Founding of the Tablighi Jamaat

Date

c. 1926

Category

Religion & ideology

Region

South Asia (Mewat, British India)

Era

Modern

Significance

Around 1926, the Deobandi Islamic scholar Muhammad Ilyas Kandhlawi launched the Tablighi Jamaat ("Society for Spreading Faith") in the Mewat region of British India, near the Dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin in Delhi.

Concerned that nominally Muslim communities, particularly the Meo of Mewat, had retained pre-Islamic customs and were vulnerable to Hindu revivalist proselytising, Ilyas abandoned his teaching post and organised volunteer preaching bands (jamaats) to travel to villages and call Muslims to greater religious observance. The movement was deliberately apolitical and grassroots, distilling its teaching into six core principles centred on faith, prayer, knowledge, respect for fellow Muslims, sincerity of intention, and missionary outreach. From this modest beginning it grew into one of the most influential religious movements of twentieth-century Islam, with an annual conference drawing some 25,000 people by 1941 and international expansion accelerating from the 1970s onward. Today the Tablighi Jamaat operates in roughly 150 countries and counts an estimated 12 to 80 million adherents worldwide, the majority in South Asia.

Empires active in c. 1926

• Empire of Japan
  1868 CE – 1947 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• Soviet Union
  1922 CE – 1991 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related religion & ideology events

• Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto
  21 February 1848
• Founding of the Muslim Brotherhood
  March 1928
• The Azusa Street Revival and the Birth of Pentecostalism
  1906–1909
• Founding of the Baha'i Faith
  April 21 - May 2, 1863 (Declaration of Ridvan)
• Abolition of the Kapu System in Hawaii (ʻAi Noa)
  October 1819
• The Second Vatican Council
  11 October 1962 – 8 December 1965

Further reading

A Little History of Religion

The wider story

A Little History of Religion

Richard Holloway

Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.

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