Western intelligence agencies claim that some al-Qaeda and Harkat ul-Mujahideen members had links to the Tablighi Jamaat.
Aditi Phadnis reports.
IMAGE: The Delhi police deploy a drone to keep vigil as men, who attended the Tablighi Jamaat congregation in Nizamuddin West, New Delhi, wait to board a bus for the Lok Nayak Jayaprakash Naryan Hospital for coronavirus screening. Photograph: PTI Photo
WikiLeaks memos, based on the interrogation of al-Qaeda operatives detained at Guantanamo Bay, quoted them as saying they used a New Delhi-based organisation, Tablighi Jamaat, as cover to obtain travel documents and shelter.
The leaked memos said at least three detained persons stayed at the organisation’s facilities in Delhi and around.
The Tablighi Jamaat is in the news after a congregation at its Nizamuddin Markaz in New Delhi led to a sudden rise in the number of positive coronavirus cases across India.
Similar events in several countries in Southeast Asia led to many COVID-19 cases there.
The records revealed by WikiLeaks contain interrogation reports and analysis of 779 inmates at the United States military prison in Cuba.
The US records identify the Jamaat Tabligh (as the name appears in the records; JT) as a proselytising organisation that willingly supports terrorists’.
Also, according to reports, al-Qaeda used the JT to facilitate and fund international travels of its members.
Tablighi Jamaat authorities denied the charge and said their facilities were open to all.
Questioning the authenticity of the WikiLeaks records, it said: ‘It is known that such statements are forced to be made under duress.’
What we know
When it started, the Tablighi Jamaat was neither engaged in supporting nor promoting Islamic radicalism.
It was, in fact, a reformist organisation.
Academics describe it as an apolitical devotional movement stressing individual faith, introspection, and spiritual development.
But somewhere along the way, the organisation veered away from its original purpose.
We know that the Tablighi Jamaat was begun by prominent Deobandi cleric and scholar Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhalawi (1885-1944) in 1927 in Mewat, not far from Delhi.
Part of Kandhalawi’s impetus for founding the Tablighi Jamaat was to counter the inroads being made by Hindu missionaries.
They rejected modernity as antithetical to Islam, excluded women, and preached that Islam must subsume other religions.
Apart from the Quran, the only literature Tablighis are required to read are the Tablighi Nisab, seven essays penned by a companion of Kandhalawi in the 1920s.
A lesser-known fact about the Tablighi Jamaat is that it is not a monolith: One subsection believes they should pursue jihad through conscience (jihad bin nafs), while a more radical wing advocates jihad through the sword (jihad bin saif), says Alexander R Alexiev, one of the best-known experts on the organisation.
Why it captured the Islamic imagination (when it seems, superficially, to be no different from the Wahhabi-Salafi doctrine followed by most Sunnis) seems to have been its austerity, emphasis on conversion, and spirit of service.
Saudi Arabia could have seen the movement as a threat, but instead co-opted it, funded it and praised its spirit, advising others to emulate it.
Jamaat’s growth and development
The real impetus the Tablighi Jamaat got was from ruling families in Pakistan, especially Nawaz Sharif, whose father was a big supporter of the organisation.
Its facility at Raiwind, Pakistan, is a well-known recruiting ground for military training after the recruits finish their missionary training.
Alexiev’s interviews and research on the organisation reveals that the Tablighi Jamaat was instrumental in founding the Harkat ul-Mujahideen.
Founded at Raiwind in 1980, almost all the Harakat ul-Mujahideen’s original members were Tablighis.
Infamous for the December 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 and the suicide attack on a bus carrying French engineers in Karachi in 2002, Harkat members make no secret of their ties.
‘The two organisations make up a truly international network of genuine jihadi Muslims,’ one senior Harkat ul-Mujahideen official is quoted by Alexiev as saying.
A spinoff of the Tablighi Jamaat, according to Alexiev, is the Harkat ul-Jihad-i Islami.
Founded in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, this group has been active not only in Jammu and Kashmir but also Gujarat, where the Jamaat’s extremists have taken over perhaps 80 per cent of the mosques previously run by the moderate Barelvi Muslims.
Alexiev claims perhaps 80 per cent of the Islamist extremists in France come from Tablighi ranks, prompting French intelligence officers to call Tablighi Jamaat the ‘antechamber of fundamentalism’.
US counter-terrorism officials share this view.
‘We have a significant presence of the Tablighi Jamaat in the United States,’ the deputy chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s international terrorism section said in 2003, ‘and we have found that al-Qaeda used them for recruiting now and in the past.’
Little is known about the stewardship of the organisation, except all its leaders since Kandhalawi have been related to him by either blood or marriage.
Upon Kandhalawi’s death in 1944, his son, Maulana Muhammad Yusuf (1917-1965), assumed leadership of the movement, expanding its reach and influence.
Yusuf and his successor, Inamul Hassan (1965-1995), transformed the Jamaat into a truly transnational movement with a renewed emphasis on conversion of non-Muslims, a mission that continues to this day.
