Abul A'la Maududi

Abul A'la Maududi (25 September 1903 – 22 September 1979) was a journalist, Qur'anic commentator and political thinker who founded the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941 and led it for more than three decades. Muhammad Qasim Zaman describes him as "one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of the twentieth century", with "a long career as a journalist, Qur'an exegete, and political activist in pre-independence India and in Pakistan". His writings, composed in Urdu and translated into many languages, ranged across Qur'anic commentary, hadith, law, philosophy and history, and the most substantial of them is Tafhim al-Qur'an, a commentary on the Qur'an in six volumes.

His importance lies in a particular argument: that Islam prescribes not only personal piety but the ordering of public life, and that the state is therefore the proper instrument of religious obligation. This position, and the organisation he built to advance it, made him the most widely read exponent of a form of Muslim political thought distinct both from the secular nationalism of the Muslim League and from the scholarly tradition of the seminaries. Zaman's study treats him as the principal counterpart to the ulama in South Asia, and much of what follows concerns the relationship between the two.

Family and Background

Maududi was born on 25 September 1903 at Aurangabad, in the princely state of Hyderabad in the Deccan. He was the youngest of the three sons of Ahmad Hasan, a lawyer of middle-class circumstances. His eldest brother, Sayyid Abu'l Khayr Maududi, born in 1899, became an editor and journalist, and the two remained close.

The family name records a Sufi descent. It derives from Khwaja Sayyid Qutb al-Din Maudud Chishti, an early figure of the Chishti order, and Maududi's paternal line traced its arrival in India from Chisht, in what is now Afghanistan, in the early sixteenth century, settling first in Haryana and later at Delhi. On his mother's side he descended from Mirza Tulak, a soldier of Turkic origin who came to India from Transoxiana in the time of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

Hyderabad in the 1920s and 1930s was one of the more intellectually mixed environments in India, and Maududi's circle there included religious scholars as well as writers. Muhammad Idris Kandhlawi, the Deobandi scholar of hadith and Qur'anic commentary, met Maududi and his brother Abu'l Khayr while holding a post in Hyderabad State between 1929 and 1939, and remained in contact with both men for the rest of his life.

Journalism and Early Career

Between 1924 and 1927 Maududi edited al-Jami'a, the journal of the Jam'iyyat al-Ulama-i Hind. This is a detail of some consequence, and Zaman draws attention to it: al-Jami'a was the organ of the Deobandi political organisation, which means that Maududi began his public career in the service of the very body of scholars from whom he would later differ so sharply. Barbara Metcalf's history of the Deoband movement describes the network of scholars and institutions from which the Jam'iyyat was drawn, and Maududi's early employment placed him inside it.

He was not, however, a product of the seminaries. He had no formal certification in the religious sciences of the kind that Deoband or Saharanpur conferred, and this fact would shape both his own approach and the reception of his work among the ulama.

The Dispute Over Nationalism

Maududi's break with the Jam'iyyat came over the question of nationalism. Its leader, Husain Ahmad Madani, argued for what was termed composite or united nationalism — the position that the Muslims of India formed a religious community within a single Indian nation defined by shared territory, and that they should therefore seek a common political future with their non-Muslim compatriots. Maududi engaged Madani's position in a sustained polemical exchange, holding nationalism to be incompatible with Islam as such.

The consequence was a position that satisfied neither of the major camps of the 1940s. Zaman puts it plainly: "Mawdudi was equally opposed to the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan, for he believed nationalism to be incompatible with Islam and, in any case, considered the Western-educated leadership of this party unfit to lead the demand for an Islamic state." He objected to Madani's nationalism because it was nationalism, and to the League's because it was also nationalism, conducted by men he did not regard as qualified for a religious undertaking.

The Founding of the Jamaat-e-Islami

Maududi founded the Jama'at-i Islami on 26 August 1941. Its purpose, as Zaman describes it, was "to train a community of 'righteous people' who alone, he believed, could truly guarantee real and long-lasting political change".

