Muslims have feet, and tend to move about like everybody else.

The history of Islam and Muslim society can be read as a history of movement, for without such movement Islam would not be the global religion that it is today. For centuries, Muslims have travelled across the world for the sake of commerce, politics, diplomacy, warfare and to spread Islam as well. The Muslims that I am concerned with in this book are the members of the Tablighi Jama’at, a global movement of itinerant lay Muslim missionaries that has been described by scholars like Masud, Metcalf, Sikand and Reetz as a global pietist movement for faith renewal among Muslims, and which may well be one of the biggest missionary movements of any religion in the world today.

The origins of the Tablighi Jama’at go back to Mewat, North India and the Deobandi tradition that originated from the Dar’ul Uloom madrasah in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh. The Deobandi movement was started by Muhammad Qassim Nanotawi and Maulana Rashid Ahmad Gangohi in 1867. Like the Deobandis, the Tablighis were conservative fundamentalists who were inspired by the reformists of the Salafi movement from the Arab lands. However, unlike the Deobandis who were educationists, the Tablighis were mainly lay missionaries who sought to transform Muslim society and bring Muslims back to the path of true Islam.

The Tablighi movement was formed around 1926-27 by Muhammad Ilyas Kandhalawi (1885-1944), whose family was closely linked to the Deobandi leadership and its sister school, the Mazahiru’l-Ulum in Saharanpur. Ilyas was known for both his knowledge of Islam and his Sufi inclinations, and his work was later continued by his successors, Yusuf Kandhalawi (1917-1965) and Muhammad Zakaria Kandhalawi (1898-1982).