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Islam, Ritual and the Ethical Life

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Islam, Ritual and the Ethical Life ISLAM, RITUAL AND THE ETHICAL LIFE DAWAT IN THE TABLIGHI JAMAAT IN PAKISTAN Arsalan Khalid Khan Charlottesville, Virginia M.A. Anthropology, University of Virginia 2011 B.A. International Relations, Beloit College 2005 A Dissertation Presented to The Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Anthropology December, 2014 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 4 2. Islam and the Colonial Configuration of Religion 46 3. Ritual Ideology: Dawat, Personhood, Purity 74 4. Piety as Ethical Relatedness 110 5. From Precarious to Certain Faith: The Making of a Spiritual Home 156 6. Dawat and Transcendence in an Islamic Nation 195 7. Conclusion: Dawat as Islamic Modernity 240 1 Acknowledgements The research for this dissertation was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. The faculty in the Department of Anthropology at UVa provided me with a warm and nurturing space to develop as a scholar. I am most indebted to my dissertation chair and adviser, Richard Handler, for his unwavering support and encouragement without which I may never have been able to see this task to completion. I consider my work mostly a dialogue with what I have learned from him over these many years. I also want to extend my gratitude to the members of my committee. Dan Lefkowitz’s insights into performance helped me frame key aspects of my dissertation. Peter Metcalf consistently encouraged me to ground my theoretical arguments in ethnography, which I have tried to do. Ravindra Khare and my outside reader John Echeverri-Gent compelled me to clarify key points of the dissertation. Over the years, my understanding of anthropology has developed through courses and conversations with Ira Bashkow, Fred Damon, Eve Danziger, Susan McKinnon and John Shepherd. I have tried to incorporate a small part of what I learned from each of them in this dissertation. I had the good fortune of being part of an intellectually vibrant network of scholars at UVa and beyond. My ongoing intellectual exchange with Jason Hickel has been among the most productive. Members of my writing group Roberto Armengol, David Flood, Julie Starr, Jack Stoetzel and Rose Wellman also deserve special mention. Over the years, I have had enriching conversations about my research with Erika Brant, Todne Thomas Chipumuro, Nauman Faizi, Emily Filler, Aysha Ghani, Chris Hewlett, Nadim Khoury, Sue Ann McCarty, Betsy Mesard, Neeti Nair, Alessandro Questa, Grace Reynolds, Omar Shaukat, and Clare Terni. My research in Karachi would not have been possible without the support of my friend and key interlocutor, Talha Zahid, who helped me navigate the space of the Tablighi Jamaat. During my fieldwork in Karachi, I benefited from the intellectual camaraderie of a number of friends including Moneeza Ahmed, Nadir Hassan, Zahra Malkani, and Shaheryar and Rabayl Mirza. Many childhood friends also provided me with much needed breaks from my fieldwork. My deepest gratitude is reserved for my family. A special thanks goes to Nani and my khala, Tazeen Erum, for everything. My brother Mansoor Khan has served as a constant source of inspiration for my intellectual pursuits. I am also grateful to him and Abbie Fentress Swanson for providing me with a second home in NYC. My step-father Afzal Ahmed Syed has been a patient supporter and always entertained my efforts at translation with good humor. This dissertation is dedicated to my mother Tanveer Anjum who has been with me from the beginning. 2 Dissertation Abstract This dissertation explores the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to- face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational piety movement, the Tablighi Jamaat. Tablighis say that Muslims have abandoned their Islamic duties for “worldly” pursuits and must be brought back to Islam through dawat. They insist that only their own form of dawat, which requires lengthy and arduous travel, is capable of drawing Muslims to Islam and dismiss as “worldly” activities the efforts to spread Islam by a diverse array of Islamist actors including political parties, corporations, NGOs, and popular televangelists. I show that, for Tablighis, dawat qualifies as a “religious practice” (dini amal) because it is a divinely prescribed ritual that, when conducted in its proper form, elicits divine agency in order to create ethical relationships between speakers and listeners. These ethical relationships, I argue, are conceived in hierarchical terms and are modeled on the ideal of the relationship between the Prophet and the Companions. It is this ideal of ethical relationships that Tablighis consider the ground for the Islamic nation and the global Islamic community, and it is the failure of Islamists to live in these terms that renders them un-Islamic. My central thesis is that dawat is built on a model of ethical action in which a person becomes an ethical subject by submitting to the authority of pious others and being “acted upon” by them. This model of ethical action locates “agency” not within the individual as it is in a modernist ontology but in the relations between persons. The distinction Tablighis draw between “religious” and “worldly” activities, then, is not about religious doctrine or belief, which they share with Islamists, but about the proper form of an Islamic community structured by a sacred hierarchy. 