Sayyid Abu'l-A'la Mawdudi, 1903-1979 (photo: al-Majalla) |
Mawdudi was born in the city of Aurangabad in South India. In the early 1920s, he studied with Abdusallam Niyazi in Delhi and later with the Deobandi ulema at the Fatihpuri mosque's seminary, also in Delhi. He moved to Hyderabad, the last remaining Muslim enclave in India, in 1928 to lead the Muslim community there. Searching for explanations for the decline of Muslim power relative to Hindus in Hyderabad, Mawdudi concluded that diversity was the culprit: the centuries old practice of interfaith mixing had weakened and watered down Muslim thought and practice in that region of India. The solution was to purge Islam of all alien elements. All social and political ties with Hindus must be severed. Non Muslims, for Mawdudi, were ipso facto a threat to Muslims and to Islam and must be contained by restricting their rights. He applied similar logic to his case for women being subservient to men.
Mawdudi and others founded the Jama'at al-Islami Party in Lahore, Pakistan in 1941. Among his supporters was Muhammad Manzur Nu'mani, a prominent Deobandi scholar. Mawdudi was profoundly influenced by the founder of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna. In turn, Mawdudi's thought deeply influenced Egypt's most radical Islamist thinker, Sayyid Qutb, especially Mawdudi's use of Lenin's notion of a "vanguard" to effect change. Mawdudi died in 1979 in Buffalo, New York. His funeral was held in Lahore and drew a crowd of over one million. (See Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, "Mawdudi and the Jama'at-i-Islami: The Origins, Theory, and Practice of Islamic Revivalism," in Ali Rahnema (ed.), The Pioneers of Islamic Revival (London: Zed Books, 1994), 98ff.).
Mawdudi based his call to arms against those who rejected Islam and were plotting to destroy it on s. 2:190-193 from the Qur'an and on the hadith, "‘I have been ordered to fight people ( al-nas ) until they say ‘There is no God but God.’ If they say it, they have protected their blood, their wealth from me. Their recompense is with God.’" For Mawdudi, Islam was a revolutionary force:
"'Islam is a revolutionary doctrine and system that overturns governments. It seeks to overturn the whole universal social order...and establish its structure anew...Islam seeks the world. It is not satisfied by a piece of land but demands the whole universe...Islamic Jihad is at the same time offensive and defensive...The Islamic party does not hesitate to utilize the means of war to implement its goal.'"
(quoted by Yvonne Haddad, "Islamists and the Challenge of Pluralism," Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, 1995, p. 10.)
Mawdudi envisioned a particular set of institutions for his ideal Islamic state. An Islamic state would have a President, an elected shura council (consisting of Muslims elected only by other Muslims), an independent judiciary, and a cabinet formed by a Prime Minister. Dhimmis (non-Muslims living under Muslim protection) would have the right to vote in lower level elections only. They would have the right to serve on municipal councils and in other local organizations, but not in the larger, overarching administrative units concerned with what Mawdudi called the "system of life" (nizam al-haya).
Mawdudi's goal was to wage jihad until the whole world had been brought under the rule of Islam. His thinking influenced Pakistan's ruler Zia al-Haq who built the concept of jihad into Pakistan's foreign policy in the 1970s. Mawdudi wrote:
"'Islam wants the whole earth and does not content itself with only a part thereof. It wants and requires the entire inhabited world. It does not want this in order that one nation dominates the earth and monopolizes its sources of wealth, after having taken them away from one or more other nations. No, Islam wants and requires the earth in order that the human race altogether can enjoy the concept and practical program of human happiness, by means of which God has honoured Islam and put it above the other religions and laws. In order to realize this lofty desire, Islam wants to employ all forces and means that can be employed for bringing about a universal all-embracing revolution. It will spare no efforts for the achievement of this supreme objective. This far-reaching struggle that continuously exhausts all forces and this employment of all possible means are called jihad.'"
(quoted by Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, Marcus Wiener Publishers, Princeton, N.J., p. 128.)