Sayyid Abul-A'la Mawdudi was the first of the Islamic revivalists to develop a wide-ranging ideology through the Jamaat-e-Islami, the party that he founded in Lahore in 1941 and remained Amir (chief) until 1972.
Jamaat-e-Islami is one of the most prominent Islamic movements of our time. Party branches and student wings now exist in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Kashmir and Sri Lanka.
Maulana Mawdudi was one of the first Muslims of his time to equate religious devotion with political obedience, through Jamaat-e-Islami.
He wished, as did Imam Hasan al-Banna [the founder of Ikhwan in Egypt], to establish a true Islamic society. He agreed with Imam Al-Banna that civilisation was torn between the forces of Islam and jahiliyah, or ignorance, and that Islamic law was central to a just society.
In this quest, Maulana Mawdudi sought a vanguard of religious intellectuals to transform society through education, spreading Islamic teachings as widely as possible. This vanguard became the Jamaat.
After the creation of Pakistan, the party focused its efforts on making sure the Islamic republic lived up to its name.
On the need for Islamic law:
"That if an Islamic society consciously resolves not to accept the sharia, and decides to enact its own constitution and laws or borrow them from any other source in disregard of the sharia, such a society breaks its contract with God and forfeits its right to be called "Islamic".
He devoted his entire life to expound the meaning and message of Islam and to organise a collective movement to establish the Islamic Order.
In this struggle, he had to pass through all kinds of sufferings. Between 1948-67, he was put behind bars on four occasions, spending a total of five years in different prisons of Pakistan.
In 1953, he was also sentenced to death by a Martial Law court for writing a 'seditious' pamphlet, this sentence being later commuted to life imprisonment.
He authored more than one hundred works on Islam, both scholarly and popular, and his writings have been translated into forty languages."
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