Islamic iconicity and the performance of the sacred past

Tablighi conceptions of dawat fit well with the descriptions of Islamic pietists in Egypt by Saba Mahmood (Reference Mahmood2005) and Charles Hirschkind (Reference Hirschkind2006) who stress that ritual practice in Islam is not merely symbolic or expressive but is a disciplinary means to cultivate ethical sensibilities and selves. Ritual practices like the mandatory prayer and sermon listening cultivate morally laden affective dispositions like humility, pious fear, patience, and love, which then enable one to differentiate good from bad, right from wrong, and truth from falsehood, allowing one to live an ethical life. It is through Islamic practice that one cultivates the inner affective dispositions that propel one to live an Islamic life, and it is by living an Islamic life that one is brought back to ritual duties (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2001). As one senior Tablighi, explained to me, “the purpose of dawat is to make religion descend in the heart … we know in our minds but it has not yet descended into our hearts.” In this discourse, one finds clearly that dawat is a form of bodily discipline aimed at the cultivation of a pious self.

Dawat is predicted on a ritual ideology that presupposes the transformative force of sacred words both on others and on the self. The efficacy of dawat depends on three “felicity conditions” (Austin Reference Austin1975). First, dawat must be conducted in a face-to-face or as Tablighis understand it “heart-to-heart,” manner and therefore requires embodied presence in the mosque. Tablighis are drawing on broader Islamic conceptions of the primacy of the human voice as the “unmediated” form of communication, unlike like texts, seen as distant and mediated, or what Brinkley Messick (Reference Messick1992) has aptly called recitational logocentrism. The human voice is understood to create a relationship of immediacy between both Muslims as well as with God (Eisenlohr Reference Eisenlohr2010, Reference Eisenlohr2018; see Engelke Reference Engelke2007). The face-to-face encounter is seen as the basis for creating a “direct” relationship between the Tablighi and God that imbues words with divine power and channels that power to the addressee who is then transformed through God’s agency. In Tablighi discourse, dawat “connects the self to God’s self” and creates a “heart to heart” (dil se dil) relationship between Muslims. Second, to be efficacious, dawat must be conducted with “purity of intentions” (ikhlas-e-niyaat). Tablighis understand purity of intentions to be not only an inner state of sincerity but directly tied to the sacrifice of life force (jaan), wealth (maal) and time (waqt). For Tablighis it is the physical struggle and hardship (mushaqqat) that one experiences in dawat that makes God open the heart and allows religion to settle in the heart. Finally, dawat is a “collective practice” (ijtimai amal) and must be with other Muslims. The importance of collective practice is fully captured in the oft-heard Tablighi maxim, “individual practice is like a speck while collective practice is a mountain.” It is the collective labor of dawat that gives it its efficacy to transform the self and thus to transform the world.

Tablighis travel in groups of six to twelve to preach the merits of Islam. Each week, Tablighis conduct one preaching tour (gasht) in their local areas and one in another area in the city. Every month Tablighis conduct one three-day (sehroza) preaching tour that takes them outside the city. Each year Tablighis are expected to travel on a 40-day trip (chilla) that takes them to various parts of the country. Each Tablighi is expected to conduct at least one four-month dawat tour, understood as three consecutive chillas, in order to become what Tablighis call an “old companion” (purana saathi). This confers some authority, including the right and duty to become the leader (amir) of a preaching group.

As in other Islamic piety movements, Tablighis insist that dawat is a means for the reform (islah) of the self and for the cultivation of faith, but they also foreground the fact that is not simply that one is acting on oneself through Islamic practice but that by enacting the Prophet’s example, one draws the gaze of others, and this creates a change in oneself. For instance, Tablighis say that by keeping a beard as per the Prophet’s example, a Muslim becomes responsible for the moral expectations associated with the beard and therefore feels compelled to act in accordance with those expectations. As one Tablighi explained, “my beard reminds me that I am of the Prophet’s community (ummat) and that I must never do anything to defile the image of the Prophet.” The beard is an iconic sign, in Peirce’s (Reference Peirce and Buchler2011) sense of being a sign that carries a physical resemblance to its object, but it is also an indexical sign, in that it suggests contiguity with Prophetic example. In dawat, one is performing the same tasks that the Prophet and Companions performed and thus comes to feel the responsibility for acting in accordance with virtues of their character. As we embarked on one preaching tour, the leader (amir) of our congregation explained, “We are Tablighis now. Now everything we do will be scrutinized from how we sit, to how we talk, to how we eat. May God give us the strength to fulfill our duties.”

In this sense, dawat is a type of performance that draws the gaze of others by virtue of the mobilization of iconic signs that typify the pious acts of the Prophet and companions and a form of publicity that draws attention to the self and thus makes one responsible for living up to the ethical entailments of a publicly declared moral position (see Khan Reference Khan2022). It is not surprisingly, then, that one of the pivotal acts of dawat, seen as key for the formation of a pious self is standing to give a sermon (bayan) to others and thus being scrutinized by others for one’s performance. Dawat is a performance of the Prophetic model that depends for its efficacy on replicating Prophetic example and creating a heightened sense of moral responsibility which in turn is understood to become habituated as a form of pious selfhood.

