous County to start a restaurant in the Han-dominated port city of Xiamen in Fujian Province. He worried that he could not prevent his son from losing his faith, so he dealt with his powerlessness by calling others to be good Muslims, hoping Allah would reward his efforts with a faithful son.
Daily Tablighi study sessions and regular visits to absent members provide a quasi-familial social network for those isolated and marginalized by economically driven migration and the collapse of traditional clan and kin-based networks. I cannot recall meeting a single participant who was originally from Xining and most of them, even the wealthy like Yacub, were rural residents who migrated to Xining. The movement creates common ground between classes that have increasingly diverged over the past 30 years in urban China. The poor find a sense of empowerment, and the wealthy reconnect with a simpler life and help to elevate spiritually the masses that have been left behind materially. When I first met Yacub, he told me that we ate sitting on the floor the way Muhammad and his companions did, so no one could tell who was rich or poor. One organizer fondly recalled how a foreign Tablighi criticized a Muslim doing charity work, saying that, instead of feeding and clothing people in this life, he should think about how they will be fed and clothed in the next life, implying that the spiritual sustenance everyone could provide is more important. The wealthy can afford to attend study sessions every day and participate in the movement abroad, so many of them become organizers. However, it is difficult to distinguish class among Tablighis because every member of a travelling jama‘at contributes the same sum of money to the common pool and discussion within the movement always centres on spiritual struggles in which everyone is equal.
A centralized hierarchy manages the Tabligh Jama‘at on international and national levels (although it is unclear to what extent this is true in China because of the movement's ambiguous legal status), but local amirs constantly consult with participants (a process known as mushawara that takes place at all levels of the movement all over the world) and delegate responsibility so the movement functions like a grassroots community association. If the issue of hierarchy and authority seems vague, it is because the movement strives to keep it this way. No one I asked had any knowledge of any leaders in China beyond the local level. Neither NoorFootnote 51 nor myself had access to the inner workings of Tabligh leadership, but we both observed a movement in which subtle peer pressure is the only visible force ensuring compliance with numerous rules governing every detail of life. Participation is highly variable and entirely voluntary, and everyday decision-making is mostly conducted in a transparent and decentralized manner.
The movement is not only a means of dedicating oneself to Islam; participation gives individuals a sense of agency independent of their families and social networks. Janson points out that independent young Muslims use the category of ‘cultural Islam’ (that is also widely maligned among Chinese Tablighis) to condemn their parents’ lax or unorthodox practices and assert their independence.Footnote 52 Hollup also shows how young participants in Tabligh Jama‘at no longer recognize traditional local Islamic authorities.Footnote 53 All ages participate in the movement, but the movement in China skews younger than the congregations of most mosques, which are regularly filled with men of retirement age, and most organizers are in their thirties or forties. In his autobiographical work, Sardar recalls how he first went to a Tabligh Jama‘at meeting partially because of preachers shaming him for not being a better Muslim and partially out of rebellion against his parents.Footnote 54 Chinese Tablighis whose parents also disapprove of the movement, criticism of those who merely inherit their faith, and determination of the path of their preaching excursions support this interpretation of the movement as a source of agency and even an avenue of rebellion. Indeed, Metcalf points out that the movement emphasizes individual performance, salvation through devout actions, and emotional narratives of individual experience that are rarely seen in other Islamic movements.Footnote 55
During my jama‘at, we made several independent decisions that contradicted local leaders’ wishes or the movement's conventional practices. We embarked on our journey with three instead of the minimum of four members, Housseini and I took notes against an organizer's advice, and we skipped a meal and session of visiting that local organizers had scheduled to call on a potential convert. Indeed, Noor describes a situation in which ‘Life in and among the Tabligh Jama‘at can be described as corseted as well but it remains a life where the individual remains free enough to initiate and determine his own process of personal transformation’.Footnote 56 An individual's choice to participate in Tabligh Jama‘at with its decentralized and consultative decision-making practices could be considered a tacit rejection of broader sectarian, local, national, and transnational schemes of religious and worldly authority. For Tablighis, concerning oneself with such power struggles would be a distraction from the more important task of cultivating one's piety through direct face-to-face interactions.
