ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the arrival, development and spread of the Tablighi Jama’at across Southeast Asia, and focuses on how this lay pietist movement has been able to gain a substantial number of followers and spread its network across the region by adopting a quietist and non-confrontational approach. Locating the Tabligh in the region and in the wider constellation of global Muslim movements today, the paper considers how the Tabligh has been able to gain such a following without antagonizing any of the states or other rival Muslim movements in the region. The paper also looks at the internal literature of the movement and how its notion of model Muslim behavior – which is seen and cast as a retreat from worldliness and political entanglement – has made it seem unworldly and fatalist in the eyes of some.
