Abul A'la Maududi

Abul A'la Maududi (25 September 1903 – 22 September 1979) was a Pakistani Islamic scholar and political thinker who founded Jamaat-e-Islami in British India in 1941 and led the party in Pakistan from 1947 until 1972. ¹

Wilfred Cantwell Smith described him, as the English article reports, as "the most systematic thinker of modern Islam", and his writings — above all his six-volume Qur'an commentary, the Tafhim-ul-Quran — made him, in the same article's judgement, the most influential of the contemporary Islamic revivalist scholars, read from South Asia to the Arab world, Iran and Turkey. ¹

He was the first recipient of the Saudi King Faisal International Award for service to Islam, in 1979. ¹

He was born in the city of Aurangabad, in the princely state of Hyderabad, the youngest of three sons of Ahmad Hasan, a lawyer; the family claimed descent from the Chishti line, and his surname derives from Khwaja Qutb al-Din Maudood Chishti. ¹

Until he was nine he was educated at home by his father and teachers his father employed — Arabic, Persian, Islamic law and hadith, with logic besides — and the Arabic article adds that his father taught him the Qur'an and fiqh and had him memorise Imam Malik's Muwatta. ^{1 2}

A precocious child, he translated Qasim Amin's The New Woman from Arabic into Urdu at eleven, attended the Oriental High School in Aurangabad founded by Shibli Nomani, and then a traditional Darul Uloom in Hyderabad; when his father died in Bhopal in 1919, leaving no property, his formal education ended at sixteen. ^{1 2}

In Delhi he read his distant relative Sayyid Ahmad Khan, learned English and German, and studied Western philosophy, sociology and history intensively for five years; through members of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind he then pursued the Dars-e-Nizami curriculum and obtained ijazahs in the traditional sciences, though he declined to call himself an 'alim in the formal sense, holding both the traditional and the modern schools partly right and partly wrong. ¹

The Arabic article describes the milieu of his formation as one in which deep hadith scholarship, the Hanafi school with its rationalism, and the Sufi orders with their spirituality stood side by side — a description of his environment that this record reports as such, not as his own affiliation. ²

He published on electricity at fifteen, was editor of the Urdu weekly Taj at seventeen, edited the newspaper al-Jamiah from 1924 to 1927, and from 1932 ran the journal Tarjuman al-Quran, in whose pages his political ideas took shape between 1932 and 1937 as he turned toward Islamic revivalism and Islam as a complete ideology. ¹

Growing doubtful of the Indian National Congress and its pluralist project, and in conflict with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind's support for a composite India, he resolved to build an organisation of da'wah that would stand as an alternative to both Congress and the Muslim League. ¹

After meeting Muhammad Iqbal in 1938 he moved to Pathankot in the Punjab to oversee a waqf, Darul Islam, intended as the nerve centre of an Islamic revival; after a dispute with the land's donor he moved the community to Lahore in 1939, where he taught briefly at Islamia College before being dismissed for his political lectures. ¹

In August 1941 he founded Jamaat-e-Islami in Lahore as a religious-political movement to promote Islamic values and practices, supported by Amin Ahsan Islahi, Muhammad Manzoor Nomani, Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi and Naeem Siddiqui. ¹

The party opposed the partition of India, arguing that a territorial division violated the doctrine of the ummah by setting a temporal border between Muslims; when partition came in 1947 the movement split along the new borders, and Maududi, who had migrated to Lahore, led the Pakistani party as its emir until 1972. ¹

In Pakistan his career turned from scholarship to politics: he demanded a constitution based on the Qur'an and the Sunna — "an Islamic state is a Muslim state, but a Muslim state may not be an Islamic state unless and until the constitution of the state is based on the Qur'an and Sunnah", as the article quotes him — and clashed repeatedly with governments dominated by a secular political class. ¹

He was first jailed in 1948 after objecting to the government's clandestine sponsorship of the insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir while it professed a ceasefire, and was imprisoned again in 1964 and 1967. ¹

In 1953 he and the Jamaat joined the campaign demanding that the Ahmadiyya be designated non-Muslims and removed from high office; the agitation produced riots in Lahore in which, the article reports, between two hundred and two thousand people died, and martial law was selectively imposed. ¹

Arrested, he was sentenced to death for his part in the agitation; strong public pressure secured his release after two years, and the biographer Vali Nasr, as quoted in the article, judges that his unapologetic stance — refusing advice to beg clemency — had an immense effect on his followers, who read it as a victory of Islam over un-Islam. ¹

The campaign shifted national politics toward Islam, and the 1956 constitution accommodated many of the Jamaat's demands before Ayub Khan's coup shelved it; in the 1970 election the party won only four national seats despite fielding 151 candidates, and Maududi withdrew from political activism in 1971 and resigned the emirate in 1972 on grounds of health. ¹

When General Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977, he accorded Maududi the standing of a senior statesman and sought his advice; Maududi supported Zia and his programme of Islamisation, and tens of thousands of the movement's members and sympathisers received posts in the judiciary and civil service. ¹

This section reports Maududi's own argued positions, as the sources present them; it is not a verdict by the museum.

