Dawat in the Time of Corona: Islam and Pious Sovereignty in the Tablighi Jamaat

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, practitioners of Tablighi Jamaat, a transnational Islamic piety movement, continued their mass gatherings called Ijtimah. Taking reference from his extensive fieldwork with Pakistani Tablighi, Dr Arsalan Khan outlines how a ritualised form of face-to-face preaching, or dawat, creates a distinct pious sociality based on what he calls the “ethics of hierarchy”.