Hereafter
The Cosmic System is a Perfect System
A Perfect System cannot be Aimless and Worthless
Rational End of this Perfect System
The End of the Cosmic System
What will be the System of Life in the Hereafter?
The Need for Belief in the Last Day
Preference for the Hereafter over this World
The Record of Temporal Actions and Justice
The Benefit of Belief in the Last Day
9. The Importance of Belief (Īmān) in Islamic Civilization
Salient Features
An Outline of Islamic Civilization
The Importance of Belief (Īmān) in Islamic Civilization
The Danger of Hypocrisy (Nifāq)
Appendix: Life after Death
Index
Sayyid Abul Aʿlā Mawdūdī (1903-79) is undoubtedly one of the greatest Islamic scholars produced by Muslim South Asia throughout its 1200 year-long history. With the launch of the Jamāʿat-i-Islāmī in 1941, he not only joined the ranks of leading Muslim reformers, but became the torch bearer of a new Muslim political awareness being born out of the demise of Western colonialism and imperialism. He was one of the progenitors of the people called by the rather new term ‘public intellectuals’ – the rare breed of people who not only sit behind their desks or search the deep recesses of libraries to produce new epistemological views and scholarship but also have the vigour and the vision to combine social and political activism with their intellectualism – persons who, to borrow a modern management phrase, ‘walk the talk’. Coming in the wake of the epochal work of South Asia’s all-time intellectual giant Muḥammad Iqbāl and his reformation of classical Muslim thought, Sayyid Mawdūdī joined other modern Mus-lim public intellectuals, like Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, to inspire three generations of twentieth-century Muslims on to the path of Muslim rethinking, reformation, and revolution.
Sayyid Mawdūdī’s political thoughts, chiefly the essential requirement of a vanguardist movement that was not just Islamic and revolutionary but one which also believed in the theo-intellectual basis of a state, which inspired reformist intellectuals like Sayyid Quṭb and numerous others throughout the Muslim world. Sayyid Mawdūdī’s influence on Muslim youth and intellectuals was very significant – so significant that Pakistan’s military and political elite saw him as a threat strong enough to be locked up and even sentenced to death!
The present work Islāmī Tahdhīb awr uske, Uṣūl-o-Mabādī is one of the few works of Sayyid Mawdūdī which has remained untranslated in a complete modern version, even though parts of the work have found their way to Western readers though other works of the author. I am grateful to two colleagues of my late father, Dr Zafar Ishaq Ansari and Professor Khurshid Ahmad, for reposing their confidence in me in giving me the chance to translate this work.
May God bless Sayyid Mawdūdī for his seminal works – and the team that has made this translation possible, which will help to bring the work of this great scholar to a new audience. I seek your prayers for my own forgiveness (maghfirah) as well as for that of my family, my late parents and for all Muslims.
| Makkah al-Mukarramah | Syed Akif |
Rabīʿ al-Awwal 1432
February 2011
Sayyid Abul Aʿlā Mawdūdī (1903-1979), one of the twentieth-century’s leading Muslim intellectuals and revivalists, wrote Islāmī Tahdhīb awr Uske Uṣūl-o Mabādī, which was published in 1933. This book, written during the last period of colonial rule in British India and at a time when the momentum for independence was growing, attempts to bring out the vital relationship between a civilization and its underlying worldview and vision of life, with particular attention to the case of Islamic civilization.
Now civilization is one of the major ideas of the modern age. To stress its importance it would suffice to say that Arnold Toynbee, the towering historian of the twentieth century, regards it as the proper unit of historical inquiry.1 At the opposite end of the spectrum, we find the late Samuel Huntington, the well-known prophet of gloom, predicting a global future defined by a ‘clash of civilizations’.2 Be that as it may, the term has come to denote a community or society with a developed state of intellectual, cultural and material development, an improved state of moral conduct, an extensive use of record-keeping, including writing, and the appearance of complex political and social institutions. Civilization is associated with a whole range of factors such as an intense urbanisation leading to the emergence of huge cosmopolitan cities, the establishment of the writ of the state over its citizens, the rise of capitalism, the emergence of occupational specialisation and the existence of a variety of socio-political institutions. In short, the word signifies an ordered society that has far outgrown the primitive conditions of existence in which, to borrow Hobbes’ words, ‘life was nasty, brutish and short’.3
A civilization understandably has a time and space dimension. Hence we speak of entities such as the Indus Valley civilization, the Babylonian civilization, the civilization of ancient Rome, or modern European civilization. Are civilizations, however, also related to the ideas and ideals cherished by those who live under their shadows?
In the present work Mawdūdī focuses his attention on the relationship between a civilization and its worldview, or the vision of life and the religious outlook that inspires and permeates it. His concern is to explore the relationship between Islam and civilization, and he sets out to examine how, in what ways, and to what extent Islam gives shape and direction to the civilization of Muslims. If Islam’s role in this regard is considered to be crucial, then how is Islam related to the temporal and spatial contexts of civilization itself?
Mawdudi notes with displeasure the trend among contemporary scholars of his day to regard Islamic civilization as an outgrowth and continuation of previous Middle Eastern and Greek and Roman civilizations. These scholars strove to prove that the constituent elements of Islamic civilization were derived from the civilizations that preceded it. As for the distinctive aspects of Islamic civilization, they tended to attribute them to the characteristics of the Arabs’ ‘mindset’ which prompted them to make some adjustments while using the building blocks of other civilizations in erecting the edifice of their own civilization.4
Mawdudi altogether denies the validity of this whole approach. He is at odds with the attitude of equating civilization with a nation’s cumulative ‘knowledge, literature and fine arts, its literary and rhetorical devices, modes of social life, style of refined living and system of governance’. He does not consider these to be the equivalent of ‘civilization’. In his view, they are the end results
