Metcalf quote interested me, she sounds PC, providing the typical "jihad doesn't mean holy war" canard. Probably doesn't talk to muslims whose thinking doesn't fit her imagination of her sympathy object.
She's got a website: Prof. Barbara Metcalf
She is an "expert" on the group. Here's three of her article titles:
"* 1998 Women and Men in a Contemporary Pietist Movement:The Case of the Tablighi Jama at Appropriating Gender: Womens Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia ed. Amrita Basu and Patricia Jeffery. New York: Routledge, 107-121" 50-50 odds says this peice apologizes for sexism and says the women in this group are really "empowered" but dumb westerners are blind to see it.
"* 1996 Sacred Words Santioned Practice New Communities Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe ed. Barbara Daly Metcalf. Berkeley: University of California Press 1-27." Hmmm... By use of the post-modern word "space" she means in reality non-assimulation and maintenance of mental or physical ghettoes, no doubt pleasing to many guilt ridden liberals. Wonder if she did any cross-cultural comparisons, say with Iranians or Hindus in America. They don't have much problems. Guatemalans I know don't want "space," they want to integrate!
"* 1996 New Medinas: The Tablighi Jama at in America and Europe Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe ed. Barbara Daly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 110-27" Now she's getting scary. Not just muslilm "space", but that for a radical extremist group, she adds. That's great, she wants to import (impose) "new medinas" for radicals in America and Europe. Haven't read the text, but I would fathom her mental ethnic zoo is colored and conditioned by anti-western values and cultural self-loathing.