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Abul A'la Maududi

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Abul A'la al-Maududi (Urdu: ابو الاعلیٰ المودودی, romanized: Abū al-Aʿlā al-Mawdūdī; (1903-09-25)25 September 1903 – (1979-09-22)22 September 1979) was an Islamic scholar and the author of Tafhim-ul-Quran, who was active in British India and later, following the partition, in Pakistan. Described by Wilfred Cantwell Smith as "the most systematic thinker of modern Islam", his numerous works, which "covered a range of disciplines such as Qur'anic exegesis, hadith, law, philosophy, and history", were written in Urdu, but then translated into English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Burmese, Malayalam and many other languages. He sought to revive Islam, and to propagate what he understood to be "true Islam". He believed that Islam was essential for politics and that it was necessary to institute sharia and preserve Islamic culture similarly as to that during the reign of the Rashidun Caliphs and abandon immorality, from what he viewed as the evils of secularism, nationalism and socialism, which he understood to be the influence of Western imperialism.

He founded the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami. At the time of the Indian independence movement, Maududi and the Jamaat-e-Islami actively worked to oppose the partition of India. After it occurred, Maududi and his followers shifted their focus to politicising Islam and generating support for making Pakistan an Islamic state. They are thought to have helped influence General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq to introduce the Islamisation in Pakistan, and to have been greatly strengthened by him after tens of thousands of members and sympathisers were given jobs in the judiciary and civil service during his administration. He was the world's first recipient of the Saudi Arabian King Faisal International Award for his service to Islam in 1979. Maududi was part of establishing and running of Islamic University of Madinah, Saudi Arabia.

Maududi is acclaimed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Circle of North America, Hamas, Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, and other organisations.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Of this kind were all the religions of early peoples, which we may define as civil or positive divine right or law. There is a third sort of religion of a more singular kind, which gives men two codes of legislation, two rulers, and two countries, renders them subject to contradictory duties, and makes it impossible for them to be faithful both to religion and to citizenship. Such are the religions of the Lamas and…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The social contract & discourses
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The Indians look straight before them for ten years at a time, are fed by those around, and are destitute of other spiritual content than that of knowing what is abstract, which content therefore is entirely finite. This, then, is not the soil of freedom.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
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A free country which attempts to govern a distant dependency, inhabited by a dissimilar people, by means of a branch of its own executive, will almost inevitably fail. The only mode which has any chance of tolerable success is to govern through a delegated body of a comparatively permanent character, allowing only a right of inspection and a negative voice to the changeable administration of the state. Such a body…
John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government
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Abul A'la Maududi

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