Abul A'la Maududi

Sayyid Abu'l-A'la Maududi (25 September 1903 – 22 September 1979) was a journalist, Qur'anic commentator and political thinker of British India and afterwards of Pakistan, and the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami. F. C. R. Robinson's entry on him in The Encyclopaedia of Islam describes him as a journalist and theologian, a major influence in the politics of Pakistan and one of the leading interpreters of Islam in the twentieth century.¹ Muhammad Qasim Zaman's study of the ulama in contemporary Islam calls him one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of the twentieth century, and sets out his career as having run across journalism, Qur'anic exegesis and political activism, in pre-independence India and then in Pakistan.²

He was born at Aurangabad in the princely state of Hyderabad, into a family that traced its descent to a shaykh of the Chishti order, and was educated at home and in the madrasas of Hyderabad rather than in either the conventional training of a religious scholar or the schooling of the British Indian government. He supported himself for a decade as a journalist, editing the organ of the Jam'iyyat al-Ulama-i Hind between 1924 and 1927, and from 1932 held the editorship of the monthly Tarjuman al-Qur'an, which carried his ideas for the rest of his life. In the last decade of British rule he argued against territorial nationalism — against the Indian National Congress, against the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan, and in a sustained dispute with the Deobandi scholar Husain Ahmad Madani — holding that what was required was not a nation state of Muslims but a state ordered by Islam. In August 1941 he founded the Jamaat-e-Islami to that end and was elected its amir. After 1947 he moved to Pakistan, where his writing and his organisation became central to the argument over an Islamic constitution; he was imprisoned repeatedly and in 1953 was condemned to death, the sentence being commuted. He gave up the leadership of the organisation in 1972 and died at Buffalo, New York, in 1979.

His life and thought are known from a substantial scholarly literature, and this article draws on the dedicated entries by Robinson in The Encyclopaedia of Islam and by Anis Ahmad in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, on Zaman's study and on Irfan Ahmad's study of the Indian organisation, together with a biographical article at History of Islam and his own account of his formation in the opening address he gave to the founding meeting of 1941. The sources agree on the main outline and diverge on several points of detail, including the year of his father's death and whether he founded Tarjuman al-Qur'an or took over an existing journal; those divergences are set out in the Historiographical Note.

Family and early life

Descent and family

Anis Ahmad's entry records that Maududi was born on 3 Rajab 1321, 25 September 1903, at Aurangabad, a town of the state of Hyderabad now in Maharashtra, and that he was given the name of his great-grandfather Abu'l-A'la, who died in 935 AH (1529 CE). He was known as Sayyid Abu'l-A'la on the ground of descent from al-Husain. The family had come originally from Herat and traced its line to Mawdud-i Chishti, a shaykh of the Chishti order, from whom the family name derives.³ Robinson gives the ancestor as Khwaja Qutb al-Din Mawdud Chishti, who died in 577 AH (1181–82 CE), and records that the family migrated to the subcontinent in the later fifteenth century and produced many spiritual leaders.⁴ The article at History of Islam likewise places the family in the Chishti tradition and records a claimed descent from the Prophet through the line of al-Husain.⁵

Robinson describes Maududi's father as a lawyer who had come from Delhi and had been associated with Sayyid Ahmad Khan, but who preferred to live in Hyderabad as the last significant centre of the Mughal tradition.⁶ The article at History of Islam names him Ahmad Hasan Maududi and describes him as a lawyer with an English education who later turned towards a more orthodox religious life.⁷

Education

The character of his education is a point on which the sources agree, and it bears on much that followed. On Robinson's account the young Maududi was carefully insulated from western culture, and although he attended one of Hyderabad's madrasas he experienced neither the typical schooling of an alim nor that of the British Indian government.⁸ Zaman makes the same point from the other direction: Maududi was a journalist and an Islamist thinker, but had no formal madrasa education, and he neither claimed to be one of the ulama nor was usually recognised as one.⁹

Anis Ahmad's entry has him reading Arabic, fiqh, literature, logic and kalam with Abu Ziyad Niyazi by the method known as the dars-i nizami,^[a] afterwards receiving an ijaza from the Fatehpuri madrasa, and learning English.¹⁰ The History of Islam article adds that his early education was at home under his father's supervision, covering Arabic, Persian, Urdu, logic, jurisprudence, hadith, mathematics and history, that he attended the Madrasa Furqaniyya at Aurangabad and afterwards the Darul Uloom at Hyderabad. It names among the classical authors he read Ibn Taymiyyah, al-Ghazali and Shah Waliullah.¹¹

Ahmad Hasan Maududi died in 1918.¹² His death brought the financial difficulty that interrupted his son's formal higher education, and Maududi never took a university degree; his intellectual formation came instead through independent reading and through journalism. The sources consulted date the death differently, and the Historiographical Note sets out the variants.

