Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- A Note on Proper Names and the Spelling Used in This Book
- Glossary
- Introduction: Brother Bismillah and My Introduction to the Tablighi Jama’at
- I At Home Across the Sea: The Arrival of the Tablighi Jama’at and Its Spread Across Southeast Asia
- II Learning to Be: The Foundational Literature of the Tablighi Jama’at and Its Role in Defining the Movement
- III Learning on the March: The Portable, Reader-friendly Literature of the Tablighi Jama’at and Its Role in the Self-identification and Reproduction of the Movement
- IV The Stories We Tell: The Conversion Narratives of the Tablighi Jama’at and the Internalisation of Tablighi Identity
- V Learning to Be Tablighi: The Rule-governed World of the Tablighi and the Disciplining of the Self
- VI How We Look and What We Are: The Tablighi Jama’at Framed in the Eyes of Others
- VII Finally, a Summing Up: The Tablighi Jama’at as the Complex Thing That It Is
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
VI - How We Look and What We Are: The Tablighi Jama’at Framed in the Eyes of Others
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- A Note on Proper Names and the Spelling Used in This Book
- Glossary
- Introduction: Brother Bismillah and My Introduction to the Tablighi Jama’at
- I At Home Across the Sea: The Arrival of the Tablighi Jama’at and Its Spread Across Southeast Asia
- II Learning to Be: The Foundational Literature of the Tablighi Jama’at and Its Role in Defining the Movement
- III Learning on the March: The Portable, Reader-friendly Literature of the Tablighi Jama’at and Its Role in the Self-identification and Reproduction of the Movement
- IV The Stories We Tell: The Conversion Narratives of the Tablighi Jama’at and the Internalisation of Tablighi Identity
- V Learning to Be Tablighi: The Rule-governed World of the Tablighi and the Disciplining of the Self
- VI How We Look and What We Are: The Tablighi Jama’at Framed in the Eyes of Others
- VII Finally, a Summing Up: The Tablighi Jama’at as the Complex Thing That It Is
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Pr. 340. One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.
Ludwig WittgensteinLet us return to Wittgenstein for a moment and take into consideration his argument that the meaning of signifiers lies not in any private act of definition but rather in the broader context of how they are used in the public domain.
I brought up this point earlier when we argued that the meaning of the Tablighi Jama’at is not a matter of personal subjective choice on the part of the members of the movement itself. What the Tablighi is and what it means to be a Tablighi has less to do with one's subjective state and certainly nothing to do with a private language. If the signifier ‘Tablighi Jama’at’ means anything at all, the meaning of the signifier has to lie in the context of a public domain where signifiers mean what they do according to how they are used in that public arena. It was on this premise that I have tried to show that there is such a thing as the Tablighi Jama’at, and that the signifier is a meaningful one due to the fact that its meaning is determined according to the rules of the Tablighi language-game that makes up the discursive universe of this movement.
Proceeding from that premise, we can take the argument one step further: if the Tablighi Jama’at means what it does to the members of the movement who are in a rule-governed ‘form of life’, then it also follows that the meaning of that same signifier can be further added to as it is used by others outside that ‘form of life’. Identities are relational, and subject-positions are relative. What the Tablighi Jama’at is, is partly determined by how the movement sees itself, and this has been the focus of my study in the previous chapters. However, the Tablighi Jama’at is also the sum total of how others see it, and it would be worth our while to take another glance at the Tablighi in order to have a multi-perspective view of the object of study.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Islam on the MoveThe Tablighi Jama'at in Southeast Asia, pp. 169 - 192Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013