As a performance organized around Islamic iconicity, dawat aims to establish a relationship of contiguity between the itinerant Tablighi and the sacred past and therefore inscribe the Tablighi with the virtues associated with Prophetic example. Piety in this sense is an intersubjective achievement, which aims not only to transform others but also transforms the Tablighi himself insofar as he becomes the primary bearer of moral responsibility. Dawat is what Rappaport (Reference Reetz1999) has called “autocommunicative” insofar as it commits the Tablighi to the normative order that he performs in ritual action (51). Tablighis describe the effects of dawat in terms of creating a realization or “feeling” (ihsaas) of one’s relationship (nisbat) with the Prophet as well as the creation of “proximity” (qurbat) to God. Through repetition, Tablighis say, the vital relationship to Prophetic example is strengthened and one acquires the faith to live according to God’s plan. This creates a system of spiritual ascent that structures what Reetz (Reference Rutherford2006) has aptly called the “faith bureaucracy” of the Tablighi Jamaat.

When one asks Tablighis about how precisely dawat transforms a Tablighi, one is told that the words created in dawat carry spiritual potency (roohani quwwat). Tablighis say that God recognizes the sacrifice (qurbani) that one makes in dawat and thus imbues words with spiritual potency. Tablighis regard dawat to be a form of sacrifice of life force (jaan), wealth (maal), and time (waqt). The Tablighi assumes the physical struggle or hardship (mushaqqat) of the journey, pays his own way, and commits his own time, all forms of wealth and power that he can put to “worldly” ends but instead devotes to God. In exchange, God grants the Tablighi a spiritual potency (roohani quwwat) that manifests in “heavy” words. One can think of sacrifice here as a form of “value conversion,” the destruction of lower value objects associated with the “world” for higher value objects associated with “religion” (Munn Reference Munn1986). Pregnant with divine agency, these words are uniquely capable of transforming others and transforming the self. They are said to make the hearts of people “soft” and “open” and they readily settle in the heart because they are “heavy.”

This conception of the power of sacred words organizes the institutional hierarchy of the Tablighi Jamaat. New companions only give sermons in their own local mosques and are encouraged to develop their sermon-giving skills on dawat tours where they preach primarily to non-Tablighis. Old companions, on the hand, preach to both non-Tablighis as well as the weekly Thursday congregation of Tablighis in the mosque complexes of each city as well as in the larger gatherings of the annual congregations. The Elders, who are the pinnacle of piety and have the heaviest words, speak from the pulpit at the annual congregations to hundreds of thousands if not millions of Tablighis. Tablighis insist that hearing these words have immense transformative power; thus, it is of critical importance to attend the annual congregations. Moreover, as the exemplars of virtue, the sermons of the Elders also circulate in material media like cassettes and CDs and now increasingly on the Internet. Lower ranked Tablighis actively avoid having their voices circulate in mass media, a fact I repeatedly confronted when trying to conduct and record interviews. Tablighis explained to me that such recordings were “dangerous” because these words are not sufficiently “heavy” and therefore can lead others away from Islam. We can see, then, that lower ranked Tablighis are pious listeners relative to higher ranked Tablighis who are pious speakers. A movement up in the sacred hierarchy implies a relationship of directness (barah-e-rast) to Allah and less dependence on the mediation of pious others.

What we see in the past section is that the chronotope of dawat involves a simultaneous movement outwards in space as well as backwards in time. An upward movement in the institutional hierarchy of the Tablighi Jamaat implies a wider and wider circulation of one’s “heavy” words, while greater and greater time committed to dawat implies congealing of the virtues of the Prophet and Companions and thus a return to the sacred past. In this sense, dawat links space and time and sees the transformation of the former as made possible by the temporal movement backwards in the ritual process. In the next section, I turn to how this ritually construed hierarchy is inhabited in congregational life of the Tablighi Jamaat in what I call the ethics of hierarchy.

Pious companionship (sohbat) as the chronotope of pious becoming

The Tablighi Jamaat draws on this Sufi model of companionship (sohbat) in which creating pious dispositions requires spending time among those more pious than oneself. As Brian Silverstein (2011) describes in his study of Naqshbandi Sufis in Turkey, spiritual realization or the cultivation of ethical dispositions requires mystical techniques that involve “companionship” with the sheikh. “For the proper formation of character,” he writes, “one should always be in the company of ‘good people,’ defined as those who seek the approval of God, and only God, and are not led astray by popular fashion, prestige or power” (2011, 144). Similarly, Brannon Ingram (Reference Ingram2018) has shown how in the Deobandi tradition, sohbat is the mechanism to ensure that the Islamic tradition spreads without losing its link to the authority of the ulama. In the Tablighi Jamaat, sohbat is the social and discursive space in which one acquires ethical sensibilities and dispositions that orient one toward pious action. It is the submission to pious authority and especially to the authority of the Elders of the movement that disciplines the religious passions and gives them the proper shape, creating someone who is not only themselves capable of living in terms of divine commandments but also able to spread Islamic virtue to others without leading them astray.

