Muhammad Ilyas

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Muhammad Ilyas was the founder of the Islamic movement Tablighi Jamaat of the South Asian subcontinent. He is arguably one of the most influential, yet least well-known, figures of the twentieth century Islam. Mawlana Ilyas was born in 1885 to a family of religious scholars, and his early education was completed at home. He was then sent to study at the famous centre of Islamic learning, Darul Uloom Deoband, where he studied under several famous Ulama. After completing his studies, he taught at various madrassas. In the late 1920s, he founded the Tablighi Jamaat movement to revive Islam in the subcontinent. Despite his enormous contribution towards the development of a powerful grass root Islamic Dawah 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 manifestions 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.