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. 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 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 Tabligh-designed 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 the Tablighis 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.