Tablighis often compare dawat to the process of creating a glass vase that needs heating first and then must be cooled before being molded into shape. When an individual ventures out to preach on his own, he can easily become enamored by his own authority and fall prey to self-worship and thus create innovations (biddat), novel forms that depart from the original Islam of the Prophet. Pious companionship cools this passion, giving it shape and making it sturdy and stable. It is the practices of submission to pious others in the space of the congregation that keeps a Tablighi on the path and allows him to remain a vehicle for pious virtue. By cooling the passions and molding them into shape, pious companionship is a condition for the effective transmission of Islamic truth, knowledge and affect. The emphasis on pious companionship is key to how Tablighis draw the distinction between the domains of “religion” and “the world.” The domain of religion is structured by a semiotic ideology that stresses the creation of a direct relationship with God, a position found commonly across the Abrahamic religions and modern religious ideologies but pious companionship serves as a “discipline[] of presence” that is seen by Tablighis as the basis for maintaining the direct connection to God through the pious Elders of the Tablighi Jamaat (Silverstein 2011).

For this reason, Tablighis place such an enormous emphasis on the Thursday evening congregations (shab-e-jumma) where the pious Elders speak from the pulpit as this is seen as an immensely potent place to accrue religious merit and acquire pious virtue. Every Thursday evening, thousands if not tens of thousands of Tablighis flow through the many gates of the Madni Mosque. I would accompany my Tablighi friends to the Madni Mosque where thousands if not tens of thousands of Tablighis would congregate shortly before evening prayers and stay till the afternoon prayers on Friday. The shab-e-jummah seemed an ideal place for research as it allowed me to move between mosque units with which I had become acquainted and to talk to Tablighis beyond specific mosques. However, it was precisely at shab-e-jummah that my awkward position as a researcher in the Tablighi Jamaat became evident.

What was at stake in this was brought to my attention one hot and humid August evening. I was sitting with a few younger Tablighis after dinner. The conversation was banal. Usman, a polite and soft-spoken young man in his early twenties was describing to me how some customers at his phone shop in the Electronics Market come in to trade their phones for new ones almost every month, and how, phones had become an obsession for young people. In the middle of the conversation, a young boy came to Usman and told him that Yusaf bhai (bhai being the title for older brother) was calling him. Umer promptly went over and kneeled next to him. Yusaf bhai was very well respected in the Al Aqsa Mosque where I had conducted the bulk of my research and would often be invited to the quarters of the Elders. He was widely considered an exemplary Tablighi who possessed an unusual level of piety and faithfulness. Yusaf bhai had recently returned from a seven-month tour, considered the second highest level of commitment after the one-year tour, which took him to numerous countries in Africa. He and I had met briefly at the annual congregation in Raiwind from which he departed on his extended tour. He was always polite and would often greet me, but the sense he left me with was that he did not feel like I really should be conducting research there.

“Come, come, Arsalan. Please sit down,” Yusaf bhai said. “Assalamalaikum, Yusaf bhai. How are you?” “Waleikum salaam, well by Allah’s grace. MashAllah, I’m very pleased to see you’ve been coming to shab-e-jumma regularly.” I nodded. “It’s nice,” I said. “I get to meet new people and get to talk to people, and it helps me better understand what dawat is about. I am learning a great deal.” Yusaf bhai smiled and nodded. “Dawat is our purpose in life,” he said, and “shab-e-jummah is a very ‘spiritual space’ (roohani mahol). Just being here helps one become a better Muslim.” I nodded in affirmation. “Islam is absorbed by the senses, so just being here helps one absorb religion, but then it must descend into the heart.” Yusaf bhai went on to explain that even though it is a powerful space, I should not just come here and expect it to transform me automatically. One must put in the effort (mehnat) to acquire the results, he explained. Again, I nodded in affirmation to things that I had heard frequently. “Without doubt,” I said. The issue is, he noted, hinting at my research, that Islam is not a “bookish religion” (kitabi mazhab) but a “religion of practice” (amali mazhab).

Religion does not settle in your heart only by reading and writing about Islam, and it certainly does not settle in your heart just by talking about Islam. Yusaf bhai launched into a story about a professor he encountered who was very knowledgeable about Islam. This professor, he explained, knew the Quran inside out and one could ask him anything about what was in the Quran, and he would tell you exactly which part (sipara) it was in. It was hard to believe that this man had so much knowledge (ilm) because he did not do any of his practices (amaal). “See, we know this in our minds (zehn) but it has not descended into the heart.” Yusaf bhai, then, described how even though this professor had all the knowledge in the world, he was always “troubled” (pareshan) and never had any “peace” (sukoon). He was always running around seeking new knowledge, which is why he seemed to know so much, but this knowledge was “empty.” It did not have God’s grace (barakat) and so it never satisfied his yearning to know and it just made him more and more “troubled.” Yusaf bhai explained that when one is troubled, one becomes incapable of living one’s life in a religious way (dini tariqa se). One is pulled in every direction, and this leads one into despondency and away from God. “Do you understand, Arsalan?” I nodded in affirmation. After explaining this Yusaf bhai, as if speaking to a child, said I was now free to go back to the others. I arose and departed.

