SUMMARY:

This article employs the concept of spiritual nomadism as a lifestyle and a regular traveling practice to portray and understand the contemporary religious practices of participants in the Tablighi Jamaat movement, which originated in India and today has become truly global. In the late 1990s the movement reached Central Asia and Russia and found fruitful ground in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The article builds on an analysis of the traditional role of travel in Islam and on a more contemporary interpretation of spiritual travel in Tablighi ideology and practice. Its main ethnographic elements are drawn from the author’s forty-day Tablighi travel from Kyrgyzstan to India as part of a group of Kyrgyz, Kazakh, and Russian Tablighi and it is structured around six main themes discussed from the viewpoint of spiritual nomadism: personal transformation, knowledge and experience, new perspectives on worldly matters, socialization, correction of belief, and travel metaphors. It argues that active and regular participants in the movement acquire elements of a nomadic lifestyle and can be called spiritual nomads of the twenty-first century and that in some places in the world, such as Central Asia, Tablighi practice effectively uses the already existing nomadic practices of historically nomadic peoples such as the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs.