Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat, say that Muslims have abandoned religion (din) and been led astray by the world (dunya) and this has thrust the world into a state of moral chaos (fitna). They insist that only their form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) can remedy this situation. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of chronotope, or distinct imaginaries of space and time, anthropologists have argued that chronotopes produce a “plot structure” for social interaction that instantiates different social persona and forms of agency. In this article, I argue that dawat is organized around a chronotope of piety that encourages deference to others as well as defers the realization of piety to the future, thereby creating a self-limiting and self-regulating form of pious authority that Tablighis see as the basis for the creation and moral reproduction of the Islamic community. Pious authority takes on political significance as an alternative form of sovereignty against the backdrop of religious and political fragmentation engendered by state- and market-driven Islamization in Pakistan.
Source: Signs and Society
DOI: 10.1017/sas.2025.1
Author: Arsalan Khan
Institution: University of Tennessee at Knoxville
Language: English
Topic: Islamic Studies and History
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W4410144329