On the surface what Yusaf bhai was saying was that dawat is an orthopraxy and embodied process and that Islam was absorbed through the senses and not simply a set of doctrines or rules to be grasped by the mind. There seemed nothing new here as I had been hearing this from the day that I began my research. However, by this time I had been participating in the necessary embodied activities of pious listening and spending considerable time in the mosque and in companionship with Tablighis. I had been doing dawat, listened to sermons, and was engaged in pious companionship in the congregation. Why was this still not sufficient for me to acquire faith and pious virtue? Why according to Yusaf bhai was I still the wayward professor?

I decided to consult others about it to see if they could help me understand. I asked my friend Shahzaib. Shahzaib and I had gone on a ten-day preaching tour together that took us from Karachi to Multan and from there to the three-day national congregation (ijtima) in Raiwind, where I also met Yusaf bhai. This was also Shahzaib’s first preaching tour and although he only intended to do a ten-day tour (ashira), the others had managed to convince him to complete a forty-day tour (chilla) with them. Since then, Shahzaib had become an active presence in the Al Aqsa Mosque and we had become friends. Like me, he was in his early 30s, and he had gone to college in North Carolina. He spoke English fluently and was eager to speak to me in English because he did not have many opportunities with his fellow Tablighis. He saw our relationship as an opportunity to talk to me about his life before dawat for which he clearly had fond memories. He had given up many of his friendships along the way and like many Tablighis I met there was a sense of loss, and this weighed heavily on him. This gave us a strong basis for building a friendship.

When I told Shahzaib what Yusaf bhai had said, he emphatically agreed. “Don’t take it the wrong way, Arsalan. Yusaf bhai is only showing concern (fikr) for you.” Shahzaib noted that Yusaf bhai was only trying to guide me to the right path and this was his duty. I asked him what he thought Yusaf bhai was trying to communicate to me, and Shahzaib explained that Yusaf bhai knows that you have been coming to the mosque and just wants you to “come to religion in the proper manner” (din pe sahi tarah ajao). Shahzaib noted that while I was spending time in the mosque it was not having the “effect” (asr) on me. What Shahzaib said next made this abundantly clear. “Look, you and I have been coming to the mosque for around the same time, but you are distracted by your research, which is why dawat is not having the right effect (asr) on you.”

In Shahzaib’s explanations, the efficacy of Islamic practice was far from automatic and my prolonged presence in the congregation and even doing the ritual practices was far from sufficient. I spent a considerable amount of time in mosques doing precisely what Tablighis were doing. As a Muslim, and someone who had spent much of his life praying in mosques, I had few qualms about conducting the mandatory prayers. Like Tablighis, I regularly listened to sermons, both the ones that were given at Al Aqsa and at Madni Masjid, and I even devoted a considerable amount of time to listening to the sermons of the Elders that circulated on cd. When asked to, I even actively participated in the preaching itself, and while I was not exceptionally skilled at it, I surely was not the least skilled either. Overtime, I had learned how to speak about the content of these sermons in ways comparable to many Tablighis. Tablighis were invested in acquiring this knowledge as a guide for how they should live their lives, so this was a valuable trait for them. I began to ask what exactly it was about my “practice” that failed to create faith? Why the failure of embodiment if I spent so much time in the mosque engaged in what Tablighis said were legitimate forms of “practice” that were designed to cultivate faith? What was implied here was not just that I was not conducting the rituals of dawat in the proper way, which surely it seemed I was, but that my relationships inside the congregation were not shaping me into a pious subject. I was still not properly inhabiting the pious relationality of the congregation.

It became clear to me that Yusuf bhai’s consternation around me that I had failed to adopt a stance of pious listening toward him. Indeed, I came to understand that he and many other Tablighis saw me as a harbinger of hubris and an agent of disruption. Along with doing my ritualized practices, I spent considerable time trying to elicit information from my Tablighi interlocutors about their ideas and understandings of dawat as well as their lives. My ethnographic approach did not distinguish between the rank of Tablighis and treated them each as equal representatives of the movement and equally capable of speaking about their own experiences in dawat. Many Tablighis, I noted earlier, would turn me away when I asked them questions about dawat or they would direct me to the Elders who they said were authorized to speak about such matters. Very few Tablighis were open to being recorded because they worried that recordings could include falsehoods that would then circulate and lead others astray. The fact that I aimed to turn my knowledge into a book that would circulate widely meant that I could easily spread falsehood and waywardness and draw Muslims away from Islam. All of this was captured in Yusaf bhai’s claim that Islam is not a “bookish religion.” Indeed, I was seen by many Tablighis as harboring the capacity to undermine their piety by transforming them into authoritative speakers, thus disrupting the hierarchical order of the congregation.

