ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVES ON TRAVEL

Emil Nasritdinov

SPIRITUAL NOMADISM

Abstract

This paper employs the concept of spiritual nomadism as a lifestyle and as regular traveling practice to portray and understand the contemporary religious practices of participants in the Tablighi Jamaat movement, which originated in India and today has become truly global. In the late 90-s the movement has reached Central Asia and Russia and it found fruitful ground in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The paper builds on the analysis of the traditional role of travel in Islam and on a more contemporary interpretation of spiritual travel by the Tablighi ideology and practice. Its main ethnographic part is drawn from the author’s 40-day Tablighi travel from Kyrgyzstan to India in the group of Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Russian Tablighi and it is structured around six main themes discussed through the spiritual nomadism view: personal transformation, new perspective on the world, knowledge and experience, social networks, strengthening of beliefs and the role of metaphors as important components of Tablighi narrative. It argues that active and regular participants in the movement acquire elements of a nomadic lifestyle and can be called spiritual nomads of the 21-st century and that in some places if the world, like in Central Asia, Tablighi practice effectively uses the already existing nomadic practices of such historically nomadic peoples, like Kyrgyz and Kazakhs.

INTRODUCTION

In the context of the general theme of this volume – Nomadism Revisited – this paper uses the concept of nomadism to describe the lifestyle of people who travel the world in its spiritual terrain. I would like to suggest that like such terms as pastoral nomadism, which define the lifestyle of people moving with their herds of animals from pasture to pasture, we can employ the term spiritual nomadism to help us better understand traveling components of contemporary religious movements. The term “nomadism” and “nomad” has expanded its meaning in the 20^th century to include such concepts as “virtual nomads” – to identify people who regularly travel in the online spaces, “academic nomads” – university professors and researchers, “global corporate business nomads” and “development nomads” – professionals working for various corporate and non-governmental organizations, “lifestyle nomads” – who travel with their guitars and backpacks and “labor migration nomads” who regularly travel between countries of origin and destination. New modes of transportation and global interconnectedness contributed to the creation and expansion of these new types of human mobility. What makes these various types of travel to be forms of nomadism is the regularity of traveling, significant time spent in journeys and effect of mobile lifestyle on many aspects of personal and communal life.

In a similar way, the number of people who travel around the world with some spiritual purposes also significantly increased. The importance of traveling is recognized in many world religions. Pilgrimages to holy places, to graveyards of saints and to the location of various relics, traveling for purposes of acquiring religious knowledge, for missionary purposes, and for escaping worldly matters are found in many examples of religious practices in the history and in contemporary days. The history of monotheistic religions, such as Judaism, Islam and Christianity, is full of stories of travels and wanderings of many Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus; and the history of Buddhism is significantly based on the travels of Buddha and his followers too. Today, we find hundreds of thousands of people of different religious affiliations traveling across the world for the purposes of their own spiritual growth.

The main ethnographic part of this paper is drawn on the analysis of practices, narratives and discourses of Tablighi travelers – participants in the movement for the revival of Islam, which originated in India in the early 20^th century and by now, reached many distant Muslim communities around the world. One of the major components of Tablighi religious tradition is regular travel. This paper describes how this kind of particular religious travel affects the lives of Tablighis individually and how it affects the larger communities they are a part of.

Tablighi travel is organized in such a way that it has strong transformative effects on the traveler. Tablighi narrative describes personal transformation as the main purpose of travel. I have been joining tablighi jamaats in their 3-day journeys since 2002 and last year I joined them in a 40-day journey. The journey was even more valuable because it took me to India, where I had a chance to be in the Nizamuddin marqas (center) in Delhi and had a chance to attend ijtema (gathering) in Bhopal. My experience was enriched through a chance to listen to the bayans (talks) by the veterans of the movement and converse with Tablighis from many parts of the world. The topic of travel was the one of most interest to me. Bayans, taalim circles, stories, and my own observations and contemplations served as the main material for the sections below. I have united the main ethnographic materials into five themes, all helping to deconstruct the travel experience: personal transformation, knowledge and experience, new perspective on worldly matters, socialization and correction of belief. Using the concept of nomadism as a lifestyle and regular traveling practice helps me to connect these themes together.

All stories and quotations used here are brought from this 40-day Tablighi travel to India, in which I met Tablighi participants from different parts of the world. Therefore, when quotes are given reference is made to where the particular informant is from.

The theoretical contribution and aim of this research is twofold: 1) to analyze and reformulate Tablighi practices in relation to the Spiritual Nomadism term used in this paper; and 2) to describe the transformative effects of spiritual Tablighi travels. But first, we have a brief discussion on the importance of travel in Islam generally, look at the origins of Tablighi traveling practice and contextualize it in the territory of Central Asia.

ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVES ON TRAVEL

Although the idea of religious pilgrimage, including the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, has been discussed extensively[1]^,[2],[3], the more inclusive subject of traveling in Islam as a unifying theoretical concept has not received sufficient systematic attention from scholars. One synthesizing attempt was made by Eickelman and Piscatori[4] in their edited book titled Muslim Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination. The authors defined several Islamic concepts describing the idea of traveling in Islam. These include hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), hijra (migration), ziyara (travel to shrines), and rihla (traveling for the purposes of acquiring religious knowledge). The authors propose that different types of spiritual travels were often combined not only with each other, but also with other types of travels, such as labor migration and trade and that these worldly travels even without a spiritual component often had strong effect on the spiritual transformations of travelers.

Other relevant terms include: the concept of sirat-al-mustakim (straight path or straight way), which we encounter in the opening surah of the Quran, and fee-sabilillah (in the path of Allah), the meaning of which includes traveling in jihad (holy war), traveling for the purpose of dawah (invitation to Islam) and traveling for various takazas (tasks) of din (religion).

Eickelman and Piscatori portray these various types of spiritual travel as specific forms of social action transforming the imagined communities of believers through shifting boundaries and creating new identities and new meanings. They emphasize the value of various terms defining Muslim travel as elements of a universal vocabulary that make possible comparison and analysis of various versions of Islam, which evolved in different parts of the world and at different periods. Travel, as one of such smaller concepts, constitutes both religious tradition and religious imagination and helps us to have richer understanding of Islam while avoiding the essentialist stand.

In Islam, the importance of travel is recognized and emphasized in the numerous ayahs of the Holly Quran and in the hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.). For example, Abdullah bin Umar (R.A.A.) described how Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) took him for his shoulder and said: “Be in this world like a stranger or a wayfarer” (Buhari).

In the more interpretive version, this hadith might stress the temporal nature of the world for a Muslim whose final abode is in the akhirat (next world). However, a more literate understanding is perhaps instructing people to spend significant part of their life as travelers. In a more straightforward way one ayah of the Quran says: “Travel through the Earth and see what was the end of those who rejected the truth” (6:11). Quran itself has many stories of how different communities rejected the message and how they were punished. In this sentence it instructs believers to travel in order to see for themselves.

There are many hadiths that describe the benefits of traveling in relation to rewards travelers receive. Following extracts were taken from the chapter on virtues of travel included in the book of “Selected Hadiths” compiled by Maulana Muhammad Yusuf:

Anas (R. A.A.) narrates that Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) said: “One morning or one day in the path of Allah is better than the whole world and everything that it contains” (Buhari).

Aisha (R.A.A.) described that she heard the Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) said “If dust touches the body of a person in the path of Allah, these parts of the body will be forbidden for the fire of Hell” (Musnad Ahmad, Tabrani, Majmauz-Zavaid).

Abu Huraira (R.A.A.) narrates how Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) once sent a group of sahabahs with a task. They asked: “Should we depart tonight or wait until morning?” Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) said: “Don’t you want to spend a night in one of the gardens of Paradise?” (Sunan Kubra).

Protection from punishment and promise of paradise embedded in the Islamic teaching and grounded in the amplitude of feelings ranging between fear and hope are all very powerful abstract motivators, while a comparison to worldly riches helps to understand the significance of the rewards of traveling.

Movement was crucial for the success of Islamic world. Islam spread so fast partly because of the nomadic lifestyle and mobility of Arabs who delivered the message of Islam to many distant corners of the old world. But movement was important not only in its initial stage. It played significant role all along the Islamic history. Gellens described Islamic civilization as “…a network of variegated societies, united by their commitment to the sharia – was one which in fullest sense owed its vibrancy to constant movement. Travel in all its myriad forms – pilgrimage, trade, scholarship, adventure – expanded the mental and physical limits of the Muslim world, and preserved and nourished the various contrasts that Muslims perennially maintained with one another”[5].

This network of Muslim societies connected through various channels was a crucial factor in preserving and strengthening the Muslim Ummah and its economic and intellectual growth. Travels were especially important in the lives of Sufis who understood travel both as a spiritual and physical journey. Pina Werbner in her book titled Pilgrims of Love describes this concept in a following way:

Sufism is conceived of essentially as a journey along a path (suluk) leading towards God. In Sufism the human being is a model for the universe, a microcosm of the macrocosm, and the journey towards God is a journey within the person… But Sufi Islam is not only a journey within the body and person… It is also a journey in space… Beyond the transformation of the person, Sufism is a movement in space which Islamicizes the universe and transforms it into the space of Allah. This journey, or hijra, which evokes the migration of the Prophet to Medina, empowers a saint as it empowers the space through which he travels and the place where he establishes his lodge[6].

Sufis traveled in different places around the world not for the purposes of worldly gain, but mostly in their spiritual realms. Sufism took different forms in different places around the world. But almost universally, there was a figure of a wondering dervish, who had very ascetic life and continuously moved from place to place performing zikr (remembrance of Allah) and searching for the purity of heart and connection with God. Today, Sufi practices can be found in all continents of the world, including Western countries, where they are called neo-Sufi movements. But the Sufi practices, which are the main interest to this paper and which are just as global trace their origins to India. These are described in the next section.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 883