In the opening address to the founding meeting of the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941, recorded in the first volume of the organisation's proceedings, Maududi gave his own account of this formation. There had been a time, he said, when he had accepted and acted upon the traditional and inherited religiousness of ordinary Muslims; when he came to what he called true consciousness he realised that merely asserting that he followed what his forefathers had done was without meaning, and he turned to the Qur'an and the Sunnah of the Prophet, understood Islam, and arrived at a conscious faith after much thought.¹³

Journalism, 1920–1932

After his father's death, Robinson writes, Maududi supported himself for a decade as a journalist, most notably as editor of al-Jam'iyyat from 1924 to 1927, the organ of the Jam'iyyat al-Ulama-i Hind.¹⁴ Zaman gives the same years and the same organisation, describing the journal as that of the Deobandi political body, and naming it al-Jami'a.¹⁵ The History of Islam article has him joining the Urdu newspaper Taj at Jabalpur as an editor in 1920 and afterwards editing Muslim and al-Jamiyat, journals that addressed the questions facing Indian Muslims during the Khilafat movement and the campaign against British rule.¹⁶ Anis Ahmad dates his editorial work to the years between 1920 and 1928 and names Jam'iyyat among the titles; he records also that Maududi took part in the Indian Hijrat movement, which argued that Muslims should emigrate to Afghanistan.¹⁷ The organisation whose journal he edited belonged to the Deobandi scholarly tradition described by Barbara Metcalf.¹⁸

During this decade, Robinson writes, Maududi came to know many of the ulama, became thoroughly versed in Arabic, learned English, went clean-shaven and wore western dress, and was involved in the Khilafat movement.¹⁹

al-Jihad fi'l-Islam

The event Robinson identifies as giving his activity a new focus in the mid-1920s was the assassination of the Arya Samaj leader Swami Shraddhanand by a Muslim, and the Hindu accusations that followed it that Islam had been spread by the sword. Stung by these, Maududi undertook an exhaustive study of the doctrine of jihad. The work was first serialised in the journal he edited and then published under the title al-Jihad fi'l-Islam; Robinson's judgement is that it heralded most of the elements of his later thought, and that the effort of writing it greatly intensified his understanding of his faith.²⁰ Anis Ahmad's entry dates the work to 1927, when Maududi was twenty-four, and describes it as a treatment of war and peace in Islamic law answering the claim that Islam had been spread by the sword, which drew attention in Indian academic circles; Robinson gives its publication at A'zamgarh in 1930.²¹ In 1928 Maududi withdrew to Hyderabad for further research and writing.²²

Tarjuman al-Qur'an and the shape of a programme

In 1932 Maududi took up the editorship of the monthly Tarjuman al-Qur'an, which both Robinson and Anis Ahmad describe as the main vehicle of his ideas for the remainder of his life, and which Manazir Ahsan's entry on the organisation notes was still the principal organ of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan long afterwards.²³²⁴²⁵ In his own account at the founding meeting Maududi said that he had begun the magazine in 1352 AH, 1933 CE, in order to call others to the truth he had come to believe.²⁶

Robinson quotes Maududi's own statement of what he intended by it:²⁷

The plan of action I had in mind was that I should first break the hold which Western culture and ideas had come to acquire over the Muslim intelligentsia, and to instil in them the fact that Islam has a code of life of its own, its own culture, its own political and economic systems and a philosophy and an educational system which are all superior to anything that Western civilisation could offer. I wanted to rid them of the wrong notion that they needed to borrow from others in the matter of culture and civilisation.

The same intensity, Robinson observes, runs through the Risala-yi Diniyyat of 1932, and the fear of the corrupting influence of western civilisation is evident in his articles on pardah,^[b] first published in 1935.²⁸ On the History of Islam article's account, through Tarjuman al-Qur'an he argued that Islam offered a complete civilisation and political order, rejected the separation of religion and state, and criticised socialism, capitalism and secular democracy alike.²⁹

Anis Ahmad records that in 1938, at the invitation of the poet and thinker Muhammad Iqbal, Maududi went to the village of Jamalpur near Pathankot in eastern Punjab and took part in founding Dar al-Islam, an institution of research and education that afterwards became the centre of the Jamaat-e-Islami.³⁰ Maududi's own account in the proceedings dates the step to 1357 AH, 1938 CE, and records that only four people became its associates at that time, that the number increased by one in the period that followed, but that small groups of like-minded people were forming elsewhere in the country.³¹

The argument against nationalism

Against both nationalisms

Robinson sets out the position Maududi reached in the last decade of British rule as a response to two fears: that independence would absorb Muslim identity into a secular, Hindu-dominated nation state, and that the Muslim answer of founding a separate Muslim nation state in Pakistan was not the right one either. Maududi now intervened in politics. In a series of articles later collected as Musalman awr mawjuda siyasi kashmakash, he reminded Muslims that they were a separate nation within the Indian environment, while insisting at the same time that they were not a nation in any European sense, as the All-India Muslim League was suggesting; Muslims were in danger of forgetting that they had a message for all humanity, and on Robinson's reading of the argument the way to carry that message forward was to establish not a nation state of Muslims but an Islamic state in which every constituent part would exhibit Islam in ideal and in practice.³²

