How the Tablighi Jamaat is reshaping Khyber Pakhtunkhwah and opening doors for radicalisation
“MEN AND WOMEN used to dress fashionably, enjoy music, watch television, visit shrines and play sports without being judged as becoming irreligious,” a young resident of Bajaur district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwah recalled. But things are changing, and he pointed to the agents of the change. “Now, Tablighi Jamaat members, with their puritanical religious views, think that most of these activities are sinful and against Islam, thus turning the society towards intolerance and narrow-mindedness.”
The Bajaur resident said the Tablighi Jamaat has gained great popularity in his area, with thousands of active members. “They visit people individually in mosques, shops, schools and workplaces, and invite them to become members of the Tablighi Jamaat. It has changed the cultural landscape of Bajaur drastically.” And though the Jamaat “does not directly preach terrorism and violence, it nonetheless provides the raw human resource that can be easily turned into jihadists.”
The Tablighi Jamaat, an international Islamic movement with millions of adherents, is well known in many countries for its orthodox preaching, and has had a strong presence in Pakistan since shortly after the country’s creation. In recent times, the Jamaat has been making major strides in Khyber Pakhtunkhwah, the province stretching along Pakistan’s disputed north-western border with Afghanistan. Dominated by Pashtuns, the frontier region has long prided itself on its distinct traditions, such as the Pashtunwali tribal code. But, many locals say, the Jamaat’s rising popularity and influence is changing Khyber Pakhtunkhwah’s cultural, religious and – to some degree at least – socio-political landscape.
To a significant majority of the province’s population, the Tablighi Jamaat is innocuous, uncontroversial, engaged in promoting piety. But many others see it as promoting dogmatic thinking, with simplistic and often problematic perspectives on life and religion. Some also see links between the activities of the Jamaat and religious extremism.
The Jamaat, founded in colonial India, has its global headquarters in Delhi, although the organisation has a loose structure with no strict hierarchies. Each country has its own headquarters, and each area where the organisation is active has its own regional centre, or markaz. The Jamaat was founded in 1926 in the Mewat region, near Delhi, as a response to the Shuddhi movement spearheaded by the Hindu revivalist Arya Samaj, which aimed to “re-convert” people of other religions to Hinduism. But it found perhaps its most potent home in Raiwind, a small town near Lahore, where the organisation’s headquarters for Pakistan is still based.
The Tablighi Jamaat – literally, the “preaching party” – is a Sunni missionary movement that preaches the Deobandi version of Islam. An orthodox revival movement born in northern India in the 19th century, the Deobandi tradition looks to “purify” Muslim practice via an emphasis on personal piety, strict adherence to sharia and a rigid interpretation of Sunni Islamic tradition, though combined with select Sufi influences. The Jamaat emphasises the fundamentals of the Islamic faith, preaches nonviolence and is purportedly apolitical. One popular encapsulation of its beliefs, likely to appear on rickshaws and other public vehicles in places where the Jamaat is active, states in Urdu, “Har masle ka ek he hal, bistar lay kar markaz chal” – There is only one solution to every problem, take your bedding and go to the markaz.
The Canadian scholar and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott has observed that, owing to the organisation’s professedly peaceful agenda, it “def[ies] easy characterisation.” The fact that it does not preach jihad, which can be construed as militant struggle, helps explains why the Tablighi Jamaat is permitted to operate in more than 150 countries, making it the largest Islamic missionary organisation in the world. But it has been proscribed in numerous countries – Saudi Arabia, Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan – for allegedly promoting extremism or increasing the potential for radicalisation.
One of the group’s main messages is to spend time in the way of God. This time may be three days, forty days, four months or – for married men only – a whole year, during which members preach door-to-door, in private and public spaces, while remaining secluded from their families. This work is mainly for men; women can proselytise in private to other women, and travel with their men for this purpose, but in daily life they are encouraged to remain inside the home, always segregated from unrelated men.
