Travelling faiths and migrant religions: the case of circulating models of da'wa among the Tablighi Jamaat and Foguangshan in Malaysia

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, we propose conceptual and methodological tools to study religion in motion and make an analytical distinction between two types of religious movement – travelling faiths and migrant religions. Travelling faiths are religious movements with universal claims around which a religious community forms (deterritorialized religions). They travel in order to proselytize. Migrant religions travel within the local ethnic confines of the migrant (and home) population, even as they reterritorialize and adapt to new contexts. Mission is one form that religious travel takes, which, especially in its Christian form, entails reaching out to a religious community with the intent of conversion. But religious outreach undertaken by travelling faiths can, and often is, directed at the existing religious community as a call to renewal and renovation. It involves a kind of conversion, if not to a new faith, then within the existing one. Many travelling faiths remain in their ethno‐linguistic community, even as they embark on their transnational journey. Others succeed in a different kind of movement. Their missions, be they directed at purifying the practices of current members or converting new ones, cross the diasporic ethnic boundary. As we show in the case of Malaysia, part of the success of the Islamic Tablighi Jamaat movement is its ability to traverse that divide, while the Buddhist Foguangshan movement, although enormously successful on a global scale, has remained largely within the ethnic Chinese domain. When religious boundaries are transcended, globality assumes a particular significance.