Zaman puts the same position in terms of the two organisations Maududi opposed. He engaged in a bitter polemic against Husain Ahmad Madani, the leader of the Jam'iyyat, over Madani's position on united nationalism; but he was equally opposed to the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan, because he held nationalism to be incompatible with Islam and considered that party's western-educated leadership unfit to lead a demand for an Islamic state.³³ The History of Islam article has him criticising the Indian National Congress as a Hindu-dominated body and expressing reservations about the Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, on the argument that a nationalism founded on territory or ethnicity conflicted with the universal character of Islam, and that Muslims formed a community bound by faith rather than by geography, language or ethnicity.³⁴

The dispute with Madani

Zaman treats the dispute over united nationalism as an episode in a wider contest over religious authority, and the detail matters for Maududi's standing. Madani's views had been attacked before, by Iqbal and by Maududi; but Iqbal came from a modernist, western educational background, as did most of the Muslim political leaders who had criticised Madani, and Maududi, though a journalist and an Islamist thinker, had no formal madrasa training and was not reckoned among the ulama. Madani, by contrast, was one of the most prominent ulama of his time. Zaman's point is that a critique of united nationalism carried a different weight when it came from within the ranks of the ulama, as in the treatise of Shabbir Ahmad Usmani written in 1939, than when it came from outside them. Zaman records that Maududi's own response to Madani was first published in 1939, and that Madani and the Deobandi ulama remained opposed to Maududi, his thought and his ideas thereafter.³⁵

The founding of the Jamaat-e-Islami

In August 1941, Robinson writes, Maududi founded the Jamaat-e-Islami, which he describes as a carefully selected righteous elite of which Maududi was the leader, to put these ideas into effect.³⁶ Zaman gives the purpose as training a community of righteous people who alone, Maududi believed, could guarantee real and lasting political change.³⁷ The History of Islam article dates the founding to 26 August 1941 at Lahore, and notes that it came a year after the Muslim League had passed the Lahore Resolution demanding a separate state for the Muslims of India; it describes the stated goal as the establishment of a state governed by the Qur'an and the Sunnah, achieved through a disciplined movement that would reform society by education, preaching and political action, with members undergoing ideological and ethical training.³⁸ Manazir Ahsan's entry on the organisation records that Maududi was elected its amir on its founding and held the office until he left it in 1972.³⁹

Irfan Ahmad's study sets out the aims recorded in the organisation's constitution in this period. Its goal was the establishment of hukumat-e-ilahiya, rendered as an Islamic state or the Kingdom of Allah; Maududi argued that the declaration of faith itself obliged Muslims to establish it, that British India was a land of unbelief because no Islamic state existed there, and that the mission was to transform India into dar al-Islam. He held secular democracy to be forbidden on the ground that it substituted human for divine sovereignty.⁴⁰ The detail of the founding meeting, of the constitution adopted at it and of the contested election of an amir is given in the article on the organisation.

Pakistan and the Islamic constitution

Zaman records that for all his initial opposition to the demand for Pakistan, Maududi moved to the new state and took an active part in shaping its public argument about the Islamic state.⁴¹ The History of Islam article explains the shift: he had feared that a Muslim nationalism founded on territory would weaken the wider unity of Muslims in the subcontinent, and had questioned whether the Muslim League was serious about establishing a genuinely Islamic state, but that the partition of 1947 and the communal violence that displaced millions, especially in the Punjab, changed the political context, and that he left India for Pakistan in that year.⁴² Manazir Ahsan records that he settled at Ichhra in Lahore, which became the organisation's new centre and where he was afterwards buried.⁴³

Robinson's assessment of the years from 1948 to 1956 is that Maududi's writings and actions, supported by his organisation, played the key part in directing Pakistan away from the secular state its founders had envisaged and towards the goal of an Islamic one, and that his pressure was primarily responsible for the Islamic content of the Objectives Resolution of the Constituent Assembly. On the January 1951 meeting he records that Maududi's leadership brought representatives of all groups of the ulama to agree on twenty-two principles of an Islamic state, which remained for everyone concerned in constitution-making the benchmark of the conservative position. His authority then brought him to the fore in the agitation of 1952–53 against the Ahmadiyya community of Pakistan, which Robinson records as having helped keep the twenty-two principles alive in the constitution-making process. It was in large part his achievement, on Robinson's account, that the first constitution, promulgated in 1956, looked towards reconstructing Muslim society on a truly Islamic basis and revising all existing laws in the light of the Qur'an and the Sunnah.⁴⁴

Zaman adds a point about the character of this activity rather than its outcome. Maududi worked closely with the leading ulama in formulating the religious parties' demands for an Islamic constitution in the early years of independence, and at critical junctures his party acted in concert with them; Zaman's judgement is that his career and his party's represent one of the earliest instances anywhere in the Muslim world of collaboration between Islamists and the ulama, a pattern observed later in Egypt and elsewhere.⁴⁵