The notion that Muslims were too willful and self-centered and that they failed to listen and take instruction was, for Tablighis, a pervasive and foundational problem in modernity for which pious listening was the remedy. The unauthorized and self-authorized assumption of authority in the world threatens Tablighis belief that faith is “the certainty that everything comes from God and nothing comes from another” (Allah se sab kuch hone ka yaqeen aur doosre se kuch na hone ka yaqeen). Tablighis talk frequently of the problem of hubris as it is manifested in excess assertiveness or “talk.” Indeed, control over the tongue is seen as a quintessential feature of the pious subject. My presence in the congregation thus provoked fears of hubris because I went around the congregation trying to encourage people to represent themselves and their understanding of dawat. I learned though that while I might have provoked this problem, it permeated the movement and had to be assiduously managed.

Let’s return the example of my friend Shahzaib. Shahzaib and I had gone on our first preaching tour together, which took us from Karachi to Multan and to the national congregation in Raiwind over the course of fifteen days. While I went from there to Lahore and ultimately back to Karachi, Shahzaib went along to complete his first forty-day tour (chilla). Shahzaib came from a family that was deeply involved in the Tablighi congregation. His father, who was an old companion, had encouraged him to go on the forty-day tour and Shahzaib had several cousins who were very active in the movement. Shahzaib told me he felt he should pursue dawat to uphold the values of his family and to make his father happy. More significantly, though, he repeatedly expressed to me how he wanted to be “close” to Hazrat. Hazrat was a Tablighi Elder who simultaneously sat on the Karachi council (shura) but was also an authorized Chisti Sufi sheikh who had his own spiritual house (khanqa). Shahzaib’s desire to please Hazrat clearly preceded his participation in dawat but instead came from the general respect and admiration for Hazrat that Shahzaib had acquired from his family and broader social milieu. Shahzaib’s aim was to become close to Hazrat.

It became clear to me that many Tablighi in his mosque congregation did not initially view Shahzaib as particularly model Tablighi. In hushed tones, several Tablighis had told me that Shahzaib lacked “control over his tongue” and “didn’t know when to talk and when to listen.” Indeed, these were the kinds of comments that one heard often about many people in the congregation, especially those what had newly found passion for dawat. Indeed, the hubris (takabbur) and selfishness (khudgharzi) of such novices was a common enough aspect of Tablighi discourse even if it was not discussed openly. People attributed some of this to the fact that Shahzaib was from a wealthy family. His family owned a successful textile factory, which meant he was wealthier than many of the others in the Al Aqsa congregation, and he had studied textile design in the U.S. as well. Some Tablighis thought that this created attachment to “the world.” Over the two years of my research, however, I began to witness a shift in Shahzaib’s attitudes toward others in the mosque. He assumed increasing responsibility inside the mosque, like committing himself to “service” (khidmat) at shab-e-jumma, and devoting time to help organize mosque activities. Furthermore, the more involved he became in mosque activities, the more he came to speak about the virtues of other Tablighis, often elaborating the positive qualities (sifaat) of others. On one occasion at the mosque, Shahzaib, without any prompting and while gazing longingly at Yusaf bhai, said, “You know what Yusaf bhai told to me? He said the Elders don’t want to be Elders. Nobody who is eager to be an Elder should ever be one since it comes with so much responsibility. Yusaf bhai is very faithful and knowledgeable. One can learn so much by spending time with him.” Yusaf bhai was clearly encouraging him not be so eager in his pursuit of authority in the congregation. On another occasion, Shahzaib catalogued the different qualities of various members of the congregation like their “softness of temperament” (narm mizaaji) or their “cheerful temperament” (khush mizaaji) or their “concern” (fikr) for others and so on. This shift in Shahzaib was not lost on other Tablighis, who increasingly started seeing him in a more positive light. Shahzaib was demonstrating the virtue of pious listening through recognition of those above him in the sacred hierarchy of the congregation.

What became evident to me from Shahzaib’s example and from my own failings as a Tablighi is a broad ethical commitment to the mediation of pious others. When Shahzaib began dawat he wanted a “direct” relationship to Hazrat, a relationship that he was eager to acquire and for which he felt competitive toward others. In one instance recounted to me by another Tablighi, Shahzaib had dismissed a fellow Tablighi for not knowing enough of the content of the Fazail-e-Amaal, thereby suggesting hubris in his textual knowledge but failing to understand how to relate to others. Such acts are seen as highly disruptive of social relationship within the mosque and threaten to undermine the unity of the congregation. Gradually, Shahzaib desisted from this desire to connect directly to Hazrat and his sense of competition diminished. He came to see the value of all the levels of piety that stood between him and Hazrat. Increasingly, the congregation came to resemble the tiered structure of relations of the Companions with the Prophet who all had different roles, statuses, and qualities. This subtle shift marked Shahzaib’s shift from “worldliness” to piety in the eyes of other Tablighis in the congregation. Shahzaib had learned to “control his tongue” and had stopped claiming authority that others had not yet granted to him. The direct and individuated relationship Shahzaib sought with Hazrat gave way to a collectivism (ijtimaiyat) and broader sense pious mediation within congregational life. This transition from wordliness to piety, hubris to humility, selfishness (khudgharzi) to collectiveness (ijtimayat) meant that Shahzaib had truly become a pious listener and companion.

