ABSTRACT
As we have seen, Islam, in terms of ‘din’, is synonymous with the Islamic state: you cannot have one without the other. This was Mawdudi’s central aim: to create the vision of a modern state that is informed within a framework of his paradigms of the Qur’an, the Prophet, and the Rightly Guided Caliphs. In many respects, he seems to be calling for a return to the Caliphate, but it is much more complex than that. The Islamic state was central because Mawdudi had little faith in individuals to live pious lives, and so they must be led by the virtuous. This is best expressed in Mawdudi’s ‘trinity’ of religion (iqamat-i din), virtuous leadership (imamat-i salihah) and divine government (hukumat-i ilahiyah). The continuity between Islam and politics was, for Mawdudi, like the relation of ‘roots with the trunk and the branches with the leaves [of a tree]’, for, ‘In Islam the religious, the political, the economic, and the social are not separate systems; they are different departments and parts of the same system.’2 This was also all part of Mawdudi’s jihad:
Of all the factors of social life which impinge on culture and morality, the most powerful and effective is government … Hence the best way of putting an end to the fitna [strife] and purifying of life of munkar [evil] is to eliminate all mufsid [corrupt] governments and replace them with those which in theory and practice are based on piety and righteous action, the objective of Islamic Jihad is to put an end to the dominance of the un-Islamic systems of governments and replace them with Islamic rule.3
