Tablighi Jamaat (Saadi / Nizamuddin faction)

Tablighi Jamaat was founded in 1926 in Mewat (Haryana, India) by Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhlawi as a Sunni Deobandi-derived missionary movement teaching that ordinary Muslims should engage in tabligh (preaching) and structured khuruj (going-out missions) to encourage stricter Islamic practice. The classical Tablighi model — 6 uṣūl (basic principles), 3-day / 40-day (chilla) / 4-month (chilla-e-arba'een) missions in self-funded groups of 8–10 men, evening bayan (sermon) at the mosque, daily gasht (door-to-door visits) — became the largest Sunni mass-revivalist movement globally through the 1960s–2010s, with estimated 150 million sympathisers and the Tablighi ijtema (annual gatherings) in Bangladesh and Pakistan drawing millions of attendees.

The 2015 succession crisis followed Maulana Inamul Hasan Kandhlawi's 1995 death and the subsequent dual claims by his great-grandson Maulana Saad Kandhlawi (New Delhi Nizamuddin HQ) and a rival shura-council based at the Pakistani Raiwind headquarters. By 2018 the split had become a formal schism with two competing global networks. The Saadi / Nizamuddin faction is the entry covered here.

Documented patterns in the Saadi faction specifically include: (1) severance pressure on members who switch allegiance to the rival Raiwind faction; (2) substantial khuruj commitment requirements particularly burdensome to family / household responsibilities; (3) doctrinal control via the Saad-Kandhlawi-led shura's authority over which scholars are accepted as legitimate; (4) post-2020 controversies including the Nizamuddin Markaz COVID-period gathering in March 2020 that became an Indian-state political controversy (Indian government allegations were partially walked back after court rulings). The mainstream low-control Tablighi practice (most of the 150 million sympathisers operate in the moderate-band range, comparable to mainstream Sufi or charity-Islamic engagement) is distinct from the post-2015 Saadi-faction high-commitment-chapter pattern this entry covers.