Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Presenting ethnographic work from Gujarat, India, I shall discuss how religious movements such as the Tablighi Jama’at question the binary between ‘political’ and ‘apolitical’ religious movements. In 2002, the Muslim community bore the brunt of the unprecedented commu-nal violence in Gujarat. I shall trace the rise of Tablighi Jama’at in Gujarat and discuss how such grass-root networks function in times of crisis. The discussion that follows questions another dualism in the field of sociology of Islam, that is, the binary of Islamization versus syncreticism. I argue that in the study of religious movements in South Asia, contemporary sociology suffers from a conceptual ‘lag’ and needs to re-appraise its concepts. Finally, I draw attention to the importance of studying religion as a social institution and not only as a question of minority identity.