Tabligh Jama‘at imbues all Muslims with the prestigious role of teacher which is traditionally ascribed only to scholars who have mastered Arabic and Quranic knowledge through years of study—a situation that leads many Islamic scholars to oppose the movement and accuse participants of spreading their own ignorance.Footnote 57 Many Chinese Salafis, in particular, levelled this criticism against Tablighis. But, like Salafis, Tablighis in China see themselves as resurrecting proper Islamic practices after complacent imams have allowed Islam in China to lapse into a deplorable state. When I asked one teenaged Tablighi about the state of Islam in his predominantly Muslim hometown, he said, ‘Since it has this work, it is okay’ (才有这个工作就可以), and went on to complain that too many of the imams there did not know or support Tablighi methods. Horstmann observes how this egalitarian spirit gives the impoverished and marginalized villagers of southern Thailand new prospects and connections.Footnote 58 Tablighis certainly form new connections within the Muslim community, but Chinese Tablighis also strain their relations with Muslims critical of the movement as well as a mainstream society in which atheism and materialism are the norm.
Tablighis in the Islamic world or areas with Muslim populations larger and more influential than China's may draw social and material benefits from participation in the movement, but those in China primarily gain a subjective sense of confidence and empowerment. In his study of South Asian Tablighis, Sikand points out that ‘By opening up access to valued symbolic resources of shari'at-centred Islam and ashraf “high” culture, the movement provides them [participants] with an important channel for upward social mobility’.Footnote 59 In China, the movement expands Muslims’ realm of experience with travel, teaches them some new Hadith, probably improves their Arabic pronunciation and public-speaking skills, and at least encouraged one of my companions to learn some Arabic. Such skills carry social capital among Tablighis and observant Muslims, but Tablighis evoke such a strict separation between spiritual and material worlds, and most members of broader Chinese society view religion with such scorn, that it would be extremely difficult for anyone to parlay participation in Tabligh Jama‘at into any sort of advancement in society outside the movement.
Tablighis carry a transnational standard of orthodoxy and individual responsibility to the less-developed countryside and encourage rural residents to travel to cities to learn from urban Muslims in ways that parallel the Chinese state's urbanizing development programme, but counter its strategy of secularization. A devout Salafi who was a retired local official and a former Communist Party member complained to me that the religious repression of the 1960s and 1970s had left too many Chinese Muslims ignorant of their faith, but he believed that Tabligh Jama‘at could help to rectify this situation. Individuals participating in Tabligh Jama‘at accept the responsibility to cooperatively impose a code of behaviour upon themselves that is sufficiently strict to render secular laws redundant and the local and national communities and leaders attached to them irrelevant. Their standardized individual comportment represents a transnational community that embodies an unspoken transcendence of local and national authority to constitute ‘an implicit critique of the global nation-state system’.Footnote 60 Tablighis often disparaged the Chinese version of the movement as compared to South Asia (Yacub often called it ‘just a copy’), but they also downplayed any notion of international combat or competition, advocating revival of Islam by the same method everywhere. The movement's ability to provide an empowering mode of participation in Islam while maintaining political innocuousness has obvious attractions for many Chinese Muslims who feel that renewal is necessary to prevent the disappearance of their faith, but must also cope with state suspicion of any religious behaviour and the fact that political ambition is a dangerous and unrealistic proposition. Tablighis are united in the pure realm of religion, but have no unified approach to worldly matters, so the movement allows individuals to confidently and independently assert agency outside the religious realm.
