Abū al-Aʿlā al-Mawdūdī

Abū al-Aʿlā al-Mawdūdī (born September 25, 1903, Aurangabad, Hyderabad state [India]—died September 22, 1979, Buffalo, New York, U.S.) was a journalist and fundamentalist Muslim theologian who played a major role in Pakistani politics.

Mawdūdī was born to an aristocratic family in Aurangabad under the British raj. His father briefly attended the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College, established by Sayyid Ahmad Khan in 1875 to promote modernist thought among Muslims, but was withdrawn by his family in favour of a more traditional education in Allahabad (now Prayagraj). He became active in a Sufi order (tariqa) and oversaw a traditional Islamic education at home for Mawdūdī in his early childhood. Mawdūdī began studying in Islamic schools (madrasahs) at the age of 11, but a crisis in the family prevented him from completing his education as a religious scholar (ʿālim). In his adult years he became convinced that Muslim thinkers must be freed from the hold that Western civilization had over them, in favour of a code of life, culture, and political and economic system unique to Islam. He established the Jamaʿat-i Islami in 1941 with the aim of effecting such reform. When Pakistan split off from India in 1947, his efforts were instrumental in guiding the new nation away from the secularism of Western governments and toward the formation of an Islamic political system. Persistently, Mawdūdī found himself in opposition to the Pakistani government. He was imprisoned from 1948 to 1950 and again from 1953 to 1955 and was under a sentence of death for a period in 1953.

Mawdūdī wrote on a very broad range of topics, including philosophy, Muslim jurisprudence, history, economics, sociology, and theology. He is best known for the thesis that God alone is sovereign, not human rulers, nations, or customs. Political power in this world exists in order to put the divinely ordained principles of the Sharīʿah (the Islamic legal and moral code) into effect. Since Islam is a universal code for human life, moreover, the state must be all-embracing and must be left in the hands of Muslims, though nonbelievers should be allowed to live within the state as non-Muslim citizens. Since all Muslims share the same relationship to God, this state must be what Mawdūdī called a “theo-democracy,” in which the whole community is called upon to interpret the divine law.