Local Adaptation and Cultural Exclusion: Thirty Years of Tablighi Jamaat in China

Abstract

Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) is a transnational Islamic revival movement that originated in India in the 1920s. Its most distinctive feature is that the secular missionary group composed of 5-10 people travels among Muslims who are considered to have “weak beliefs”, and they try to return their weakened religious practice to the right path in this way. After nearly a hundred years of global dissemination, the movement has now become a relatively successful transnational Islamic missionary movement in the world today, and has had a certain social impact in West Africa, North Africa, Southeast Asia, Central Asia and some European countries and regions. The movement has been in China for more than thirty years since it was introduced in the early 1980s, but there is no academic paper dedicated to its social practice in China. This paper adopts the anthropological fieldwork method, and conducts a long-term follow-up study on TJ activities in Northwest China, North China, Southwest China and other areas from 2011 to 2021. Part of the fieldwork data from Pakistan during 2018-2019 when I was there, it verified the specific time of TJ was introduced into China and the specific situation of its initial dissemination, in addition, this paper rationally divided three important stages of its dissemination in China and living state, at the same time, it demonstrates the specific characteristics of TJ in different periods in China.