The notion of a pious listener and companionship takes on concrete, material form in citationality. Shahzaib’s references to pious others in the congregation is the informal manifestation of the citational practices that one hears in the formal genre of bayans and in other speech genres. Bayans are replete with references to hadith that document the sayings of the Prophet and accounts of the Companions, ulama, pious Elders of the past and current Tablighi Elders. To become a citation in the formal genres of the Tablighi Jamaat is to become consecrated as a religious authority. The historian Barbara Metcalf (Reference Metcalf1993) has aptly noted that the primary aim of a Tablighi is to become a “living hadith,” someone who embodies the virtues of the Prophet as they have been documented in the hadith literature. What I am describing can be thought of an enactment of the hadith as a relational paradigm. Every hadith carries a chain of transmission (isnad), a series of moral persons who faithfully transmitted the knowledge carried by the hadith. When one invokes a hadith, one cites the requisite authorities upon whom the hadith relies and when one explains a hadith or paraphrases it, one makes note that it is an inference (mafhoom) of the meaning and not the original so as to indicate to the listener that there may be a gap between the explanation and the original. Similarly, when the Tablighi comes to recognize a chain of linkages between himself and the authoritative sources he must cite the exemplary qualities of others upon whom any claim to knowledge rests. Here he is pointing to the potential gap between what was said and what the he has inferred by referencing the authorities to be emulated in everyday life. In other words, it is in such citationality that one defers one’s own authority. When Shahzaib came to acknowledge the levels of piety between himself and Hazrat he was disavowing his own agency and identifying the qualities of pious authorities that must be emulated on the path to piety.

Citationality is key to the rich tapestry of discourse that mediates and materializes piety as an ethical relationship in the Tablighi Jamaat. It is how the “doing” of piety is made manifest beyond the preaching tour and even beyond the physical presence in the mosque. It is this everyday pious citationality that becomes the mark of a pious subject who routinely performs acts of humility, who disavows his own agency, and recognizes the authority of pious others. This is what creates the iconic-indexical link in everyday life between the “here-and-now” and the sacred “then-and-there” of the Prophet’s time. Crucially, it is also citational practice that gives material shape to the aspirational nature of the pursuit of piety (cf. Khan Reference Khan2012). As Constantine Nakassis (Reference Nakassis2016) has argued in the context of the study of branding, a citation involves placing something in brackets such that one has a relationship to it without assuming an identity with it. Just as the sacred past does not have an identity with the present but is something that one must strive to replicate in the present, so in citational practices with pious others, one is recognizing the gap between oneself and pious others and construing them as an ideal toward which to strive.

The citationality of piety materializes two key principles of Islamic piety in the Tablighi Jamaat: it manifests humility (khushu) in that it recognizes the importance of others above oneself in a hierarchy and it materializes patience (sabr) in that it turns pious others into a model to realize in the future. Shahzaib’s shift from wordliness to piety is instructive because he was originally assuming pious authority that he did yet have and was too eager to connect himself to Hazrat’s authority and therefore failing to manifest patience. His ability to recognize the virtues of others and temper his eagerness for ascending the sacred hierarchy of the movement came to be recognized by others as the mark of a pious subject. Years later, Tablighis from his mosque congregation would jokingly tell me how Shahzaib has now become a pious Elder (buzurg), suggesting in humorous fashion that he in fact was on the path of piety now. And what, after all, is a pious Elder if not someone who never wanted to be a pious Elder in the first place but always deferred to others?

In the previous section, I showed how the ritualized process of dawat mobilized iconic signs of the Prophet’s time to link the present to the sacred past. Indeed, it is the explicitness of the metasemiotic signs of piety that draw the gaze and thus create a sense of responsibility for living up to the ethical entailments of that performance, bringing the past into the present., We can see in Shahzaib’s example how becoming a pious subject involves committing to the hierarchical form of pious relationality that regulates the eagerness to become a pious authority. We can also see how these practices, then, create a pious temporality that slows the pace of ascent up the institutional hierarchy of the movement, and how it defers the realization of piety to the future, giving distinct institutional form to the aspirational quality of pious becoming (cf. Khan Reference Khan2012).

Pious authority and the moral reproduction of the Islamic community

The Tablighi Jamaat generates Islamic authority and places it in the hands of an ever-expanding sphere of people. Indeed, one of the implicit although never fully stated aims of the Tablighi Jamaat is to transform the mosque into a site of pious mediation such that people can bring their grievances and concerns to be addressed. As one Tablighi explained to me, “the mosque was once a major institution for Muslims and people spent time there and came to find solutions to their problems but now it is seen as only a space for the mandatory prayers.” Tablighis often nostalgically yearned for times when the mosque served as a vital community institution and a place where big decisions were made on behalf of the community. Islamic authority, Tablighis often lamented, no longer carries the moral weight that it once did. Religion, Tablighis say, is made of five spheres including customs and habits (muashirat), creed (aqida), dealings (muamilat), morality (akhlaq), and worship (ibadat), but today it has been mostly reduced only to a focus on worship. One of the central aims of dawat is to imbue Islamic authority with moral weight and to make it a part of the lives of Muslims in all the spheres of life and to turn the mosque into a site for the exercise of sovereign authority.

