Indoctrinating quietism: The workings and dynamics of Tablighi Jumaat

 

Imagine any power packed function held recently and you will see one Maulana Tariq Jameel in there. His presence is as uncontroversial as it is ubiquitous. He will be paraded around as an affirmation of the functionary’s or the function’s sanctimony, along with the cross-validation through other such figures. There is tidbit running in the Tablighi circles that Maulana sb once recounted tryst with his father. After leaving MBBS midway his father was apprehensive of the life ahead for the young Tariq Jameel. The anecdote goes that Tariq Jameel became a Maulana and the most influential of Tablighi leaders and found the then PM Nawaz Sharif kissing his hand or his feet at Raiwand Markaz. Tariq Jameel is reported to have recounted that at that moment he wished that had his father been alive he would have told him that what leaving MBBS for the path of Allah has given to his son!

The purpose is not to tell Tariq Jameel’s biography or launch a tirade against. It is rather to point out that because of his moving sermons, his tales of heavens, his spine-shivering recounting of the events of the early parts of Islam he has become a singular image of the movement he belongs to.   The anecdote recounted here also points to the self-image of blessing and of worldly success brought through the very act of renouncing it which the members of the Jumaat have internalized. Tha Maulana is considered to be blessing for the Jumaat and before the age of social media and in the age of audio cassettes and CDs he was considered the powerhouse to ‘turn hearts soft’

He did turn many hearts soft, including mine. I have spent a better part of my youth attached in one way or another to the Tablighi Jumaat. The Tablighi Jumaat started in the heated environment of 1920s as a result to oppose the institutionalized conversion programs of Muslims and to guide Muslims to the ‘true’ way of Islam. The moorings of the movement are missionary while its ideology is puritanical and its mission reversion to the fundamentals of religion. Unfortunately, because of the diffuse organizational structure and of the maintaining of a working ethos on the basis of ‘counsel’ and ‘voluntarism’ it is hard to statistically analyze the composition of leadership or for that matter the demographics of the members. Though the empirical data may be hard to come by the anecdotal data and lived experiences within the movement can provide an insight into functioning and methods of, perhaps, the largest religious movement (and organization of the country). There is a hierarchal structure but that is kept informal (deliberately?) to maintain the selfless devotion to a pious and holy cause (as prophets and the Aslaf did work under Amir and not secretaries and so on).

Before putting the blame on the movement for its shortcomings and the very observable mal-effects on society which can be gauged by inferential reasoning, it is paramount to state that I don’t intend to make it the sole villain and the cause of the social stagnancy or the arrest of development of critical thought. It may very well be an effect but also may feedback into the very forces producing it, thus creating a self-feeding loop. The general consensus about their activity is that of well-regard as they don’t incite to violence or engage in open diatribe of polemics. The message is quite simple, pray and recite and do all the worshipping, focus on the individual and the collective, the Ummat, will be reformed.  The favorite evidence of this work-ethic for a glorious Islamic reformation is that Prophet Muhammad spent 13 years in Mecca, worked on the vanguard and then left for Medina. So, for now, the advice goes, focus on individual acts of worshiping and with incremental increase in the number of follower of the right path a revolution will happen.

That line of thinking advocates a strict adherence to quietism; quietism not in stoic sense but in the nihilistic sense of disregard for larger workings and structures of the society. We have to accept the social, economic misery as it is part of an unwritten law and is result of our lack of piety and enough faith. This is reductive understanding of the multi-edged exploitation that the masses suffer from and rather than engaging with the modes of exploitation through a nuanced argument the blame is deflected to be internalized by those at the very receiving end. If nothing else then this point alone makes the Tablighi Jumaat and its star preachers darlings of the ruling classes.  The recent video of Tariq Jameel in favor of government of Imran Khan which is increasingly becoming intolerant of dissent is a practical and in some aspects the first manifestation of this thinking. Imran Khan has to be supported or rather ‘we should be slaves to the person talking of Madina ke riyasat.’ The quietism preached by the Jumaat has now to be explicitly invoked for sustaining a conservative populist and headless regime!

The moral prescription of the Jumaat is that of charity, to invite others to mosque and to imitate on them the futility of this world and that all woes will be solved by ‘two rakaat of Nafl’! Sit in any meeting and the most-repeated term with be ‘Yaqeen’ and ‘that we have to strengthen our Yaqeen’. Yaqeen can be translated as an unflinching, unadulterated by doubt and unmixed by reasoning, belief in the verity of the faith. One could argue that this is legitimate and even desirable, given the militant Islamist manifestation. And many people do suggest Tabligh as a corrective to the violent Jehadist ideology but that’s settling for the sea instead of the hard rock! Engage with any of the preacher of the Jummat, and everyone is a preacher in there as the mission is programmed to be a training in preaching and calling out to the right way, and you will know that not only is the horizon of normative and descriptive values limited to concept of Saza-o-Jazaa but also the reading of history is totally inaccurate, simplistic and in service of a false consciousness.

Perhaps, the zenith of dogmatism that this movement adheres to, can be attested from the fact that the only book ‘allowed’ to be followed is Fazail-e-Amaal, written by one of the founder of the movement, Maulana Zakariya. It is a collection of Ahadith regarding the rewards for different acts of worshipping. There are multiple modes of ‘Dawwa’ or missionary work which vary in number of days spent while away from home. The 40-day period is called Chilla and then there is an arrangement of three, four and seven months and a year. You can engage with other texts under the guidance of Amir in the 3-months onward excursions. This blatant discouraging of engaging with rich, complex and multi-varied epistemological, scholarly and philosophical tradition of Islam is not only the brainwashing of young minds into a rootless and limited understanding of their reality, it also is a continuation of the fundamentalist and revisionist mode of engagement with the religious texts. This focus on one simple text to ‘lure masses into the right path’ serves as the dialectical other to the systemic preaching of quietism.

The right path as understood by the Jumaat is also one full of snarls which should alarm us. The right path is devoid of any cultural influence and a rootless understanding of the sacred texts unmoored in a sense of historical understanding and thus distanced from social reality seeped in time.  The right path is where the Deobandi and Salafi strains of revisions converge with a transformative reversion of society, albeit through individual renouncing and closing-off of rational faculties.

If the movement was a fringe phenomenon we could have afforded to ignore the peculiar effects it has on the society and especially on young minds. But, sadly, that’s not so. In my alma-meter (UET Peshawar) the Tablighi students used to have two buses provided for each shab-e-Jumma (a congregation held after Thursday evening’s prayers in district headquarters of the Jumaat). While the political student groups were not only banned but closely surveilled upon to and constantly disciplined through punitive measures. The incentives for the university administration were clear as they are for the ruling classes: strip the young minds of the ability to question the non-participatory mode of management (or governance). This encouragement of quietist lens to see the world, the training to not see the social, political and economic structures of oppression resulting in misery of the masses and thus the internalization of bigotry in the masses because of lack of piety is a pathology that if generalized will work to the detriment of a healthy, democratic and inquisitive society. Perhaps, the least we can do is to deconstruct the premium put on the piety of the Jumaat and see that the social and political roles of it are not that innocuous.