The Jamaat-e-Islami

The Jamaat-e-Islami is an organisation founded by Abul A'la Maududi on 26 August 1941, in the last years of British rule in India. Its founding purpose was not to contest elections or to agitate but to form a body of individuals thoroughly trained in what Maududi understood to be the norms of Islam, on the reasoning that lasting political change depends on the character of those who exercise authority. Muhammad Qasim Zaman describes the founding intention in these terms: Maududi "created his own organization, the Jama'at-i Islami, in 1941, to train a community of 'righteous people' who alone, he believed, could truly guarantee real and long-lasting political change."

Maududi led it as amir from its foundation until October 1972. After the partition of India in 1947, and again after the separation of Bangladesh in 1971, the organisation developed into distinct bodies in the three successor states, each with its own leadership.

Its historical significance, on Zaman's account, is not only what it achieved in any one country but what it represented structurally. Maududi's career and that of his party, he writes, "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."

Founding and Purpose

The organisation was established at a moment when the constitutional future of India was the dominant political question and when the two available answers — a united India or a separate Muslim state — were both framed in national terms. Maududi rejected both framings, holding nationalism as such to be incompatible with Islam, and the Jamaat-e-Islami was founded as an alternative to each.

The method followed from the diagnosis. If the defect lay in the formation of those who governed, then the remedy was to form people differently. The organisation was therefore conceived as a selective body with demanding standards of membership rather than a mass party, and its early work was directed at training, study and the propagation of Maududi's writings. Zaman summarises the underlying conviction: change was to be brought about by righteous individuals, "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."

The head of the organisation held the title amir, the same term Maududi used for the head of the polity in his writing on the Islamic state, where the amir held the power of decision but was expected to act in consultation.

Partition and Division

Maududi had opposed the demand for Pakistan, but when the state came into being he moved to it, and the organisation followed the political geography of the subcontinent. Separate bodies emerged in each of the successor states, and when Maududi retired from the leadership in 1972 the succession reflected that division: Mian Tufail Muhammad took over in Pakistan, Abul Lais Islahi Nadvi led the organisation in India, and Ghulam Azam in Bangladesh, which had become independent the previous year.

The division was consequential. Each body operated under a different constitution, in a different relationship to the state, and among Muslim populations of very different proportions — a majority in Pakistan and Bangladesh, a minority in India. The organisations that resulted came to differ correspondingly in their activities and emphases, notwithstanding a common origin and a shared body of founding literature.

In Pakistan: The Islamic Constitution and Electoral Politics

The organisation's most consequential early work in Pakistan concerned the constitution. Zaman records that Maududi "worked closely with the leading 'ulama in articulating the demands of the religious parties for an Islamic constitution in the early years of Pakistan's independence; and at critical junctures in Pakistani history his party acted in concert with the 'ulama."

This cooperation is more striking than it may appear, because the two parties to it disagreed fundamentally about the sources of religious authority. The ulama's standing rested on transmitted learning and formal certification in the religious sciences; Maududi had neither, and appealed directly to scripture before an audience of educated readers. Zaman's assessment of the relationship in Pakistan is that "the Deobandi 'ulama have remained much more ambivalent towards Islamists, as seen in their difficult relations with Mawdudi and his Jama'at-i Islami. Yet Mawdudi and the 'ulama were also able to collaborate in formulating the demands for an Islamic constitution, as well as on other issues relating to debates on Islam in Pakistan." Ambivalence and collaboration ran together rather than in sequence.

The decision to contest elections created a difficulty internal to the organisation's own theory. Zaman puts it directly: Maududi's "idealistic vision was compromised in the early years of Pakistan, when Mawdudi's Jama'at-i Islami decided to participate in electoral politics even before his righteous individuals were at hand." The founding premise had been that political work should wait upon the formation of suitable people; electoral participation meant acting before that condition was met. Zaman observes that the tension did not resolve itself: Maududi's 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."

Base of Support

The organisation drew its support principally from the urban middle classes — from people educated in schools and colleges rather than in the seminaries, and employed in professions, government service and commerce. Zaman notes this constituency in the course of a comparison with the reach of the religious scholars, observing that the Jamaat-e-Islami "has also traditionally drawn its support from the urban middle classes."

