Islam, Youth, and Modernity in the Gambia: the Tablighi Jamaʿat by Marloes Janson (review)

Contributing to the scholarly literature on the anthropology of Islam, gender studies and youth culture, Marloes Janson explores the Tablighi Jamaʿat – a transnational Islamic revivalist movement – in the small West Africa country of the Gambia. With rich ethnographic detail, the book records and analyses the life stories of five members (three men and two women) and highlights how the movement disrupts established local Islamic practices, forms of authority and kinship relationships. Arguing that Islam must be analysed as embedded in the daily life and experiences of Tablighis, Janson shows the complex intersections between being modern, Muslim and young in the Gambia (p. 23).

The first three chapters give a broad overview of the work. In postcolonial Gambia, where Muslim identity is a topic of public debate (pp. 44–5), Janson attempts to grasp how Tablighis create new religious affiliations and meaning as they appropriate this global movement in a local setting. Founded by Mawlana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhalwi (1885–1944) in colonial India in 1927 (pp. 72–3), the Tablighi Jamaʿat is defined by khuruj (missionary tours) directed at Muslims and the call for strict moral conduct (pp. 74–5). Rather than ʿulama (scholars), Kandhalwi emphasized the importance of lay preachers for propagating Islam (p. 73). Boasting nearly 80 million global adherents, the movement has found a modest presence in the Gambia since the 1990s (p. 70, 78).

Unlike its South Asian counterpart, in the Gambia the Tablighi Jamaʿat attracts mainly urban youth between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five (pp. 5–6). The Gambian branch also gives women the opportunity for missionary activity or masturat (p. 6). Although most studies depict youth in Africa as a ‘lost generation’, Janson analyses them as ‘religious agents bringing about socio-religious transformation’ (p. 14). Moreover by focusing on masturat, she explains how women’s religiosity comes into the public sphere and disrupts established gender norms (p. 7).

Chapters 4 to 8 bring the reader intimately into the lives of adherents. The stories of Ahmed and Bubacar highlight the competing possibilities of social and religious life for Gambian youth. While many youth become self-identified ‘ghetto boys’ (pp. 24–5) and mark their identity with drinking tea, listening to music, dating and wearing specific types of clothing (p. 117), Tablighis display their identities differently and represent a youth ‘counterculture’ (pp. 112–13). They often wear ‘ankle-length trousers and kaftans, turbans’ and sport beards (p. 122). They build bonds and new forms of sociality through khuruj and at the Markaz (Tablighi centre) (p. 156, 160). Although some youth, like Ahmed, ‘relapse’ (p. 129) and return to their former lives as ‘ghetto boys’ after becoming Tablighi, others, like Bubacar, remain committed to the movement and fend off social and familial pressures (p. 139).

Even though Tablighi ideology articulates a patriarchal definition of womanhood and restricts women’s mobility outside the home (pp. 183, 186–7), many Gambian women continue to become adherents. Against this apparent contradiction, Fatima and Aisha show how women negotiate their own space within the movement (p. 163). Through ta’alim (teaching/learning) sessions (p. 162) and masturat, women create new bonds outside their homes. During missionary tours, women give public speeches (pp. 206–7) and gender roles often become inversed, as men provide childcare and also do domestic work (p. 193, 214). Janson argues that, by becoming Tablighi, in the ‘dialectic between submission and religious agency’ (p. 224), women experience new forms of Muslim piety (p. 223).

The story of Bachir highlights that the movement in the Gambia contrasts sharply with both majlis (traditional study circles) and madrasa (modern Islamic schools) (pp. 237–8, 239–42). The Tablighi Jamaʿat consciously uses English as the language of knowledge production, rather than vernacular languages or Arabic, and draws youth from secular Western-style educational institutions (p. 236). Emphasizing ‘orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy’ (p. 225), the...