Embodied Textual Authority in the Tablighi Jamaat: Living Hadith, Collective Recitation, and Transnational Piety

Abstract

The Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) poses a significant question for the study of Islamic authority: how does a transnational revivalist movement with limited formal bureaucracy sustain a recognizable repertoire of belief and practice across diverse settings? This article examines how the movement's foundational literature, especially the Tablighi Nisab, widely known as Fazail-e-Amaal, mediates the relationship between hadith-based textual authority and embodied piety. Methodologically, it is a qualitative conceptual study using an adapted, purposive critical interpretive synthesis of published historical, textual, and ethnographic scholarship. The textual repertoire is reconstructed from scholarly representations of core works rather than from an edition-defined multilingual corpus. The analysis argues that the TJ's prioritization of fazail, or virtues and spiritual rewards, over masail, or jurisprudential disputes, functions as a pedagogical hermeneutic. The article develops embodied textual authority as a process model in which textual selection provides normative orientation, collective recitation and affective activation enable uptake, embodied rehearsal and social reinforcement support enactment, and contextual modulation conditions transnational recognizability. The model explains recurring forms of piety without implying uniform reception. The controversy over weak (da'if) hadiths is examined as a contest over epistemic authority and pedagogical legitimacy rather than as an attempt to adjudicate hadith authenticity. Because the evidence is limited to published scholarship and documented settings, the study does not establish causal effects, measure global uniformity, or undertake edition-based takhrij. Its contribution lies in clarifying how texts, human mediators, emotions, bodily discipline, and social environments jointly produce religious authority.