ABSTRACT
Mawdudi’s Jihad in Islam received numerous accolades, which no doubt prompted Mawdudi to forgo journalism as a career and seek a higher vocation, especially in terms of writing more scholarly works. He left Delhi in 1928 and went to stay in the capital city of Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad. It is possible that Mawdudi found this environment more suitable for his studies, given its reputation as rich in history, its culture and inspiring architecture, and the strong Muslim presence that it has to this day. He spent two years there working on a history of the Seljuq dynasty.2 Mawdudi also translated from Arabic to Urdu a history of the Fatimid dynasty3 written by Ibn Khallikan (1211-82). Khallikan was a Kurdish Muslim scholar whose historical writings are still regarded as containing a high degree of accuracy and thorough scholarship. It is interesting that while Mawdudi comes across in his own writings as ideologically conservative and Sunni, he has always been prepared to study the beliefs of other religious traditions, adhering to his own view that in order to criticize your enemy, you need to understand them. Mawdudi’s familiarity with other traditions was not just in the religious sense, and not just with Islamic or ‘pseudo-Islamic’ (Ahmadi, Ismaili, etc.) beliefs. At the time of his studies in Hyderabad he would spend a great deal of time at the renowned Translation Institute (Darul-Tarjumah) at Uthmaniyah University in Hyderabad. Mawdudi’s brother, Abu’l-Khayr, taught there and was also a member of the Translation Institute which at the time was renowned for its translation into Urdu of a number of important works by British philosophers and other scholars. But the Institute did not just translate; it encouraged lively intellectual debate that arose from these translations
of western texts, which Mawdudi was certainly a part of. What becomes apparent is that Mawdudi’s educational inheritance was immense and varied. As we have seen, he was well acquainted with not only the Sunni Islamic sciences of sharia, Qur’anic interpretation, fiqh, Islamic philosophy, and was himself a trained alim, but he was also a student of Shi’a Islam and Sufi mysticism. In addition, he was familiar with the legal, political and philosophical debates in western thought. Like his brother, Mawdudi became an affiliate of the Translation Institute
and, in 1931, he started work on translating the Al-Asfar al-arba’ah (‘Four Journeys’) of the great Persian philosopher Mulla Sadra (1572-1640). It is a curious fact that, despite a lack of political philosophy in Mulla Sadra’s writings, Mawdudi cites him as a major influence, and it is interesting that in more recent times Sadra has been regarded as the ‘philosopher of the Revolution’ by those involved in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 such as Ayatollah Khomeini and Mortaza Motahhari. However, this should not be so surprising for anybody who has made a closer study of Sadra for his seemingly grand, abstract Heideggerian intellectual exercise was also meant to be translated into communal and individual action on an everyday level.4
Mulla Sadra, or Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Qawami al-Shirazi to give him his birth name, was certainly a remarkable intellectual and is rightly considered to be one of the most influential philosophers in Islamic thought. His works represent a synthesis of one thousand years of Islamic thought which preceded him, and he was expert in Islamic philosophy, theology, mysticism, Qur’anic interpretation and history. Sadra’s literary output is considerable with over 50 works attributed to him. He wrote insightful commentaries on the works of the founder of the Illuminationist (ishraqi) school of philosophy Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (1154-91) as well as on possibly the greatest philosopher the Islamic tradition has produced, Ibn Sina, (better known in the west as Avicenna, 980-1037). He also wrote original short treatises on theological and philosophical topics, on Islamic jurisprudence, Qur’anic commentaries and hadith scholarship. His major works are al-Mashha’ir (‘Apprehensions’), Kasr Asnam al-Jahiliya (‘Breaking the Idols of Paganism’) and al-Asfar al-arba’ah al-’aqliyyah (‘Transcendental Wisdom’, better known as ‘The Four Intellectual Journeys’). In his ‘Four Journeys’, Sadra argues for the compatibility of philosophy
with that of religion, and was no doubt a reflection of a concern at the time that philosophy was not ‘Islamic’. Sadra’s ‘synthesis’ is that both philosophy and religion represent a single truth that was revealed to the first man, Adam, and was then transmitted to the prophet Abraham and the other prophets, the Greek philosophers, the Prophet Muhammad, the Muslim mystics and finally the philosophers of more recent times. However, by not making a distinction between prophets and philosophers in terms of having access to truth, it can be seen how this might offend the more orthodox Muslims. For Sadra, such philosophers as Empedocles, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus are all, in his words, ‘pillars of wisdom’ who have received the
‘light of wisdom’ from the ‘beacon of prophethood’, hence his view that they all share the same outlook on such issues as the unity of God (Tawhid), the creation of the world and of resurrection.5 Sadra presents an imaginative philosophical history with a synthesis of Sunni, Sufi and Shia Islam. Although the prophetic stage of history comes to an end with the death of Muhammad as the Seal of the Prophets, what follows is the Imamate stage of the 12 Shia imams which will continue until the 12 imam returns from his temporary occultation (ghaybah). Sadra stresses that these imams are not prophets, but are ‘executors’ in that they execute the truth that has been revealed by the prophets. In fact, these ‘executors’ have a history that goes back to before the twelve Shia imamas, going right back to Sheth who was executor to Adam. When the Twelfth imam, the Mahdi, comes out of occultation at the end of time, humankind will return to a pure monotheistic state that existed at the time of Abraham. Mawdudi had gone from being a journalist to a scholar, but he was also a
political activist. Mawdudi was not one to sit in some ivory tower, but felt a need, probably inspired by the views of Mulla Sadra among others, to put religion into the realm of politics. We have seen in the previous chapter how Mawdudi’s upbringing affected his views on the state of Islam in India; his feeling that the very existence of Islam was threatened and that Jinnah and the Muslim League were nothing more than symptoms of ‘jahiliyya’, of ignorance. A jihad was required if Islam were to be revived, and someone was needed to lead this jihad. Hyderabad seemed a natural destination for Mawdudi for his ancestors had done much to build up and preserve Nizamic rule in this state and its decline at this time reflected Mawdudi’s concern with the decline of Islam’s greatness in India and beyond more generally:
