Biography of Muhammad Ilyas

Mawlana Muhammad Ilyas, the founder of the Tablighi Jama’at of South Asian subcontinent, is arguably one of the most influential, yet least well-known , figures of the twentieth century Islam. Despite his enormous contribution towards the development of a powerful grass root Islamic Da’wah movement, Mawlana Ilyas has not received much attention in the literature on modern Islamic movements. Most of the Western, and even Muslim, scholarships have remain occupied with the more spectacular and dramatic manifest ions of Islamic revivalist upsurge. The available literature on Maulana Ilyas and his Tablighi movement is mostly in Urdu and that too consists mainly of inspirational works by its leaders and devotional writings by its followers and supporters.

Mawlana Ilyas was born in 1885 in a small town in the United Province of British India in a family of religious scholars. He received his early religious education at home and later went to the famous center of Islamic education in Deoband where he studied the Qur’an, Hadith, Fiqh and other Islamic sciences under the early Deoband luminaries. After completing his education at Deoband, Mawlana Ilyas took up a teaching position at another famous Madarsah Mazaharul Uloom in Saharanpur (U.P., India)

It was at this point in his life that Mawlana Ilyas became aware of the "dismal Islamic situation" in the Mewat region near Delhi where majority of Muslims were living a life that had very little to do with Islamic teachings and practices. Mawlana Ilyas sent several of his disciples to Mewat to survey the situation and later himself undertook many Da’wah trips there. Mawlana Ilyas met Mewati Muslims who could not even recite Shahadah and who had not prayed even once in their life because they did not know how to pray. He saw Muslims greeting each other in a typical Hindu manner; some had even adopted Hindu deities and visited Hindu temples to participate in devotional practices.

Mawlana Ilyas fully aware of the difficult task ahead was, nevertheless, determined to bring the Meo Muslims back to the fold of true Islam. In the early 1920s, he prepared a team of young Madrasa graduates from Deoband and Saharanpur and sent them to Mewat to establish a network of Masajid and Madrasas throughout the region. He soon realized, however, that the Madrasa ulama trained in the Deoband tradition were simply reproducing their prototypes and had no significant impact on society at large. Mawlana Ilyas concluded that these Madrasas were ill-equipped to produce Muslim preachers who would be willing to go door to door and remind people of their Islamic obligations. These institution were good only for producing religious functionaries, not Da’wah workers.

It was because dissatisfaction with the Madrasas that Mawlana Ilyas resigned from a prestigious teaching position at Madrasa Mazaharul Uloom in Saharanpur and came to Basti Nizamuddin in the old quarters of Delhi to begin his Da’wah. The Tablighi movement was born in this place in 1926. Basti Nzamuddin became his permanent residence as well as the headquarter of the Tablighi movement.