Imprisonment and the sentence of 1953

Robinson gives two terms of imprisonment, from 1948 to 1950 and again from 1953 to 1955, and notes that in 1953 Maududi was for a period condemned to death.⁴⁶ The History of Islam article dates his arrest to 1953, during the agitation against the Ahmadiyya in the Punjab, and adds that a military court sentenced him to death for publications held to have inflamed the unrest, and that pressure from scholars and political leaders across the Muslim world led the government to commute the sentence; it records further imprisonments under the governments of Ayub Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.⁴⁷ Manazir Ahsan's entry gives four terms of imprisonment between 1948 and 1967, amounting to five years in all, and dates the commutation to life imprisonment and the release to April 1955.⁴⁸ Anis Ahmad records a separate imprisonment of two months in 1967 arising from his views on whether the crescent marking the festival of sacrifice had been sighted.⁴⁹

The later years

After 1956, Robinson writes, the argument over the place of Islam in the constitution subsided, and Maududi travelled widely outside Pakistan until ill health restricted him in 1969. He was a frequent visitor to Saudi Arabia, where he took part both in establishing and in running the Islamic university at Medina and the World Muslim League; Manazir Ahsan's entry records him among the founders of the latter.⁵⁰ Whenever a question touching Islam arose in Pakistan — Robinson gives the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance of 1961 and the Ahmadiyya question of 1974 as instances — he was prominent in it.⁵¹

Anis Ahmad dates to 2 November 1972 the day on which Maududi, his health having deteriorated, gave up the leadership of the organisation to Mian Tufayl Muhammad; he records that in 1975 Maududi advised its consultative council to withdraw from politics and was not heeded.⁵² Maududi opposed the successive governments of Pakistan throughout, on Robinson's account, and although he resigned the headship in 1972 he was behind the organisation's part in the movement to overthrow Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977, and that the government of Zia-ul-Haq, with its promise of Islamisation, was the first he felt able to support.⁵³

Anis Ahmad records that Maududi went to the United States in May 1979 for treatment, his son being a physician there, and that he died at Buffalo, New York, on 22 September 1979 after a series of operations. His body was taken to Pakistan, and after a funeral prayer attended by more than a million people he was buried in the garden of his house at Lahore on 26 September 1979.⁵⁴

Writings

Robinson describes Maududi's output as voluminous, covering tradition, law, philosophy, history, politics, economics, sociology and theology, with many of the works translated and some into more than a dozen languages; he notes a bibliography of 138 of them compiled in a volume published in his honour at Leicester in 1979.⁵⁵

Tafhim al-Qur'an

Robinson calls the Qur'an commentary Tafhim al-Qur'an his masterwork and records that it took him thirty years to finish, giving its six volumes as published between 1949 and 1972.⁵⁶ Anis Ahmad gives the span as 1942 to 1972, dating the beginning to its serial publication in Tarjuman al-Qur'an and the completion to 1972, and records that Maududi wrote an introduction to each chapter dealing with the circumstances of its revelation, the conditions of that period and the difficulties the Islamic call had met, and that he described his own method as a free one intended to render the Qur'an in intelligible language.⁵⁷ Zaman notes that of Maududi's numerous writings the most significant is this six-volume Urdu commentary, and that it has continued to be influential in Islamist circles across the Muslim world; he observes that Maududi, like Sayyid Qutb, wrote his commentary for ordinary educated Muslims rather than for scholars.⁵⁸ The History of Islam article describes the commentary as providing a sustained interpretation of Islam as a social and political system, and as having come to be widely read.⁵⁹

The political works

The History of Islam article names among the works setting out his political theory Islamic Law and Constitution, The Process of Islamic Revolution and Four Basic Quranic Terms.⁶⁰ Anis Ahmad's entry records the last of these as Qur'an ki Char Bunyadi Istilahayn, published at Lahore in 1941 and again in 1978, treating the terms ilah, rabb, ibada and din,^[c] and notes that the understanding set out in it presents Islam as a unifying and comprehensive order covering worship, politics, economics, law, morality, community and family. He names also Islami Hukumat kis Tarah Qa'im hoti hey, published at Lahore in 1941, in which the starting point of the gradual and systematic social change Maududi proposed is the indivisibility of life into religious and worldly spheres.⁶¹⁶² Robinson gives Musalman awr mawjuda siyasi kashmakash as three volumes published at Lahore between 1937 and 1939, and Anis Ahmad describes it as a collection of the political writings that had appeared in Tarjuman al-Qur'an.

