Always more of a scholar and a mujaddid (reformer) than a practical, hands-on politician, Maududi remained detached from specific political and social issues. Instead, he concentrated on communicating his vision of the ideal Islamic state. Every element of this state would be informed “from above” by the laws of din (religion), not by secular Western principles of democratic governance. The Islamic state would therefore be innately democratic because it directly reflected the will of Allah.

  This holy community could come into being only if its citizens were converted from ignorance and error to an uncompromising and purer understanding of Islam as a whole way of life. Maududi had studied European socialists, who saw their “base” as the masses of the working class in every country. Maududi saw the world population of Muslims as his “base” in the same way. If united ideologically, Muslims would eventually be politically indivisible, rendering secular nation-states irrelevant. The Islamic jihad (holy war) was not only a struggle to evolve spiritually, it was also a political struggle to impose an all-encompassing Islamic ideology. This would focus on Islamic control of state resources, so that finally the kingdom of God would be established on Earth.

  In 1947, on the Partition of India and Pakistan on religious lines, the British Raj was dissolved. Although his party did not back Partition, criticizing its leaders’ policies as insufficiently Islamic, Maududi moved to Pakistan, determined to make it an Islamic state.

The Islamic revolution in Iran, led by Ruhollah Khomeini, ushered in the world’s first Islamic republic in 1979. A state run on Islamic religious lines was Maududi’s lifelong goal.

Western critics of Maududi’s call for an Islamic world order claim that Islam sees its own history as a long descent from ideal beginnings, rather than as an evolutionary advance of civilization and reason. Meanwhile, the fundamentalist Muslims in Maududi’s slipstream see the ongoing interference of Western countries in the internal politics of the Middle East as the continuation of colonial domination, and believe that only Islamic government ruling through Sharia law (canonical law based on the teachings of the Quran), as interpreted by Muslim clerics, can govern mankind.