Abul A'la Maududi

Abul A'la Maududi was the most systematic Islamist thinker of the twentieth century and the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, and his ideas shaped political Islam far beyond South Asia. He was born at Aurangabad in British India, was schooled at home in a traditional curriculum, and came to prominence as a journalist rather than through a seminary. His central argument was that sovereignty belongs to God alone. From that he drew the conclusion that Islam is not a private religion but a complete political and legal order, and that any state not governed by sharia is a form of ignorance. He founded Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941 as a disciplined vanguard party rather than a mass movement. He opposed the creation of Pakistan as a nationalist rather than Islamic project, then moved there after partition and spent thirty years arguing that it must become an Islamic state. He was imprisoned several times and was sentenced to death in 1953 for a pamphlet against the Ahmadi community, a sentence commuted after international protest. His Tafhim-ul-Quran, a commentary written over thirty years, remains widely read. Sayyid Qutb drew on his work, and through Qutb his vocabulary entered Arab Islamism. He accepted the Saudi-funded King Faisal Prize in 1979 and died the same year in Buffalo, New York, where he had gone for medical treatment. He also argued that women should be excluded from public political life, a position that set Jamaat-e-Islami apart from other South Asian parties. His movement never won large electoral support in Pakistan, yet its influence on the country's constitution and on its blasphemy and Ahmadi legislation has been considerable, and its student wing shaped a generation of activists.

• Lived: 1903 CE – 1979 CE
• Nationality: Pakistani
• Roles: scholar, politician