The conception of the Islamic state

Robinson sets out the constitutional scheme in Maududi's writing. The ruler, the amir, is to be elected by whatever means are appropriate, provided they ensure the choice of the man who enjoys the greatest measure of national confidence; the legislature, the majlis-i shura, is likewise to be elected by whatever means ensure the choice of men having the confidence of the people. Legislation itself proceeds in four ways: by interpretation, by analogy, by inference, and — in that area of human affairs on which the Sharia is silent — by independent judgement.⁶³

The History of Islam article sets out the underlying principle as the Islami Nizam, or Islamic order: sovereignty belongs to God alone, and human beings serve as vicegerents responsible for implementing divine guidance, so that the state is a theo-democracy in which rulers and citizens alike remain subject to the Qur'an and the Sunnah.⁶⁴ Robinson likewise records Maududi's term "theo-democracy".⁶⁵ Manazir Ahsan's entry on the organisation sets out the same conception: because God is the source of law and the human being His vicegerent, the state is a kind of theo-democracy in which the Muslim community interprets the divine law through representatives within the framework of the Sharia; the head of government may be chosen by a suitable method of election provided he has the confidence of the people and conforms to the standards of Islam.⁶⁶

Robinson's assessment of the whole is that the major feature of Maududi's thought was to have transformed Islam into an ideology, an integrated and all-embracing system, and that he aimed to set out the ideal order of the time of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. The outcome, on Robinson's reading, is the most comprehensive statement of the nature of the Islamic state in modern times, and one which, while drawing an ideal from the past, was shaped by contemporary concerns and modes of thought; he adds that the exposition, as might be expected from a man who was primarily a theologian, is strong on general principles and weak on detail.⁶⁷

Relations with the ulama

Zaman describes Maududi's relations with the ulama as complex and contradictory, and the account is worth following because it cuts against a simple opposition between the two. Maududi was more willing than many other Islamists to acknowledge the value and the relevance of the premodern Islamic juristic and exegetical tradition to the understanding of Islam in the modern world; he acknowledged the importance of certain commentaries on hadith by the ulama and gave those works a prominent place among the texts he thought ought to form the basis of training students in Islamic law.⁶⁸ Against that, Zaman records, he remained sharply critical of the madrasas, and quotes him directly:⁶⁹

The old-fashioned schools are steeped in conservatism to such an extent that they have lost touch with the modern world. Their education has lost all contact with the practical problems of life and has become barren and lifeless. It cannot, therefore, produce people who might be able to serve, for instance, as judges and magistrates of a progressive modern state.

The ulama answered in kind, Zaman records, arguing that Maududi's want of formal religious education left him unqualified to speak authoritatively on Islam, and objecting with considerable polemical energy to his interpretations of the Qur'an.⁷⁰

Zaman locates the deeper difference in Maududi's reliance on preparing a new community of righteous individuals, schooled in what he took to be the fundamental norms of Islam and ready to lead the rest of society towards an Islamic revolution. On the meaning of that word Zaman draws a distinction that has been much discussed: although Maududi spoke frequently of the need for revolutionary change, it has been persuasively argued, he writes, that Maududi — unlike Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, who was in many ways deeply influenced by his thought — did not envisage recourse to violent means, his revolution being one to be brought about by those righteous individuals, whose training and prolonged formation would both effect change and guard against any later deviation. Zaman notes that this vision was compromised in the early years of Pakistan, when the Jamaat-e-Islami decided to take part in electoral politics before those individuals were at hand, and that Maududi's followers have continued to contend with the tension between formation and active political participation in a system they regard as flawed.⁷¹

Influence beyond South Asia

Robinson places Maududi among the most influential of those Muslims who came to hold, as the twentieth century went on, that the answer to western domination was to be formulated not in terms of nationalism and secularism but in terms of Islam. He names as influences upon him Ibn Khaldun, Shah Wali Allah, Muhammad Iqbal and Hasan al-Banna, and records that Maududi in turn influenced men ranging from the leaders of Islamic movements in Egypt, Syria and Iran to many ordinary Muslims throughout the Muslim world.⁷² Anis Ahmad's entry records likewise that his ideas affected writers and politicians and also the thinking of Islamic organisations, and that his works were rendered into Arabic, Turkish, English and many other languages.⁷³ The History of Islam article notes that thinkers connected with the Muslim Brotherhood read and translated his works into Arabic, and that scholars have identified strong parallels between Maududi and Sayyid Qutb in their criticism of secular modernity and their call for Islamic governance.⁷⁴

Historiographical Note

The year of his father's death

Three of the sources consulted date the death of Maududi's father differently, and because they express it in different terms the divergence is easy to miss.

Source	Reading
F. C. R. Robinson, The Encyclopaedia of Islam	His father died when Maududi was sixteen
Anis Ahmad, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi	He lost his father at the age of seventeen
History of Islam	His father died in 1918

Maududi was born in September 1903, so the three readings place the death in roughly 1919–20, 1920–21, and 1918 respectively. No source consulted gives a day or month, and none is reconcilable with the others by the ordinary allowance for a Hijri-to-Common-Era conversion. The article gives 1918, the reading of the History of Islam article, on the editorial decision of 17 October 2026 that resolved the question; the two ages recorded by the encyclopaedia entries are set out above so that a reader meeting either of them elsewhere can see where it comes from.