An alternative modernity: sanctifying the self through a transnational imaginary
Tabligh Jama‘at removes Muslims from their secular environment and materialistic habitus in order to help them create a new Islamic subjectivity that will effect a transformation of their daily lives when they return from preaching journeys. Bourdieu uses the term habitus to denote a set of behaviours and predispositions that is inherited and shaped by structures of culture and power.Footnote 61 However, I have found Saba Mahmood's use of the Aristotelian notion of habitus more appropriate to Tabligh Jama‘at because it represents conscious and purposeful self-transformation by embodying virtuous behaviours in hopes that they will become internalized.Footnote 62 In her study of a (non-Tablighi) da'wah movement in Egypt, Mahmood uses the Aristotelian notion of habitus to describe how her informants internalize virtue through adopting virtuous practices of personal comportment, study, and preaching.Footnote 63 Bourdieu's formulation of habitus is unconsciously inherited according to one's socio-economic position, whereas Tablighis, like Mahmood's informants, intentionally cultivate a virtuous mode of being in hopes that the desired behaviours will eventually become effortless—a process more consistent with Aristotle's notion. Her Egyptian interlocutors refer to al-Ghazali's methods that were directly inspired by Aristotle and, even though Tablighis do not make this direct connection, their texts and practices also self-consciously shape a more virtuous habitus. My informants primarily experience Tabligh methods as tools to define themselves as pious individuals in opposition to the secular or sectarian identities local structures of power encourage.
Tabligh Jama‘at is similar to some forms of Protestantism in that it circumvents clerical authority, encourages pursuit of salvation through individual reform, and advocates propagation of its message throughout the world. Tozy compares the movement to an evangelical Christian sect in that it suggests ‘The world is corrupt because men are corrupt. If one can reform mankind one can change the world. The characteristic activities of this type of sect are revivalism and public preaching’.Footnote 64 Protestantism theoretically permits anyone to become a preacher, but Tabligh Jama‘at insists that everyone must become a preacher without the need for any sort of formal training or ordination. Ali notes that it puts ‘the authority of the preacher–the Tablighi–over that of the “ulama” (Islamic scholar), not unlike the evangelical Protestant response to secularism’.Footnote 65 Yoginder Sikand echoes this comparison to the Reformation in pointing out the Tablighi emphasis on each individual's responsibility before God as well as its promotion of a capitalistic calculus to determine heavenly rewards for each virtuous action amounts to an ‘inner worldly asceticism of the Protestant sort’.Footnote 66 Beyond these similarities in practice and distribution of spiritual authority, Horstmann argues that Tabligh Jama‘at ‘paradoxically represents the force of modernity and rationalization’ in that it deploys both transnational community and profit as motivating factors to urge its members to conform to certain behaviours.Footnote 67
China's Tablighis see the transnational Tablighi community as representing a pious and cosmopolitan alternative to both the Marxist notion of atheist modernity their children learn in schools and the alluring Western combination of Christianity, capitalism, and decadence. Criticism of both Chinese and Western modes of materialism is common among all observant Chinese Muslims, but Tabligh Jama‘at adds an attractive and empowering plan of action. Pious practices, universal brotherhood, and the sense of purpose these create and represent provide individuals with structure and confidence by linking them directly with a transnational community and, in doing so, circumvent fractious political and theological issues and alliances. Tabligh Jama‘at can be considered modern, or even postmodern, in that its practices are individualized and transnational in a way that tends to ignore or undermine traditional customs and authorities, as well as non-universal identities of ethnic, local, and national natures.
Ilyas founded the Tabligh Jama‘at to promote embodied religion as a means to encourage a deeper understanding of Islam through intensive study; however, critics today claim many Tablighis have lost sight of deeper spiritual ends in their obsession with superficial means.Footnote 68 Regardless, it is difficult, or even impossible, to clearly define a common goal of a movement that is dedicated to perpetual struggle to perform a more perfect version of oneself. The carefully scripted behaviour of Tablighis protects them in their inward struggles against desires and ego as they continually implore others to join the struggle against their own internal demons. This method meshes well with a Chinese culture that has long relied on clearly defined public norms for acting, thinking, and feeling that are taught by memorization and recitation of moral parables and dogmatic texts in both Confucianism and socialism. However, participants in the Tabligh Jama‘at aim to not only internalize, but universalize, a standard pattern of personal comportment which promises eternal rewards, not just a mundane ethical order like that of Confucianism or socialism. Thus, all participants are locked in a struggle that is at once internal, communal, and universal. This struggle dwarfs all finite worldly concerns and belittles any mundane sense of identification. Tabligh Jama‘at provides a subjective experience of the global ummah that allows one to transcend local and national concerns by performing a pious, modern, and universal Muslim individuality.