The conception is worth setting out carefully, because it distinguishes him from other movements of the period. He did not propose to seize the state, nor to work primarily through mass mobilisation. He proposed to form a body of individuals whose training and thorough formation in Islamic norms would fit them to lead, on the reasoning that institutions take their character from the people who staff them. Zaman notes that although Maududi "spoke frequently about the need for revolutionary change, it has been persuasively argued that Mawdudi — unlike, say, Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, who was in many ways deeply influenced by Mawdudi's thought — did not envisage recourse to violent means". The change was to come through the righteous individuals themselves, "people, especially in positions of leadership, whose training and extended Islamic socialization would be the surest means not only of bringing about effective change but also of serving as a bulwark against any temptations to deviate from the straight path once they had been set on it".

He led the organisation as its amir from its foundation until October 1972.

Pakistan and the Islamic State

Having opposed the demand for Pakistan, Maududi moved to the new state after 1947 and, in Zaman's words, "played an active role in shaping the public discourse on the Islamic state".

His conception of that state placed decision-making with the amir, the head of the polity, who was expected to act in consultation with others. Zaman's fourth chapter examines this scheme alongside the very different arrangement developed in Iran, and the comparison brings out what was distinctive in Maududi's thought: authority rested on conformity to revealed norms rather than on the juristic qualification of the ruler, which is why a state so conceived did not require the ulama to govern it.

In the early years of independence he worked closely with the leading religious scholars in formulating the religious parties' demands for an Islamic constitution. Zaman regards this as historically significant well beyond Pakistan: Maududi's career and that of his party "represent one of the earliest instances of collaboration between the Islamists and the 'ulama anywhere in the Muslim world — a phenomenon that would be observed later in Egypt and elsewhere."

There was a tension in this from the outset. The Jama'at-i Islami decided to contest elections in Pakistan's early years, before the community of righteous individuals that Maududi's theory required had been formed. Zaman observes that his followers "have continued to struggle with this tension between 'education as cultural engineering' and active political participation in what they regard as an inherently flawed political system."

Relations With the Ulama

Zaman describes Maududi's relations with the religious scholars as "complex and contradictory", and the phrase is apt in both directions.

On one side, he was more willing than most Islamist thinkers to grant the continuing value of the pre-modern juristic and exegetical tradition for understanding Islam in the modern world. He acknowledged the standing of certain hadith commentaries written by the ulama and included them among the works he thought ought to form the basis of training students in Islamic law. His party acted together with the ulama at several critical moments in Pakistan's history.

On the other, the two differed fundamentally over religious authority, and over the adequacy of madrasa education to the needs of a modern state. The scholars, for their part, held that his lack of formal training in the religious sciences told against his standing to pronounce on them, and objected to his interpretations of the Qur'an. The exchange was conducted with considerable force on both sides. This article records that the disagreement existed and what it was about, and does not reproduce the polemic.

The deeper difference, in Zaman's analysis, was structural rather than personal. The ulama's authority rested on transmitted learning, on the chains of teachers through whom texts were received, and on competence in a technical tradition. Maududi's rested on a direct appeal to scripture, addressed to educated readers who had not been trained in that tradition and did not consider themselves bound to defer to those who had. The two claims could cooperate politically while remaining incompatible in principle, which is precisely what happened.

Writings

Tafhim al-Qur'an, his six-volume Urdu commentary on the Qur'an, is his major work. Zaman notes that it, together with his other writings, "have continued to be highly influential in Islamist circles throughout the Muslim world". He observes elsewhere that Islamist intellectuals such as Maududi and Qutb wrote commentaries directed at ordinary educated Muslims rather than at religious specialists, and that some of the ulama came to do likewise — the two constituencies competing for the same general readership in the same medium of cheap Urdu print.

His output extended well beyond exegesis, into hadith, law, philosophy and history. It was written in Urdu and subsequently translated into English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Burmese and Malayalam, among other languages, and the translations account for much of his influence outside South Asia.

He held that secularism, nationalism and socialism were incompatible with Islam, and regarded all three as arriving in the Muslim world through Western dominance rather than from within it. His positive programme was the adoption of the shari'a as the law of the state, understood as restoring a pattern of social practice he associated with the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs.

Standing in the Wider Muslim World

Maududi's reach outside South Asia is illustrated by a detail Zaman records in a different connection. When the Syrian hadith scholar Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda compiled the list of those who had authorised him to transmit hadith, that list included not only established ulama but Maududi. Zaman draws two conclusions from this. The first is that circles of hadith transmission had widened beyond the scholarly class. The second concerns patronage: what brought the two men together was "not only a broadly shared Islamist ideology... but also the Saudi state, which was a patron of both Mawdudi and Abu Ghudda, and indeed of many of the Pakistani and Indian 'ulama."