Tarjuman al-Qur'an: founded or taken over

Robinson and Anis Ahmad both record that Maududi took up the editorship of an existing monthly called Tarjuman al-Qur'an in 1932. The History of Islam article records instead that he launched the journal in that year. Maududi's own words in the opening address of 1941, as the proceedings give them in translation, are that he started the magazine in 1352 AH, 1933 CE. The article follows the two encyclopaedia entries, which are explicit about what the act was, and records his own statement alongside them.

The name of the journal he edited from 1924 to 1927

All four sources agree that Maududi edited the organ of the Jam'iyyat al-Ulama-i Hind from 1924 to 1927, and they give its title in two forms. Robinson has al-Jam'iyyat, Anis Ahmad has Jam'iyyat and the History of Islam article has al-Jamiyat, while Zaman has al-Jami'a. The first form is used here as the reading of three of the four.

Tafhim al-Qur'an: the span of composition

Anis Ahmad gives the span as 1942 to 1972, dating the start to the commentary's serial publication in Tarjuman al-Qur'an; Robinson gives the six volumes as published between 1949 and 1972 and describes the work as having taken thirty years to complete. Thirty years from 1942 reaches 1972, which suggests that the two are dating different things — the serialisation and the volumes — rather than contradicting one another, but neither source says so, and both figures are recorded above as they stand.

See also

• Jamaat-e-Islami — the organisation he founded in August 1941 and led until 1972
• Husain Ahmad Madani — the Deobandi scholar with whom he conducted the dispute over united nationalism
• Shabbir Ahmad Usmani — whose treatise of 1939 made the same case against united nationalism from within the ranks of the ulama
• Muhammad Iqbal — at whose invitation he came to Jamalpur in 1938 to help found Dar al-Islam
• The Deobandi movement — the tradition of the body whose journal he edited from 1924 to 1927, and of his principal opponents
• Sharia — the law within whose framework his constitutional scheme places legislation
• The Rashidun Caliphate — the order he took as the model for the Islamic state

Notes

References

Citations

Footnotes

1. Robinson, "Mawdūdī, Sayyid Abu 'l-Aʿlā", The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, vol. 6, pp. 872–874 — his description as journalist and theologian, a major influence in Pakistani politics and a leading interpreter of Islam in the twentieth century. ↩

2. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — his standing among Islamist thinkers of the twentieth century, and the three strands of his career. ↩

3. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 29, pp. 432–437 — his birth on 3 Rajab 1321 at Aurangabad, the name taken from his great-grandfather, the descent from al-Husain, and the family's origin at Herat and line to Mawdud-i Chishti. ↩

4. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the ancestor given as Khwaja Qutb al-Din Mawdud Chishti, the migration to the subcontinent in the later fifteenth century, and the family's spiritual leaders. ↩

5. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the family placed in the Chishti tradition, and the claimed descent from the Prophet through al-Husain. ↩

6. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — his father as a lawyer from Delhi, once associated with Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who preferred Hyderabad as the last significant centre of the Mughal tradition. ↩

7. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the father named as Ahmad Hasan Maududi, a lawyer with an English education who later turned to a more orthodox religious life. ↩

8. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — his insulation from western culture, and an education that was neither that of an alim nor that of the government schools. ↩

9. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — his want of formal madrasa education, and that he neither claimed nor was generally accorded the standing of one of the ulama. ↩

10. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî" — his reading of Arabic, fiqh, literature, logic and kalam with Abu Ziyad Niyazi by the dars-i nizami, the ijaza from the Fatehpuri madrasa, and his learning English. ↩

11. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the early education at home under his father, the subjects covered, the Madrasa Furqaniyya at Aurangabad and the Darul Uloom at Hyderabad, and the classical authors he read. ↩

12. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the death of his father in 1918. The two encyclopaedia entries date it differently, by his age rather than by a year; see the Historiographical Note. ↩

13. Proceedings of Jamaat-e-Islami, vol. 1, the opening address to the founding meeting — his own account of turning from inherited religiousness to a conscious faith. ↩

14. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the decade supported by journalism, and the editorship of al-Jam'iyyat from 1924 to 1927. ↩

15. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — the same years and body, with the journal named al-Jami'a. ↩

16. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the editorship of Taj at Jabalpur from 1920, and afterwards of Muslim and al-Jamiyat. ↩

17. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî" — his editorial work dated to 1920–1928, and his part in the Hijrat movement. ↩

18. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 — the Deobandi scholarly tradition to which the body whose journal he edited belonged. ↩

19. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — his acquaintance with the ulama, his Arabic and English, his dress, and his part in the Khilafat movement. ↩

20. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the assassination of Swami Shraddhanand and the accusations that followed it, the study of jihad undertaken in answer, the serialisation and publication of al-Jihad fi'l-Islam, and his judgement of the work. ↩

21. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî" — the work dated to 1927, its subject as war and peace in Islamic law, and the attention it drew; Robinson gives its publication at A'zamgarh in 1930. ↩

22. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — his withdrawal to Hyderabad in 1928. ↩

23. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the editorship of Tarjuman al-Qur'an taken up in 1932, and the journal as the main vehicle of his ideas thereafter. ↩

24. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî" — the same, in the same terms. ↩

25. Manazir Ahsan, "Cemâat-i İslâmî", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 7, pp. 291–293 — the journal as still the principal organ of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan long afterwards. ↩

26. Proceedings of Jamaat-e-Islami, vol. 1 — his own statement that he began the magazine in 1352 AH, 1933 CE. ↩

27. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the passage quoted, in which Maududi states what he intended by the journal. ↩

28. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the Risala-yi Diniyyat of 1932 and the articles on pardah of 1935. ↩

29. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the argument advanced through the journal, and his rejection of socialism, capitalism and secular democracy alike. ↩

30. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî" — Iqbal's invitation, the move to Jamalpur near Pathankot in 1938, and the founding of Dar al-Islam. ↩

31. Proceedings of Jamaat-e-Islami, vol. 1 — his own dating of the step to 1357 AH, 1938 CE, the four original associates, and the groups forming elsewhere. ↩

32. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the two fears to which his position responded, the articles collected as Musalman awr mawjuda siyasi kashmakash, and the distinction between a nation state of Muslims and an Islamic state. ↩

33. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — his polemic against Madani over united nationalism, and his opposition to the Muslim League's demand and its leadership. ↩

34. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — his criticism of the Congress and his reservations about the League under Jinnah, and the argument from the universal character of Islam. ↩

35. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — the dispute as an episode in a contest over religious authority, the contrast with Shabbir Ahmad Usmani's treatise of 1939, the first publication of his response in 1939, and the continuing opposition of Madani and the Deobandi ulama. ↩

36. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the founding of the Jamaat-e-Islami in August 1941 as a selected righteous elite under his leadership. ↩

37. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — its purpose as training a community of righteous people. ↩

38. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the founding dated to 26 August 1941 at Lahore, its relation to the Lahore Resolution, and the stated goal and method. ↩

39. Manazir Ahsan, "Cemâat-i İslâmî" — his election as amir at the founding and his holding the office until 1972. ↩

40. Irfan Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India — the aims recorded in the organisation's constitution, his reading of the declaration of faith, British India as a land of unbelief, and his position on secular democracy. ↩

41. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — his move to Pakistan despite his opposition to the demand, and his part in its argument over the Islamic state. ↩

42. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the grounds of his earlier opposition, the effect of partition and the violence that followed it, and his departure for Pakistan in 1947. ↩

43. Manazir Ahsan, "Cemâat-i İslâmî" — his settlement at Ichhra in Lahore, which became the organisation's centre and his burial place. ↩

44. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the years 1948 to 1956, the Objectives Resolution, the twenty-two principles agreed in January 1951, the agitation of 1952–53, and the character of the 1956 constitution. ↩

45. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — his close work with the leading ulama over the Islamic constitution, and his career as an early instance of collaboration between Islamists and ulama. ↩

46. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the terms of imprisonment from 1948 to 1950 and 1953 to 1955, and the death sentence of 1953. ↩

47. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the arrest of 1953 during the Punjab agitation, the military court's sentence, its commutation after international pressure, and the later imprisonments. ↩

48. Manazir Ahsan, "Cemâat-i İslâmî" — four terms of imprisonment between 1948 and 1967 amounting to five years, the commutation to life imprisonment, and the release in April 1955. ↩

49. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî" — the two months' imprisonment in 1967 over the sighting of the crescent. ↩

50. Manazir Ahsan, "Cemâat-i İslâmî" — his place among the founders of the World Muslim League. ↩

51. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the subsiding of the constitutional argument after 1956, his travels until ill health restricted him in 1969, his part in the Islamic university at Medina and the World Muslim League, and his prominence in the questions of 1961 and 1974. ↩

52. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî" — the handover of the leadership to Mian Tufayl Muhammad on 2 November 1972, and his unheeded advice of 1975. ↩

53. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — his opposition to the successive governments of Pakistan, his part behind the movement against Bhutto in 1977, and his support for the government of Zia-ul-Haq. ↩

54. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî" — his journey to the United States in May 1979, his death at Buffalo on 22 September 1979, and the funeral and burial at Lahore on 26 September. ↩

55. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the range of his output, its translation, and the bibliography of 138 works in the volume published at Leicester in 1979. ↩

56. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — Tafhim al-Qur'an as his masterwork, thirty years in the making, its six volumes published between 1949 and 1972. ↩

57. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî" — the span given as 1942 to 1972, the serial publication in Tarjuman al-Qur'an, the introductions to each chapter, and his description of his own method. ↩

58. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — the commentary as the most significant of his writings, its continuing influence in Islamist circles, and its address to educated Muslims rather than scholars. ↩

59. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the commentary as a sustained interpretation of Islam as a social and political system, and its wide readership. ↩

60. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — Islamic Law and Constitution, The Process of Islamic Revolution and Four Basic Quranic Terms named among the works setting out his political theory. ↩

61. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — Musalman awr mawjuda siyasi kashmakash as three volumes published at Lahore between 1937 and 1939. ↩

62. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî" — Qur'an ki Char Bunyadi Istilahayn and the four terms it treats, Islami Hukumat kis Tarah Qa'im hoti hey and its starting point, and Musalman awr mawjuda siyasi kashmakash as a collection of his journal writings. ↩

63. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — the election of the amir and the majlis-i shura, and the four modes of legislation. ↩

64. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the Islami Nizam, divine sovereignty, human vicegerency, and the state as a theo-democracy. ↩

65. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — Maududi's own term "theo-democracy". ↩

66. Manazir Ahsan, "Cemâat-i İslâmî" — God as the source of law, the human being as His vicegerent, interpretation through representatives within the framework of the Sharia, and the conditions on the head of government. ↩

67. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — his assessment that Maududi turned Islam into an ideology, drew his ideal from the Rightly Guided Caliphs, produced the most comprehensive modern statement of the Islamic state, and was strong on principle and weak on detail. ↩

68. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — his acknowledgement of the premodern juristic and exegetical tradition, and the place he gave the ulama's hadith commentaries in legal training. ↩

69. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — the passage quoted, in which Maududi criticises the old-fashioned schools. ↩

70. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — the ulama's reply that his want of formal religious education left him unqualified, and their objections to his Qur'anic interpretation. ↩

71. Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam — his reliance on a new community of righteous individuals, the argument that he did not envisage violent means, the contrast with Sayyid Qutb, and the tension the decision to contest elections created. ↩

72. Robinson, "Mawdūdī" — his place among those who answered western domination in terms of Islam, the influences upon him, and those he influenced in turn. ↩

73. Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî" — the effect of his ideas on writers, politicians and Islamic organisations, and the translation of his works. ↩

74. "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com — the reading and translation of his works by those connected with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the parallels drawn with Sayyid Qutb. ↩

Sources

Primary sources. His own works, and his own account of his formation.

• Abul A'la Maududi, Tafhim al-Qur'an, 6 volumes, Lahore — serialised in Tarjuman al-Qur'an from 1942 and completed in 1972.
• Abul A'la Maududi, Musalman awr mawjuda siyasi kashmakash, 3 volumes, Lahore, 1937–1939.
• Abul A'la Maududi, al-Jihad fi'l-Islam, A'zamgarh, 1930.
• Abul A'la Maududi, Risala-yi Diniyyat, 1932; translated into English as Towards Understanding Islam.
• Abul A'la Maududi, Qur'an ki Char Bunyadi Istilahayn: Ilah, Rabb, Ibada, Din, Lahore, 1941 and 1978.
• Proceedings of Jamaat-e-Islami, Volume 1: First Ijtema and Ijtema of Darbhanga, August 1941 to October 1943, translated by Arshad Shaikh — his opening address to the founding meeting, in which he gives his own account of his formation, of starting Tarjuman al-Qur'an, and of the establishment of Dar al-Islam.

Academic and scholarly sources.

• F. C. R. Robinson, "Mawdūdī, Sayyid Abu 'l-Aʿlā", The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, volume 6, pp. 872–874.
• Anis Ahmad, "Mevdûdî", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, volume 29. Ankara, 2004, pp. 432–437.
• M. Manazir Ahsan, "Cemâat-i İslâmî", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, volume 7. Istanbul, 1993, pp. 291–293.
• Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change.
• Irfan Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami.
• "Abul A'la Maududi", historyofislam.com.
• Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 — consulted for the Deobandi tradition and the background of the body whose journal he edited.

Further reading

Offered to the reader for further study. Nothing in this article rests on the works below.

• Islamic Perspectives: Studies in Honour of Mawlana Sayyid Abul A'la Mawdudi, edited by Khurshid Ahmad and Zafar Ishaq Ansari. Leicester, 1979 — contains the bibliography of his 138 works, with details of translations, that Robinson's entry names.
• Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, "Mawdūdī, Sayyid Abū al-Aʿlā", in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. New York, 1995, volume 3, pp. 71–75.
• Charles J. Adams, "Abū'l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī's Tafhīm al-Qur'ān", in Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur'ān.
• Sayed Riaz Ahmad, Maulana Maududi and the Islamic State. Lahore, 1976.
• Kalim Bahadur, The Jamaʿat-i-Islami of Pakistan: Political Thought and Political Action. New Delhi, 1977.

External links

Approved sources only, each with its number on the Register of Approved External Web Sources.

• Mevdûdî and Cemâat-i İslâmî — the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, register entry 2: the entries by Anis Ahmad and M. Manazir Ahsan
• Abul A'la Maududi — historyofislam.com, register entry 7
• Proceedings of Jamaat-e-Islami, Volume 1 — archive.org, register entry 12: the record of the founding meeting of August 1941, containing his opening address