From The Economist
IF MAULANA MAUDOODI, one of two or three people who gave birth to modern political Islam, were to travel through the Muslim world now, he would find some mildly pleasant and very unpleasant surprises. Some 35 years after his death, the political movement he founded, Jamaat-i-Islami, remains an influential force in Pakistan, especially in the area bordering Afghanistan. In Bangladesh, meanwhile, the movement’s leaders look likely to be executed (one has been already) on war-crimes charges relating to the country’s independence struggle in 1971, which they opposed.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which was certainly influenced by Maudoodi’s thinking, has seen its fortures soar and then crash; a Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi, was elected president in June 2012, only to be ousted by the army last July. The Brotherhood was declared to be a terrorist group last month, and today security forces were clashingwith Brotherhood supporters in several parts of Egypt. Among prominent Egyptian Muslims, Maudoodi especially inspiredSayyid Qutb, the Islamist thinker who was executed in 1966; and Qutb in turn influenced the future leaders of al-Qaeda as well as Brotherhood offshoots which were not quite so extreme.
For south Asian Muslims living in the West, the legacy of Maudoodi and Jamaat remains quite strong (stronger in certain Bangladeshi-settled parts of east London, for example, than it is in Bangladesh), but it has also mellowed a little. The Islamic Foundation, a research institution based in Leicester in the English Midlands, published several of Maudoodi’s works in English and hence brought them to the attention of politically active British Muslims; but the Foundation now strongly denies any particular association with Jamaat, and stresses its credentials as an inter-faith dialogue partner.