This social base is consistent with the character of Maududi's writing. His works were composed in accessible Urdu prose and addressed to readers who had received a modern education and were looking for an account of Islam framed in terms they recognised, rather than to students of the seminary curriculum. The organisation recruited among the readership its founder's books had created.

Islamists and the Ulama in Comparative Perspective

Zaman's study sets the Pakistani case within a wider comparison, and the contrast illuminates what was distinctive about it. In both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, he observes, the leading ulama remained closely tied to the state, while what he calls the "peripheral" ulama developed close links with the Islamists. Pakistan followed a different pattern, in which the Deobandi scholars — a large, institutionally established body with their own seminaries, their own political organisation in the Jamiat Ulama, and no dependence on state patronage — engaged the Islamists as something closer to equals, and did so with the mixture of reserve and cooperation described above.

Zaman also notes that the boundary between the two was less sharp in practice than in principle. Madrasa graduates and college graduates worked alongside one another, and a modern education and a seminary training were often combined in the same person. Such shared background, he writes, "does not break all distinction between the Islamists and the 'ulama, but it does often facilitate an exchange and cross-fertilization of ideas between them."

Literature and Influence

The organisation's intellectual foundation is Maududi's own body of work, above all his six-volume Qur'anic commentary Tafhim al-Qur'an and his writings on the Islamic state. Zaman notes that these writings "have continued to be highly influential in Islamist circles throughout the Muslim world", and their translation from Urdu into Arabic, English, Bengali and many other languages carried the organisation's founding ideas well beyond South Asia.

Historiographical Note

The Jamaat-e-Islami has been the subject of a substantial academic literature and also of a large volume of writing that is committed for or against it. This article restricts itself to the organisation's founding, purpose, structure, division after partition, and the relationship between it and the religious scholars, as these are described in the scholarly sources consulted.

The later political history of the three organisations in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh — their electoral records, their conduct in particular episodes, and the controversies attaching to them — is contested, and much of the available material on it is written from a position. It is not covered here, and readers seeking it are referred to the specialist studies listed below, of which Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr's monograph on the Pakistani organisation is the standard scholarly treatment.

The organisation's name is transliterated variously as Jamaat-e-Islami, Jama'at-i Islami, and Jamaat-i-Islami; Zaman uses the second form. All refer to the same body, and the differences are of transliteration only.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• The Qur'an — the authority to which the organisation's founding literature makes its direct appeal
• Tafhim al-Qur'an by Abul A'la Maududi — the six-volume commentary that forms the intellectual basis of the organisation's teaching
• The canonical hadith collections, from which its founding literature argues
• The practice of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, taken in that literature as the model of properly ordered Muslim public life

Classical Islamic Sources

• The Hanafi school of law, the juristic tradition of the environment in which the organisation was founded
• The pre-modern tradition of Qur'anic commentary and jurisprudence, whose continuing authority Maududi affirmed against other Islamist thinkers
• The classical literature on the imam and the amir, the vocabulary from which the organisation's conception of leadership is drawn
• The hadith commentaries of the ulama, which Maududi named among the works that should form the basis of legal training

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change by Muhammad Qasim Zaman — for the founding and purpose of the organisation, its entry into electoral politics, its collaboration with the ulama over the Islamic constitution, the comparative position of Islamists and ulama in Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and its base of support
• Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 by Barbara Daly Metcalf — for the Deobandi tradition and institutions with which the organisation's relations are described
• Wikipedia, "Abul A'la Maududi", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abul_A%27la_Maududi — consulted with the owner's authorisation for the founding date, the span of Maududi's leadership, and the successor leaderships in the three countries
• Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama'at-i Islami of Pakistan (University of California Press) — the standard scholarly monograph, cited extensively by Zaman; cited in the source consulted rather than read directly for this article

Further Reading

• Mumtaz Ahmad, "Islamic Fundamentalism in South Asia: The Jamaat-i-Islami and the Tablighi Jamaat of South Asia" — a comparative study of the two movements, cited by Zaman
• Abul A'la Maududi — the organisation's founder and first amir
• The Tablighi Jamaat — the contemporaneous South Asian movement with which it is often compared
• Husain Ahmad Madani — the Deobandi scholar whose position on nationalism Maududi opposed
• The Deobandi Movement — the scholarly tradition with which the organisation both differed and cooperated