Chapter Two - Sayyid Abul ‘Ala Maududi: A Theorist of Disciplinary Patriarchal State

Summary

As the founder and the main ideologue of the large and influential Jama'at-e Islami in Pakistan and India, Maududi was both a political activist as well as a theorist of political Islam in the modern world. While it is true that Maududi increasingly gravitated toward politics and political action, especially as his career and age advanced, he nevertheless was deeply engrossed in creating a conceptual framework to advance his political agenda. This chapter focuses on the ideational aspects of Maududi's career, because at the core of his activity stands a cosmology and a theory of an Islamic state that has had far reaching impacts on many Islamist movements around the world.

Maududi began his career as an Islamist activist and thinker in earnest in the early 1930s, when the anti-colonial movement in India was reaching its zenith. At the same time, the Muslim-Hindu conflict and strife were looming large in the minds of Muslim thinkers of his milieu. Furthermore, there is no doubt that many other Islamic thinkers of this time had been exposed to Western colonialism and had begun addressing the issue. Consequently, the notion of power came to occupy a central place in their discourses. And given the historical experience of the Indian subcontinent, with its long history of colonialism, the centrality of the notion of power in Maududi's thought is even more pronounced.

Thus at the core of Madudi's discourse is a complex formulation of power which radiates throughout his conceptual framework of Islamic revival. As we will explore in detail below, Maududi, like many other Islamic thinkers discussed in this volume, posits a notion of human power, which while central to his discourse, is indirect and limited. He considered power to be coterminous with human existence and constitutive of civilization. Without power, human life would be impossible because administration of society necessitates power. Yet the human power that he was advocating is not direct, and it emanates from the power of God. For this reason, humans do not really possess power, but it is vouchsafed to them by God, which makes their hold on power contingent, temporary, limited and subject to being withdrawn at any moment. Nevertheless, this conceptualization of power is essential to Maududi's systematic thought for the establishment of an ideal Islamic society.