ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 traces the formative history and discourses of the TJ. Special attention is given to the ways TJ founder Muḥammad Ilyās, in response to inter-religious challenges, built on the Deobandi model and forged a new method of da‘wa. The chapter also analyzes the TJ’s formative texts inter-religiously. Special attention is given to Faḍā’il-i A‘māl (The Merits of Actions). This is the first analysis of the life of Ilyās and the Faḍā’il-i A‘māl from an inter-religious perspective set within the longer history of da‘wa. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the TJ represents one kind of bottom-up da‘wa and da‘wa modernity well suited to Indian and global contexts.
