Syed Abul Ala Mawdudi
Syed Abul Ala Mawdudi was born in 1903 in Awrangabad near Hyperbarabad, India.
As a precocious youngster, he learns Urdu, Persian, Arabic and later English. After losing his father at the age of sixteen and in order to support himself, he begins to work as a journalist in Delhi, notably as editor, from 1924 to 1927, with al-Djam’iyyat, an organ of Djam’iyyat-i ‘Ulama’-i Hind. During this period, and following the abolition of the (political and spiritual) caliphate by Atatürk in 1924, Mawdudi participates in a movement aimed at restoring it.
For Mawdudi, the separation from India precludes his conception of a universal Islamic state. He finally comes to the idea of a partition between Pakistan and India in the early 1940s, provided that the Muslim state be strictly Islamic, in order to gain some strength before reclaiming the world.
Mawdudi develops a fundamentalist thought. He makes a difference between cult, which is less important for him as it differs according to each region; and political Islam whose goal is conquest.
“Islam seeks to destroy all states and governments opposing an Islamic ideology and program, wherever they are on earth. (…) The aim of Islam is to establish a state based on its own program and ideology. (…) The objective of Islamic jihad is to eliminate non-Islamic systems and replace them with an Islamic system of government. Islam does not intend to limit this revolution to a single state or few countries. The goal of Islam is to generate a universal revolution.“
– Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903 – 1979)
[Jihad in Islam, Beirut, The Holy Koran Publishing House, pp. 6 and 22]
Mawdudi wants to establish the Sharia first within the borders of Pakistan, and then spread over the entire Indian sub-continent.
He is the first to launch campaigns against the Ahmadis in 1939. The resulting movement of terror culminated in the law expelling Ahmadis from the community of believers
Western education aimed at corrupting Islamic manners, according to Mawdudi:
“Programs were instituted so that all Islamic values would be annihilated, so that the manners and morals of the Muslims be vitiated, so that they depart from their inherited customs.” (Islam today p.49)
A “democracy” must be established in “accordance with the Islamic principles, aims and civilization” (Islam today p.53).
In Europe, Mawdudi works are first disseminated by the Islamic Foundation of Leicester, then by Tawhid Editions thanks to Tariq Ramadan.
Mawdudi who died in 1979 was a fundamentalist theologian and was very much followed in Pakistan. He is the founder of Jamaat e Islami.
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