Between Muslim Nationalists and Nationalist Muslims

Mawlana Sayyid Abul al-Ala Mawduri (1903-79) is widely considered among the most influential of all Islamic thinkers of the twentieth century. His ideas have greatly influenced Islamic movements within his native India-Pakistan subcontinent to the Middle East and Maghrib in the west, and to Southeast Asia in the east due to widely available translation of his works in Arabic, English and other languages. His voluminous interpretation and the translation of the Quran is unquestionably a masterpiece of Urdu literature.  The Mawlana’s racy style of Urdu prose is simply unmatched in traditional religious scholarship. The author of numerous works, Mawlana Mawdudi articulated his particular views on four major aspects of collective human life-religion, politics, economy, and society. Seen together his writings constitute a clear, coherent, if controversial statement of Islam. In addition to the matters pertaining to Islam and Muslims in general, he wrote and spoke about issues facing fellow Indian Muslims in the first half of the twentieth century. One of these questions pertained to the future of his own native Hyderabad State in the Deccan, Southern India. Although the Mawlana’s views on Islam and the future of Muslims in British India have been the subject of numerous polemics, peans, and academic works, none to date have been written about his views on the future of Hyderabad. This article attempts precisely that.