Let me briefly touch on two examples. I was sitting at the mosque with Abid, a young working class Tablighi who was the caretaker for a plot of land. A young man came and kneeled next to him. The young man glanced at me and hesitated a bit, but then gradually eased into a narrative about his brother. He said that his younger brother has stopped giving money in the home, even though his family is struggling because his father is ill and has not been able to work. The entire responsibility for the parents, he said, is now on his shoulders, as his other brother is jobless. With two young children of his own, this had created a deep strain in his own marital life, with his wife being perpetually angry at him, his parents, and his brothers. Abid told the young man that he should first pray to Allah to give him guidance (hidayat) and to open and connect their hearts. But, he also told him that he would be happy to discuss the matter with both of them if that is what he would like. The young man, to my knowledge, never brought his brother in to see Abid, but it was clear that Abid could serve the function of pious mediation if it was needed.

While conflicts among kin are the primary site for pious mediation, conflicts in the larger community also occasionally are brought to Tablighis. Take the example of a Tablighi named Asghar. Asghar had been a committed Tablighi since the late 1980s and so was an experienced Tablighi and the head (amir) of his local congregation. Unlike Abid who was a migrant from rural Punjab, Asghar grew up in Karachi and was from a middle-class, educated Urdu-speaking family. Like many Urdu speaking people in Karachi, Asghar’s family was closely tied to the Jamaat-i-Islami political party in the 1980s. But, in the 1990s, as he was coming of age, he found his way into the Tablighi Jamaat. When I visited Asghar, he asked me to accompany him to the local mosque. Asghar was there to mediate a conflict between two young men from the community who had been involved in a business transaction involving joint investment in a rikshaw. The rikshaw had been involved in an accident while one of the boys was driving it that left it considerably damaged, creating a conflict over how much responsibility there was for its repair and who would pay. Rather than involve the police, which they felt could cost the family more as the police may extract a bride and could even lead to the loss of the vehicle, the families of the boys sought the council of Asghar who was well known in the area as someone who could fairly adjudicate the matter. Asghar convened the two boys’ families in the mosque to discuss the loss of property. Asghar began the pious mediation with the invocation that as Muslims, they are connected through their relation to the Prophet and thus try to find a common ground. He asked the boys why they embarked on a joint venture, while emphasizing their deep emotional connection by pointing to the importance of friendship and how much the Prophet valued friendship. The goal of this was to stress their obligations to one another as friends and Muslims. In the end, the young men decided that they would simply split the cost of the repairs.

Dawat confers pious authority on Tablighis who, trained in the virtues, and a general acceptance that they can address kinship and communal conflicts. The Tablighi becomes capable of regenerating moral relationships and restoring moral order even beyond the congregation. If Abid and Asghar can resolve small scale local conflicts, the Elders of the Tablighi Jamaat are widely acknowledged both within the movement and beyond as being capable of mediating much greater issues like ethnic and sectarian and even national conflicts.

These forms of pious mediation are not formalized or even officially acknowledged by Tablighis, and Tablighis often insist that their only role is to perform dawat. This erasure from explicit discourse is important because Tablighis want to limit such moral interventions only to those who can perform them. They certainly do not want new companions to assume the role of communal authorities. One can see why this would be a serious threat to the integrity of the movement. If people do not abide by the limits of their capacities, then they can easily undermine the moral authority of the Tablighi Jamaat.

We can here see here the larger political stakes of the chronotope of piety. Recall Shahzaib’s insistence that an Elder is one who is someone who did not want to be an Elder but instead always deferred to others. Indeed, this is a time of self-limiting and self-renouncing authority that Tablighis see as needed to address the problems Muslim face but is entirely absent in political life. The ethics of hierarchy as it is materialized in pious companionship regulates the overzealous pursuit of pious authority. The pious subject is one who recognizes his own limits and defers to those more pious than himself. Indeed, this is a key reason why I was seen as not embodying pious virtue despite committing myself to the ritual practices of dawat and this is why my efforts to elicit Tablighis own understandings about dawat was seen as encouraging impious or “worldly” behavior. It is precisely this self-limiting form of pious authority that Tablighis see as capable of regenerating relationships among Muslims and the basis for the moral regeneration of Islamic life.

Contesting sovereignty in the heterogeneous space–time of Islamic modernity

Talal Asad’s (Reference Asad2003) seminal argument that secularism is not neutral toward religion but rather aims to transform religion into a matter of private belief has inaugurated a rich, critical scholarship on secularism. Drawing on Asad, Hussein Ali Agrama (Reference Agrama2012) argues secular law is a “questioning power” in that it must continuously determine where the line between religion and politics is located and thus define the legitimate parameters of religion. This literature has drawn critical attention to how secular governmentality entails contradictory processes of reification and regulation (Fernando Reference Fernando2014) and sets the conditions for violence, including violence that is deemed “religious” (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2016).