He took part in the establishment and running of the Islamic University of Madinah in Saudi Arabia. In 1979 he became the first recipient of the King Faisal International Prize for service to Islam.

Death

Maududi died on 22 September 1979 at Buffalo, in New York State, where he had gone for medical treatment, three days before his seventy-sixth birthday.

After his retirement as amir in 1972 the leadership of the organisation he had founded passed to Mian Tufail Muhammad in Pakistan, while the bodies in India and Bangladesh developed under their own leaderships — Abul Lais Islahi Nadvi in India and Ghulam Azam in Bangladesh — a division that followed the partition of the subcontinent and the separation of Bangladesh in 1971.

Sayyid Qutb and the Question of Influence

Zaman's treatment of Maududi repeatedly sets him beside Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, and the comparison is the principal way in which Qutb enters this account.

Two points are established. The first is influence: Qutb was, in Zaman's words, "in many ways deeply influenced by Mawdudi's thought", and the transmission of ideas from Urdu into Arabic Islamist writing runs substantially through Maududi's translated works. The second is divergence over means. Zaman records the argument, which he finds persuasive, that Maududi did not envisage recourse to violence, whereas the same cannot be said of the tradition that developed from Qutb's later writing. Both men also wrote Qur'anic commentaries for a general educated readership rather than for scholars, and both employed the concept of jahiliyya — the condition of ignorance preceding revelation — as a category for describing contemporary society, though Zaman notes in his own annotations that they used it in different senses.

This article does not attempt a biography of Qutb. The approved sources available treat him comparatively, in relation to Maududi and to the Egyptian ulama, rather than narrating his life, and a fuller account would require sources not yet consulted.

Historiographical Note

Maududi is a figure about whom a great deal has been written from strongly held positions, in praise and in opposition, and much of that literature is evaluative rather than descriptive. This article confines itself to what the sources establish about his life, his organisation, his writings and his stated positions, and reports the disagreements he was involved in as disagreements, without adopting the language of either side. Assessments of his historical influence on later political movements and governments are contested in the scholarly literature and are not settled here.

His name is transliterated in several ways. Zaman writes Mawdudi; other works give Maududi, Maudoodi, or al-Mawdudi. The Urdu is the same in each case, and readers searching the literature should expect all of these forms.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• The Qur'an — the subject of his six-volume commentary Tafhim al-Qur'an
• Tafhim al-Qur'an by Abul A'la Maududi — his principal work and the fullest statement of his reading of scripture
• The canonical hadith collections, on which he wrote and from which he argued
• The practice of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, which he took as the model of properly ordered Muslim public life

Classical Islamic Sources

• The Hanafi school of law, the juristic tradition of his background
• The pre-modern tradition of Qur'anic commentary and jurisprudence, whose continuing relevance he affirmed against other Islamist thinkers
• The hadith commentaries of the ulama, which he named among the works that ought to form the basis of legal training
• The Chishti order, from an early figure of which his family name derives

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change by Muhammad Qasim Zaman — for his career, the editorship of al-Jami'a, the exchange with Madani, the founding and character of the Jama'at-i Islami, his conception of the Islamic state, his relations with the ulama, and the comparison with Sayyid Qutb
• Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 by Barbara Daly Metcalf — for the Deobandi network from which the Jam'iyyat al-Ulama and its journal were drawn
• Wikipedia, "Abul A'la Maududi", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abul_A%27la_Maududi — consulted with the owner's authorisation for his dates, birthplace, family and descent, the span of his leadership, and the translation and range of his works
• Wikipedia, "Idris Kandhlavi", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_Kandhlawi — consulted with the owner's authorisation for his acquaintance with Idris Kandhlawi at Hyderabad

Further Reading

• The Jamaat-e-Islami — the organisation he founded and led for thirty-one years
• Husain Ahmad Madani — the scholar whose position on composite nationalism he opposed
• Muhammad Idris Kandhlawi — the Deobandi scholar he knew at Hyderabad
• Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda — the Syrian scholar who recorded an authorisation in hadith from him
• The Deobandi Movement — the tradition of the scholars with whom he both collaborated and differed