Abstract
Jan-Peter Hartung's book starts with the serious political and social events that occurred in 1979 throughout the Muslim world. These events describe the battle between Islam and those like the Shah of Iran, who seemingly pursued pre-Islamic values and Western thought rather than Islamic theories – another example being the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who supported Israel in 1977. Subsequent to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the 1970s was a crucial decade for Muslim religious and intellectual leaders. On the one hand, these were religious men and political supporters, while on the other hand they had to meet the expectations of the majority of Muslims who desired Islamic dignity and were already an advanced community. In this regard, Sayyid Abū ***‘l-A'la Mawdudi, a Muslim ideologist and the founder of Jama't-i Islami, was well-known for an ideology of ‘Islamism’.
Alongside an introduction and conclusion, this book is divided into four parts. The first part considers Mawdudi's formative years and the context in which he grew up, and maps out his ideological landscape. Hartung then creates a connection between Mawdudi's thought, the Islamic state and the Prism of Modernity. Chapters 3 and 4 consider the theoretical aspects of Mawdudi's theories. For Qur'anic scholars who wish to know more about modern trends in Qur'anic studies and interpretations these two parts will be of particular benefit since they emphasise Mawdudi's understanding of the Qur'an's text and its true meaning:
[Mawdudi] blamed the semantic shifts that occurred over time in the Arabic language for an increasing miscomprehension of the text of the revelation, of the ‘true meaning’ (asl ma'ni) of the Qur'anic key concepts. … That Mawdudi undertook the immense effort to compile a commentary of the whole Qur'an, which was aimed – as the title clearly states – at understanding (tafhim) rather than explaining (tafsir), is significant (p. 84; emphasis in the original).
The fifth section of the book, entitled ‘The Reception of a System’, covers the practical aspect of Mawdudi's ideological approaches.
This well-written book about South-Asian Islamic studies was compiled over fifteen years. It is fully recommended to students and scholars of Islamic, Middle Eastern and South Asian studies.