Despite the importance of this analysis of secularism as a regulatory power, this literature tends to neglect how Islamic movements are themselves hegemonic projects that aim to constitute religion and other domains of modernity. In the works of Saba Mahmood (Reference Mahmood2005) and Charles Hirschkind (Reference Hirschkind2006), Islamic piety movements are largely cast in the role of antagonists of secularism without much focus on how religion is a space of contestation between various Muslim and Islamic actors (see Schielke Reference Sikand2015). This elides the crucial fact that the boundary between religion and non-religion is a site of hegemonic struggle for sovereign authority in modernity. A semiotic analysis as pursued here allows us to examine how particular religious practices reflexively configure and naturalize social domains like “religion” and thus grants us insight into how sovereignty is created from the ground up. Dawat is one such site for the reflexive constitution of the boundary between religion (din) and the world (dunya). This division depends on the construction of a particular chronotope of the Prophet’s time, which creates a plot structure for social interaction organized around what I have called the ethics of hierarchy. The ethics of hierarchy is a distinct form of pious relationality, which anchors Islamic authority in the Prophet’s time, imbuing it with ethical substance, and it is pious relationality that becomes the ground for the transformation of the world.

To understand the political relevance of the ethics of hierarchy, one must consider the place of Islam in the fractious nature of political life in Pakistan. Founded on the basis of Muslim identity, state sovereignty was linked to Islam from Pakistan’s inception, but it was the military dictatorship of General Zia ul Haq (1977–1988) that intensified the link between Islam and state sovereignty. Zia expanded the scope of Islamic law in Pakistan, establishing the Federal Shariat Court to ensure that laws are in keeping with Islam, passed a range of anti-women legislation like the Hudood Ordinances which prescribe harsh punishments for adultery and fornication and required women to present four male witnesses as proof in cases of sexual assault and rape as well as anti-minority legislation such as Ordinance XX that prohibited Ahmadiyya Muslims who had been declared non-Muslim by the state in 1974 from claiming the status of Muslim and proscribed their use of Islamic terminology.

State-driven Islamization from the late 1970s through the 1980s facilitated the rise of a range of new Islamic actors and institutions including corporations, banks, new education institutions, televangelists, and NGOs, all of which claim the mantle of Islam. This Islamic revivalist activity has placed Islamic piety at the center of social and political life, but it has also proliferated claims and counterclaims to Islamic authority, leading to an intense fragmentation of Islamic authority in public life (Eickelman and Piscatori Reference Eickelman and Piscatori1996). The process of state Islamization and marketization of Islam has produced deep anxieties that Islamic authority is becoming a ruse for the pursuit of self-interest and domination and thus unmoored from ethical life. Stereotypes about the “mullah” being driven by base desires and interests abound in Pakistani public discourse and such sentiments are not just expressed by those who advocate for a secular public sphere (see Khan Reference Khan2012). One of the key failures of the Islamization of political and economic life is that it has engendered deep concerns across many segments of the population that Islamic authority has been emptied of its ethical substance (cf. Roy Reference Roy1994).

It is against this political backdrop that dawat’s popularity as a pure sacrifice for God and the pious authority generated in dawat comes to be seen as a solution to the crisis of political fragmentation and the basis for the moral regeneration of Islamic life. As Brian Silverstein notes on his work on Sufism in Turkey, the expansion of mass mediated forms of Islam has created a “nostalgia for immediation,” a desire to return to the original voiced presence of God embodied in the face-to-face interaction (2011, 176–178). Indeed, the Tablighi investment in the face-to-face nature of dawat and embodied co-presence in the mosque reflects this nostalgia for immediation against not only mass mediated forms of Islam but also their entanglement with modernist institutions and profit-driven aims. I have argued elsewhere (2016) that Tablighis thus draw a sharp boundary between their own “religious” activities and the “politics” of Islamist movements that they see as failing to live up to the ethical ideals of Islam. Tablighis recognize the pious authority engendered in dawat as a disciplined, self-limiting, and self-regulating form of authority and therefore as fundamentally different from “politics.” The immediacy of dawat and its organization around the ethics of hierarchy thus comes to be the basis for linking the present to the sacred past and charting a path towards an Islamic future.

Benedict Anderson (Reference Anderson1983) famously argued that the age of nationalism eclipses the hierarchical religious communities that preceded it, ushering in a new conception of “homogenous, empty time.” Partha Chatterjee rightly notes that homogenous empty-time is a utopian vision: “People can only imagine themselves in empty homogenous time; they do not live in it” (Reference Chatterjee2004: 6). And further, “The real space of modern life is heterotopia. Time here is heterogeneous. Unevenly dense” (Reference Chatterjee2004: 7) We have seen how Islamic piety in the Tablighi Jamaat is a distinct chronotopic configuration of time, the political and moral valence of which must be considered in relationship not only to “secular” time but to the proliferation of Islamic authority engendered by state and market Islamization. In the heterotopic landscape of Islamic modernity in Pakistan, the chronotope of piety structures a self-limiting form of power that imbues congregational life of the Tablighi Jamaat with moral force. It is this exercise of pious authority evidenced in ritualized listening and discursive citationality that Tablighis view as the basis for the creation of moral relationships and reproduction of the Islamic community.