Quran decreed, as his teacher Rasheed Ahmad Gangohi dreamed of doing. The inspiration for this came to Ilyas in a dream during his second pilgrimage to Mecca in 1926. Ilyas abandoned his teaching post at Madrasah Mazahir Uloom in Saharanpur and became a missionary for reforming Muslims (but he did not advocate preaching to non-Muslims). He relocated near Dargah Hazrat Nizamuddin in Delhi, where this movement was formally launched in 1926, or 1927. When setting the guidelines for the movement, he sought inspiration from the practices adopted by Muhammad at the dawn of Islam. Muhammad Ilyas put forward the slogan, , "O Muslims, become [true] Muslims!". This expressed the central focus of Tablighi Jamat: their aim to renew Muslims by socially by trying to unite them in embracing the lifestyle of Muhammad. The movement gained a following in a relatively short period and nearly 25,000 people attended the annual conference in November 1941. At the time, some Muslim Indian leaders feared that Muslims were losing their religious identity and were heedless of Islamic rituals (mainly daily prayers). The movement was never given any name officially, but Ilyas called it Tahrik-i Imaan. Muhammad Ilyas died in 1945 and he himself is buried in the Nizām Ad-Dīn Mosque. The Mewat region where Tablighi Jamaat started around Delhi was inhabited by the Meos, a Rajput ethnic group, some of whom had converted to Islam, and then re-converted to Hinduism when Muslim political power declined in the region, lacking the necessary acumen (according to one author, Ballard) required to resist the cultural and religious influence of majority Hindus, prior to the arrival of Tablighi Jamaat. Expansion The group began to expand its activities in 1946. The initial expansion within South Asia happened immediately after the partition of India in 1947, when the Pakistan Chapter was established in the hinterlands of Raiwind town near Lahore, Pakistan. The Pakistan Chapter remained the largest until Bangladesh became independent from Pakistan in 1971. Today, the largest Chapter is Bangladesh followed by the second largest in Pakistan. Within two decades of its establishment, the group reached Southwest and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. The Tablighi Jamaat's aversion to politics, and also its lack of any direct and practical economic-political-social viewpoints, helped it enter and operate in societies, especially western countries and societies where politically active religious groups faced restrictions. Foreign missions The first foreign missions were sent