Abstract

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] book is impressive in some respects, disappointing in others. On the one hand, it draws on an extraordinary range of sources and shines a helpful light on some of the less well known aspects of Mawdūdī’s thought and of the Jamāʿat-i Islāmī that he founded. On the other, it has some gross infelicities, including a murderous translation of an Urdu poem.Abū l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī was a major Muslim thinker of the twentieth century. Hartung is not the first to note that Mawdūdī presents Islam as a system of life, but he certainly is the first to bring out, painstakingly, methodically and against a rich and complex historical background, how Mawdūdī, as Hartung puts it, ideologizes Islam. The long opening chapter of the book...