Abul A'la Maududi

He stated that his paternal family originally moved from Chicht, in modern-day Afghanistan, during the days of Sikandar Lodi (d. 1517), initially settling in the state of Haryana before moving to Delhi later on, and on his mother's side, his ancestor Mirza Tulak, a soldier of Turkic origin, moved into India from Transoxiana around the times of emperor Aurangzeb (d. 1707), while his maternal grandfather, Mirza Qurban Ali Baig Khan Salik (1816–1881), was a writer and poet in Delhi, a friend of the Urdu poet Ghalib.

Until he was nine, Maududi "received religious nurture at the hands of his father and from a variety of teachers employed by him."

As his father wanted him to become a maulvi, this education consisted of learning Arabic, Persian, Islamic law and hadith.

He also studied books of mantiq (logic).

A precocious child, he translated Qasim Amin's al-Marah al-jadidah ("The New Woman"), a modernist and feminist work, from Arabic into Urdu at the age of 11.

His elder brother, Sayyid Abu’l Khayr Maududi (1899–1979), would later become an editor and journalist.

Although his father was only middle-class, he was the descendant of the Chishti in fact, his last name was derived from the first member of the Chishti Silsilah, i.e., Khawajah Syed Qutb ul-Din Maudood Chishti (d. 527 AH).

Abul A'la al-Maududi (September 25, 1903 – September 22, 1979) was an Islamic scholar, Islamist ideologue, Muslim philosopher, jurist, historian, journalist, activist, and scholar active in British India and later, following the partition, in Pakistan.

Described by Wilfred Cantwell Smith as "the most systematic thinker of modern Islam", his numerous works, which "covered a range of disciplines such as Qur'anic exegesis, hadith, law, philosophy, and history", were written in Urdu, but then translated into English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Burmese, Malayalam and many other languages.

He sought to revive Islam, and to propagate what he understood to be "true Islam".

He believed that Islam was essential for politics and that it was necessary to institute sharia and preserve Islamic culture similarly as to that during the reign of the Rashidun Caliphs and abandon immorality, from what he viewed as the evils of secularism, nationalism and socialism, which he understood to be the influence of Western imperialism.

He founded the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami.

At the time of the Indian independence movement, Maududi and the Jamaat-e-Islami actively worked to oppose the partition of India.

After it occurred, Maududi and his followers shifted their focus to politicizing Islam and generating support for making Pakistan an Islamic state.

They are thought to have helped influence General Muhammad Zia-ul-haq to introduce the Islamization in Pakistan,

and to have been greatly strengthened by him after tens of thousands of members and sympathizers were given jobs in the judiciary and civil service during his administration.

Despite his initial publication on electricity in 'Maarif' in 1918 at the age of 15 and his subsequent appointment as editor of the renowned weekly Urdu newspaper 'Taj' in 1920 at the age of 17, he subsequently resumed his studies as an autodidact in 1921.

Notably through the influence of certain members of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, he pursued subjects such as physics and Dars-e-Nizami.

Maududi obtained ijazahs, which are certificates and diplomas in traditional Islamic learning.

However, he abstained from referring to himself as an 'alim' in the formal sense, as he perceived the Islamic scholars as regressive, despite some influence from Deobandi on him: "He said that he was a middle-class man who had learned through both new and old ways of learning. Maududi concluded that neither the traditional nor the contemporary schools are entirely correct, based on his own inner guidance."

In 1919, by the time he was 16, and still a modernist in mindset, he moved to Delhi and read books by his distant relative, the reformist Sayyid Ahmad Khan.

He also learned English and German to study, intensively, Western philosophy, sociology, and history for full five years: he eventually came up to the conclusion that "ulama' in the past did not endeavor to discover the causes of Europe's rise, and he offered a long list of philosophers whose scholarship had made Europe a world power: Fichte, Hegel, Comte, Mill, Turgot, Adam Smith, Malthus, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Darwin, Goethe, and Herder, among others. Comparing their contribution to that of Muslims, he concluded that the latter's did not reach even 1 percent."

Maududi, who has consistently remained committed to securing independence from Britain, began to question the legitimacy of the Congress Party and its Muslim allies during the 1920s, when the party adopted a more Hindu identity.

He began to gravitate towards Islam, and he believed that democracy would only be viable if the vast majority of Indians were Muslims.

Maududi worked as the editor of al-Jamiah, a newspaper of a group of orthodox Muslims, from 1924 to 1927.

This time was critical and had a lot of influence.

Maududi returned to Hyderabad in 1928 after spending some time in Delhi as a young man.

Maududi's works were written and published throughout his life, including influential works from 1933 to 1941.

Maududi's most well-known work, and widely considered his most important and influential work, is the Tafhim-ul-Quran (Urdu: تفہيم القرآن, romanized: Towards Understanding the Qur'an), a 6-volume translation and commentary of the Qur'an by Maududi which Maududi spent many years writing (which was begun in Muharram, 1361 A.H./February 1942).

In the field of translation, years later, he also worked on some 3,500 pages from Asfar, the major work of the 17th century Persian-Shi'a mystical thinker Mulla Sadra.

His thought would influence Maududi, as "Sadra's notions of rejuvenation of the temporal order, and the necessity of the reign of Islamic law (the shari'ah) for the spiritual ascension of man, found an echo in Maududi's works."

When he was eleven, Maududi was admitted to the eighth class directly in Madrasa Fawqaniyya Mashriqiyya (Oriental High School), Aurangabad, founded by Shibli Nomani, a modernist Islamic scholar trying to synthesize traditional Islamic scholarship with modern knowledge, and which awakened Maududi's long-lasting interest in philosophy (particularly from Thomas Arnold, who also taught the same subject to Muhammad Iqbal) as well as natural sciences, like mathematics, physics, and chemistry.

He then moved to a more traditionalist Darul Uloom in Hyderabad.

Meanwhile, his father shifted to Bhopal – there Maududi befriended Niaz Fatehpuri, another modernist – where he suffered a severe paralysis attack and died leaving no property or money, forcing his son to abort his education.

He was the first recipient of the Saudi Arabian King Faisal International Award for his service to Islam in 1979.

Maududi was part of establishing and running of Islamic University of Madinah, Saudi Arabia.

He was the second person in history whose absentee funeral was observed in the Kaaba, after King Ashama ibn-Abjar.

Maududi is acclaimed by the Jamaat-e-Islami, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Circle of North America, Hamas and other organizations.

Maududi was born in the city of Aurangabad in colonial India, then part of the princely state enclave of Hyderabad.

He was the youngest of three sons of Ahmad Hasan, a lawyer by profession.