He held that human beings must accept God's sovereignty (hakimiyya) and adopt the divine code above man-made law, and he called the resulting order a "theodemocracy", because its rule would rest on the whole Muslim community and not on the ulama as a clerical class. ¹

Influenced, the article records, by Ibn Taymiyya's treatises on God's sovereignty, he treated sharia not as a set of penalties but as "a complete scheme of life and an all-embracing social order", addressing family, economy, administration, courts, war and peace; a society that consciously refused it, he wrote, forfeited the name Islamic. ¹

He coined and popularised the phrase "Islamic revolution" in the 1940s, but the process he envisaged was the gradual changing of hearts and minds from the top of society downward through education and da'wah, step by step and with patience, explicitly rejecting sudden, violent or unconstitutional change. ¹

He sought the station of a mujaddid, a renewer of the religion, and opposed in turn the traditionalists' stagnation — the Arabic article quotes the ulama's objection that his insistence on ijtihad departed from the scholars' path, since the conditions of ijtihad were absent in the scholars of this age — and the westernisers' dissolution of Muslim identity into a foreign culture. ^{1 2}

Like other revivalists he was critical of Sufism in his youth, and he had himself studied tasawwuf at a Deobandi seminary in Delhi's Fatehpuri Mosque, taking an ijaza in the subject in 1926. ¹

With age his criticism narrowed to the unorthodox and popular practices — the cult of saints, shrines and festivals — that he held to be unbound by the sharia, while he praised the Sufism of the early masters that keeps within it; in the Risala-i Diniyya he wrote that a Sufism loosening itself from the sharia is something Islam cannot admit, and he redefined tasawwuf as the measure of concentration and morals within religion, as the soul is to the body's law. ¹

This section reports what the sources record of Maududi's belief, without a verdict from the museum.

No source consulted names a legal school as Maududi's own, and this record leaves the segment unknown. Wikidata records his religion as Islam in general. ³

His formation crossed several circles — Chishti descent, a Deobandi seminary's ijaza in tasawwuf, the acknowledged impress of Ibn Taymiyya and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab — and the Arabic article sets his upbringing among hadith scholarship, the Hanafi school and the Sufi orders at once; teachers, ancestors, influences and milieu are not an attestation of a man's own school, and his founding of Jamaat-e-Islami is a political fact rather than a school. ^{1 2}

He was a highly prolific author of dozens of works in Urdu, later translated into English, Arabic and many other languages. ¹

His best-known work, and the one the article judges his most important, is the Tafhim-ul-Quran, a six-volume translation and commentary of the Qur'an begun in February 1942 and many years in the writing. ¹

He also helped establish and run the Islamic University of Madinah, and poured his programme into more than a thousand speeches and press statements besides his books and pamphlets. ¹

He married Mahmudah Begum in 1937, a woman of an old Muslim family whose resources let him devote himself to research and political action, and had six sons and three daughters, of whom only one ever joined the Jamaat. ¹

He suffered a kidney ailment most of his life, was often bedridden in 1945–46 and treated in England in 1969; in April 1979 the ailment worsened, together with heart problems, and he went to the United States, where his second son practised medicine, and died in hospital at Buffalo, New York, on 22 September 1979, aged seventy-five. ¹

He was buried in an unmarked grave at his residence in Ichhra, Lahore, after a very large funeral procession through the city, with the funeral prayer led by Yusuf al-Qaradawi; the English article's lead adds that he was given a state funeral, led by al-Qaradawi, at the Kaaba in Mecca — two statements the article leaves side by side, and both are recorded here as it gives them. ¹

His doctrines, the article records, influenced the Iranian Revolution — Khomeini is reputed to have met him in 1963 and later translated his works into Persian — and Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb read him in the Arab world, Qutb borrowing and expanding his concepts of jahiliyya and of a revolutionary vanguard. ¹

The historian Philip Jenkins, as quoted, counts all the major contemporary Islamist movements as deriving their programmes from the writings of Maududi and Qutb, and the article notes the influence claimed for his thought on militant movements as well as on the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Bangladesh Jamaat and the Islamic Circle of North America; these are the judgements of the scholars cited, recorded here as theirs. ¹

In Pakistan his party is thought, in Eran Lerman's phrase as quoted, to stand behind much of the country's drift toward Maududi's version of Islam, and his ideas are thought to have influenced Zia-ul-Haq's decision to begin Islamisation. ¹

• English Wikipedia article "Abu al-A'la Mawdudi" (revision 1380047326); Arabic Wikipedia article «أبو الأعلى المودودي» (revision 76783744); Urdu Wikipedia article «ابو الاعلیٰ مودودی» (revision 11804467); Wikidata item Q369907.
• Conflicts recorded, not resolved: the place of death is specified as Buffalo by the English article's narrative, while Wikidata's claim points to New York generally; the English article's lead speaks of a state funeral at the Kaaba led by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, while its death narrative places his funeral in Buffalo and his burial at Ichhra, Lahore, with al-Qaradawi leading the prayer — both statements are carried as the article gives them.