of excommunicating Muslims. Not at all. Lest there be any misunderstanding, he says: ‘Do not for a moment think that I am trying to brand Muslims as Unbelievers. This is not my purpose at all.’25 His only purpose is to give us the criteria by which each one of us should judge himself, but not others: ‘Do not use this criterion to test or judge others and determine whether they are Mumins or hypocrites and Muslims or Unbelievers; use it only to judge your own selves and, if you detect any deficiency, try to remove it before you meet Allah.’26
Iman has two levels. Sayyid Mawdudi makes a very sharp and very important distinction between the two: faith at the level of profession – what he calls ‘legal Islam’, and faith at the level of fidelity and actualization – what he calls ‘true Islam’, which God desires, which assures us His rewards in this world and the Hereafter. His concern in this book, he makes abundantly clear, is ‘true Islam’, for it is what counts in life and in God’s scale.
But at the same time, he stresses, very wisely, the importance of legal Islam. For faith thus defined forms the basis for membership in the Ummah. By clarifying the important distinction between Din and Shari’ah, he strikes at the very root of sectarianism which results in mutual excommunication. For all his stress on true Islam, and for all his rhetoric – ‘You are not Muslims’, ‘this is sheer hypocrisy’ – it must be noted that Sayyid Mawdudi never issued or signed any fatwa (edict) of Disbelief against anyone in his entire life.
And he provides us with a breadth of tolerance that is so rare in these days: ‘What right has one servant to say that he alone is the genuine servant while the other is not?’ One may argue that his understanding is correct, but this does not give him the authority to expel anyone from Islam. ‘Anyone who does display such temerity assumes, as it were, the status of the Master. He would seem to be saying, “Just as it is compulsory for you to obey the Master’s order, so also it is compulsory for you to accept my way of understanding. If you fail to do that, I shall, with my own power, dismiss you from the Master’s service” … A person who insists upon such submission to his own interpretation and judgement and assumes such powers of dismissal for himself irrespective of whether God Himself dismisses someone or not, is in fact saying that God alone is not God but that he himself is also a small god.’27
Actions: Real Iman, once installed at the centre of life, once lodged in heart, must flourish into a mighty tree of righteous deeds (as-ṣāliḥāt). Unfortunately, something which was important for the vitality and true worth of Islam – the relationship between imān and ‘amal – became an issue, quite unnecessarily, for the jurists and philosophers. Muslims have no need to assume a prerogative that is God’s: to determine any particular person’s place in the Hereafter. Or, to engage in the business of excommunication. But they must never lose a vision of Iman which can retain its power only when linked with deeds.
Sayyid Mawdudi’s real business is to make Iman real and decisive in actual life. And that, as we see, he does with remarkable vigour and clarity. The Kalimah, he says, ‘must be rooted in the heart, it must drive out any belief opposed to it, it should make any actions in contravention of it well-nigh impossible.’28
‘Ibādāt: Foremost among righteous deeds are the obligatory acts of ritual worship like Salah and Zakah. It is impossible for us to have the seed of Iman in our hearts and yet ignore these basic duties. Sayyid Mawdudi echoes the Qur’ān and Sunnah when he declares that ‘only those can be taken to be true believers who perform the Prayers and give the Alms. Those who disregard these two fundamental teachings are not true in their faith.’29.
On the other hand, acts of worship, if correctly performed, must result in claiming the whole of life for Iman, and bring all of it under God. We only have to read the discourse on ‘True Meaning of ‘Ibadah’ to appreciate fully how forcefully Sayyid Mawdudi argues this important point.
Spirit: If acts of worship do not lead to a life lived in worship, the only reason is that they have been emptied of their true meaning and purpose, their true spirit. ‘When the soul departs, what feats can a dead body perform’,30 says Sayyid Mawdudi. The Prayer is meant to restrain us from everything that Allah dislikes. ‘If it does not, the reason lies in you, not in the Prayer. It is not the fault of soap and water that coal is black!’31
Sayyid Mawdudi inveighs heavily against ‘religiosity’ hoisted on empty hearts and divided loyalties. ‘What would you say about a servant’, he asks, ‘who, instead of performing the duties required of him by his master, just stands in front of him with folded hands and keeps chanting his name?’ For example ‘his master commands him to cut off the hand of a thief. But the servant, still standing there, recites scores of times in an extremely melodious voice: “Cut off the hand of the thief, cut off the hand of the thief”, without ever trying to establish that order under which the hand of a thief may be cut off’. However, when you see a person who ‘reads from dawn to dusk the Divine injunctions in the Qur’ān, but never stirs himself to carry them out, chanting instead the name of God on a thousand-bead rosary, praying uninterruptedly and reciting the Qur’ān in a beautiful voice … you exclaim “What a devout and pious person he is!”, you are misled because you do not understand the true meaning of ‘Ibadah’.
Similarly, ‘how astonishing that you think the Prayers, Fasting, chanting on rosary-beads, recital of the Qur’ān, the Pilgrimage and Almsgiving of those people are in fact acts of worship, who day and night violate or ignore the laws of God and follow the orders of the unbelievers.’32
Jihād: Jihad is firmly linked with Iman in the Qur’ān, and therefore with the whole Muslim life. It is the purpose which calls the Ummah into existence. But, for long, we have come to believe that we do not have to stir ourselves to undertake this vital duty for it makes no difference to our Iman.
This tragic chasm Sayyid Mawdudi spans forcefully and unequivocally.
It is this ‘unconcern’ with Jihad that, he says, empties all other acts of worship of their spirit. ‘But now, I say, you must understand that a heart devoid of any intention to undertake Jihad will find all ritual worship empty of meaning. Nor will those acts bring you any nearer to your God.’33 For, ‘if you believe Islam to be true, you have no other alternative but to exert your utmost strength to make it prevail on earth: you either establish it or give your lives in this struggle’.34
Why? His argument is lucid and convincing. Firstly, having believed in Allah and the Messenger, and accepted Islam as our Din, we must bring ourselves totally under God’s rule. Therefore Muslims ‘should rise to bring their King’s land under His law, to destroy the power of those rebels among His subjects who have set themselves up as sovereigns, and to free His subjects from the burden of slavery to others. Merely believing in God as God and in His law as the true law is not enough’.35
Otherwise, secondly, we would be living under two Dins: one, in our minds, or at most in our private lives; the other, in our public lives. For, ‘Din without power to govern is just like a building which exists in the mind only. But, it is the building which actually exists, in which you actually
