The 45th death anniversary of the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, Islamic thinker and prolific author Maulana Syed Abul Ala Maududi is being observed today, Radio Pakistan reported on Sunday.
Maulana Maududi, a journalist, jurist, politician, and philosopher, was one of the greatest Islamic scholars of the 20th century. He died on this day in 1979.
He was born on September 25, 1903, in Aurangabad, Hyderabad state to an aristocratic family. 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Oriental College, established by Sayyid Ahmad Khan in 1875 to promote modernist thought among Muslims, but was withdrawn by his family in favor of a more traditional education in Allahabad (now Prayagraj).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 favor of a code of life, culture, and political and economic system unique to Islam.
He established the Jamaʿat-i Islami in 1941 to effect 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 to put the divinely ordained principles of the Sharīʿah (the Islamic legal and moral code) into effect.