3 INTRODUCTION The Tablighi Jamaat is a transnational Islamic piety movement that began in the 1920s in North India, but now has a major presence in many parts of the world, especially where there are large South Asian populations. According to some scholars, the Tablighi Jamaat is the fastest growing Islamic movement in the world (Sikand 2002). Pakistan is one of the four major centers of Tablighi Jamaat activities, with millions of people from Pakistan and around the world attending the annual congregation (ijtima) at Raiwind and hundreds of thousands attending the other annual congregations in various cities across the country. Since the 1980s, the Tablighi Jamaat has grown dramatically in Pakistan. A testament to this is the large mosque complexes (markaz) that have sprung up in all the major cities, the largest of which can host anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 worshippers. These complexes serve as key institutional nodes in a network of mosques that, either formally or informally, are affiliated with the movement. Tablighis—or practitioners of the Tablighi Jamaat—can be seen walking through Pakistan’s villages, towns and cities in groups of ten or twelve dressed in the traditional shalwar-kameez, pant-legs raised above their ankles, with long flowing beards and a white Muslim cap, an image that is immediately discernable to Muslims as being in the Prophet’s example (sunnat). They travel for specified periods of time, from a single day to an entire year, living in mosques, and “calling” or “inviting” (dawat) fellow Muslims to come to the mosque to pray and listen to sermons. It is their goal to draw other Muslims to Islamic practice, and specifically to the practice of dawat. The Tablighi Jamaat aims to draw Muslims back to Islamic practice through their own distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat/tabligh). The term “tabligh” means to 4 convey or deliver, and Tablighis use it interchangeably with the word “dawat” meaning to call or invite. In the Tablighi Jamaat, both are used interchangeably. The concept of dawat has deep roots in Islamic theology, and can be found in the Quran. The Quran states: “Who could be a better person than the one who ‘called’ (da’a) toward God and acted righteously” (41:33) and “There should be a group of people among you who ‘call’ (yad’una) to [do] good, enjoining good and forbidding evil” (3:104) (cited in Reetz 2006: 147). Tablighis interpret these Quranic injunctions to mean that it is the duty of every individual Muslim to preach the virtues of Islam to their fellow Muslims, just as the Prophet did, as a means to keep Muslims focused on Allah and “religion” (din) and protect them from the ploys of the Devil and “the world” (dunya). Tablighi conceptions of dawat, however, are not simply about the spreading of Islamic content. Rather, Tablighis insist that it is the very form of dawat that is Islamic. Their “method of preaching” (tariqa-e-tabligh), they insist, follows the Prophet’s example (sunnat), and, like all of the Prophet’s actions, is divinely inspired. It is only this form, they insist, that is efficacious in spreading Islamic virtues and capable of communicating Allah’s will and command. Early Tablighi accounts suggested that “method” came to the founder of the movement, Muhammad Ilyas, in a dream, implying that it was a direct gift from God, but Ilyas himself never said this. He did note, however, that it was a blessing from God and that “the closeness and the help and blessings [of God] is not to be found in the case of other methods” (cited in Sikand 2002: 131). The efficacy of dawat in soliciting Divine intervention is thus seen to depend on it being conducted in precisely the form that it was prescribed and fulfilled by the Prophet and his Companions. It is by following precisely the method of the Prophet that dawat becomes a religious practice 5 (dini amal) and exclusively efficacious in spreading Islamic virtues and creating the basis for a genuine Islamic community. Henceforth, I will use the term dawat to refer to the specific Tablighi method of preaching. This claim that their own “method” is divinely inspired leads Tablighis to reject all other forms of Islamic activism, especially those associated with Islamist political parties that have been a formidable presence in Pakistan’s public sphere throughout Pakistan’s history, but especially since the Islamization campaign of the military dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s.
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