Ban Tablighi Jamaat

The controversy over holding of Tablighi Jamaat at Nizamuddin in Delhi, during the coronavirus outbreak has in fact upped the ante against the Tablighi Jamaat. One of the first to have made such a call is the Dargah Ala Hazrat in Bareilly (Uttar Pradesh), which was closely followed by a number of Shia clerics. Aala Hazrat Trust, while demanding an immediate ban on Tablighi Jamaat for continuing with its Markaz congregation at Nizamuddin in Delhi after the government ordered a lockdown, also demanded legal action against the Markaz organizers. According to Aala Hazrat Trust president Mohtashim Raza Khan, the Tablighi Jamaat and particularly its chief Maulana Saad Khandhlawi acted in the most irresponsible manner and held their conference with neither security nor healthcare professionals, even as WHO declared the novel coronavirus as a pandemic. Thus they critically endangered not only the blind Jamaat followers but the entire country and her people as well. Condemning their irresponsible behavior, the Aala Hazrat Trust, while demanding a ban the organization said it had broken a fundamental rule of Islam. Shia Waqf Board chief Waseem Rizvi said that the Tablighi Jamaat had literally produced suicide bombers. Uttar Pradesh Muslim Waqf Affairs Minister Mohsin Raza, on the other hand, has described Tablighi Jamaat as an extremist organization and both he and Rizvi have demanded a ban on this organization for alleged involvement in anti-national activities. Shia Waqf Board chief Rizvi has also alleged that Tablighi Jamaat deliberately got its followers infected with coronavirus and then sent them to India so that maximum people got infected. Having said so, he even went on to say, “Such mentality deserves death and nothing less. The organization should be banned.” It is worth mentioning that Tablighi Jamaat has been banned in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In 2013, a court in Astana banned the international Islamic group Tablighi Jamaat with Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor-General’s Office announcing that “the group had been designated as extremist and all its activities in Kazakhstan were now considered illegal.” Meanwhile, noted writer Taslima Nasreen, in a tweet alleged that the Tablighi Jamaat has been spreading ignorance and fundamentalism for a century, and as such should be banned for cruelty against humanity. No Islamic group in Assam, however, has yet raised such a demand.