1903–1979 · British India / Pakistan · Theologian, Qur'an commentator, political thinker, journalist, founder of Jamaat-e-Islami
Abul Aʿlā Mawdūdī was born in Aurangabad, in the princely state of Hyderabad, in 1903, the son of a lawyer from a family of Chishti descent. He was educated first at home in Arabic, Persian and the religious sciences and then at a modern madrasa in Aurangabad, but his father’s illness and death cut short his formal schooling. In Delhi he taught himself English and Western history and philosophy, worked as a journalist, editing the Delhi paper al-Jam’iyyat from 1924 to 1927, while also acquiring traditional teaching licences from Deobandi scholars.
His first book, Al-Jihad fi al-Islam (1930), established his reputation. From 1932 he edited the monthly Tarjuman al-Qur’an in Hyderabad, using it to develop an account of Islam as a complete system of life covering belief, worship, law, economics and government. Rejecting both secular Indian nationalism and the Muslim League’s nationalism, he argued that sovereignty belongs to God alone and that the purpose of the state is to implement the shari’a, a model he called a “theo-democracy”. In 1941 he founded the Jamaat-e-Islami to train a disciplined vanguard for this task.
After partition he moved to Lahore and campaigned for an Islamic constitution in Pakistan. He was imprisoned several times and in 1953 was sentenced to death after the anti-Ahmadi disturbances, a sentence later commuted. His Tafhim al-Qur’an, a translation and commentary written over three decades, became one of the most widely read Urdu exegeses; other major works include Purdah, Khilafat-o-Mulukiyat and Towards Understanding Islam.
Mawdūdī stepped down as leader of the Jamaat in 1972, received the first King Faisal International Prize in 1979, and died that year in Buffalo, New York. Translated into dozens of languages, his writings shaped Islamist movements from the Arab world to Southeast Asia and remain central to debates on the Islamic state.