Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi
Abul A'la Maududi was the most influential Islamist thinker of the twentieth century in the Indian subcontinent and the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami. Born in Aurangabad in 1903 into a family claiming descent from the Prophet, he was educated at home in Arabic, Persian and Islamic law by his father, a lawyer, and never completed a formal religious training — which his clerical critics used against him throughout his life. He worked as a journalist from his teens, editing Muslim and then Al-Jam'iyat, newspapers associated with the Deoband ulama. His thought crystallised in the 1930s. He argued that sovereignty belongs to God alone, that any system placing it in a people or a parliament is a form of idolatry, and that Islam is a complete order governing politics and economics rather than a private faith. He redefined jihad as a revolutionary struggle to establish that order, and applied the Quranic term jahiliyya — the ignorance preceding revelation — to contemporary Muslim societies, an argument Sayyid Qutb later took much further in Egypt. He founded Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941 as a disciplined vanguard party. He opposed the creation of Pakistan, arguing that nationalism was itself un-Islamic and that Jinnah's movement was led by secular men. When Pakistan was created he moved there and spent thirty years campaigning to make it an Islamic state. He was imprisoned repeatedly and sentenced to death in 1953 for a pamphlet during anti-Ahmadi agitation; he refused to seek clemency and the sentence was commuted after public pressure. He wrote a six-volume Quran commentary. He died in Buffalo, New York in 1979.
- Lived: 1903 CE – 1979 CE
- Nationality: Pakistani
- Roles: religious_leader, writer
