Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia

10. THE TABLIGHI JAMA‘AT AS VEHICLE OF (RE)DISCOVERY: Conversion Narratives and the Appropriation of India in the Southeast Asian Tablighi Movement

195 10 THE TABLIGHI JAMA‘AT AS VEHICLE OF (RE)DISCOVERY Conversion Narratives and the Appropriation of India in the Southeast Asian Tablighi Movement Farish A. Noor India gave her mythology to her neighbours, who went to teach it to the whole world. She gave to three-quarters of Asia a God, a religion, a doctrine, an art. She carried her sacred language, her religion, her institutions to Indonesia, to the limits of the known world and from there they spread back …1 Sylvain Levi, L’inde Civilisatrice (1938) This chapter highlights one aspect of the Tablighi Jama‘at, which Masud, Metcalf, and Sikand have described as the biggest itinerant transnational Muslim missionary movement in the world today.2 The focus is on conversion narratives of Southeast Asian Muslims who have joined the Tabligh, and how these conversion narratives and strategies have employed the trope of India, re-imagined by them and the broader Tabligh as a centre of Muslim learning and pious practice. Our particular concern here is to demonstrate that in the conversion process of some Southeast Asian Muslims to the brand of normative Islam 196 Farish A. Noor embodied by the Tabligh, complex reconstructions and re-appropriations of the image and identity of India have taken place. This appropriation of the image and idea of India is selective and necessarily narrow, but is aimed at creating the bonding capital that binds together not only Muslims within the Tablighi network, but also Muslims from across South and Southeast Asia, via a discourse of a common shared Muslim history and identity. In short, not only has the Tabligh spread its network of activities beyond India to Southeast Asia, but it has also served as a symbolic and discursive bridge between the two regions with India — or in this case, a specific Tablighdesigned image of India — serving as the narrative connection which links the two communities and regions together. Earlier research on the Tablighi Jama‘at in Malaysia and Indonesia tended to focus on its urban presence and the role that the movement has played in the revival of normative Islam in both countries. Most of these studies have emphasized the missionary zeal of theTablighis themselves, and tended to lend the impression that the transnational transfer of ideas, beliefs, and religious norms was a one-way process that contributed further to the Indianization of the Southeast Asian region and which did not involve a corresponding appropriation of Indian ideas and symbols on the part of the Southeast Asians themselves. In some respects, these studies reiterated the view of Southeast Asians as passive recipients of religious praxis and norms from abroad, and compounded the image of the region as a mere depository of foreign ideas and influences; they are similar in this sense to other academic discourses on Islamization and Arabization in the region. The point that we wish to make here, via recourse to the conversion narratives of the Southeast Asian Tablighis themselves, is that such instances of conversion are rarely ever instances of passive reception bereft of agency and choice, and that in them we find evidence of a local agency of appropriation, selection, and imagining at work as well. Although in terms of its outlook and approach to Islam, the Tablighi Jama‘at movement is widely regarded as being conservative and fundamentalist, it has attracted little attention from the Malaysian and Indonesian authorities because it was viewed as apolitical and harmless. In both countries, the movement managed to attract a considerable following from Muslim bluecollar workers in the cities and was known for its success in reforming drug addicts and petty criminals in particular, ostensibly bringing them back to the right path of Islam. For this reason, the Tabligh managed to secure the tacit support and patronage of the state. The Tabligh’s intimate links to the Deobandi school (which later spawned the Taliban movement in Afghanistan) gave little cause for concern to most Muslim governments in the 1970s. The Tablighi Jama‘at as Vehicle of (Re)-discovery 197 Arguably the most important feature of the Tabligh movement is its apparently apolitical outlook and character. In both Malaysia and Indonesia, the movement was seen as quietist and passive in nature, and was conspicuously absent from the political scene. This in part explains the appeal of the Tablighi Jama‘at for urban Muslims in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, and accounts for the relative indifference of...