Abul Ala Mawdudi (also spelled Maududi or Maudoodi) founded the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) redefined in 1947 to support an Islamic State in Pakistan. A supporter of groups close to the Taliban today, the JI in Pakistan opposes Westernization and envisions an Islamic government in Pakistan governing by Islamic law.

The renewed interest in jihad by Abul Ala Mawdudi and, through him, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), initially also had a lot to do with the internal dynamics of Muslim society at the time. In fact Mawdudi thought that Muslims had "lost the taste for death," and Western imperialism, "drowned in armaments."1

Temporally specific in its uses, the idea of jihad has been variously interpreted in Muslim thought and practice. The emphasis on the spread of Islam through the sword makes it all the more important to assess the meaning and practice of jihad in the conquered territories. Modern technology and economic globalization have made the old idea of centers of authority with dependent peripheries untenable. Al- Qaeda is fighting a jihad in the Middle East from Afghanistan and the autonomous northwestern regions of Pakistan. Whether "holy war achieves its purest Islamic form" in the Central and South Asian periphery is a debatable proposition. But there can be no denying the emphasis that Al Qaeda places on the ethical nature of its struggle against the enemies ofIslam.2

Instead of debating whether jihad is primarily warfare or a spiritual struggle, it is intellectually more challenging to contend with its multiple meanings in Muslim thought and practice.3 Al Qaeda's ethical claims are based on selective appropriations of the Islamic tradition that are disputed by other Muslims. In that sense, Osama bin Laden has thrown down the gauntlet not to the West but to his co-religionists. The crucial issue facing Muslims is not that Islam has been "hijacked" by modern-day Kharajites, but the more difficult one of Muslims' clarifying their understanding of this key concept in Islam. The rush to explain jihad after the attacks on the United States has generated a veritable industry in both print and cyberspace, whose main victim has been the idea itself Contrasting claims about the purely spiritual or the primarily aggressive connotations of jihad have prevented a nuanced understanding of its multiple meanings in Muslim thought and practice. Often narrowly policy-oriented in approach, arguments based on a reductive view of jihad make that of any of his secular opponents. It was this aspect of his thought and politics which influenced militant Islamic concepts of jihad in the postcolonial period. By deftly conflating the religious and the secular, Mawdudi transformed the ethical and political dimensions of the contemporary discourse and practice of jihad in South Asia. That is why reasserting the distinction between the greater and the lesser jihad cannot adequately address the ethical challenges posed by the politics of Islamic militancy. Instead of dwelling on its ethics or lack thereof, it is more important to ask what kind of ethics the militants are promoting and to what degree it has the sanction of other Muslims.

Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi was born in Aurangabad, Hyderabad Deccan, into a family associated with the Chishti Sufi order. After completing his early education at home and at a local seminary under the tutelage of Deobandi ulema, he graduated from the Fatihpuri madrassa in Delhi. His literary skills drew him to journalism at the age of twelve. He participated in the Khilafat and noncooperation movement and joined a secret society working to dislodge the colonial government. During the hijrat movement, Mawdudi considered emigrating to Afghanistan but thought better of it. Instead, he remained in India, where he gave expression to his anticolonial and Islamic universalist sentiments in the newspapers.6

The concept of jihad engaged Mawdudi's attention very early on, but the demands of a journalistic career prevented him from setting down his thoughts on the subject. All this changed with the assassination on 23 December 1926 of Swami Shradhanand in Delhi at the hands of a Muslim named Abdur Rashid. Hindu propagandists claimed that Islam enjoined Muslims to murder unbelievers as a pious duty. Some Hindus baldly asserted that there could be no peace on earth unless the Quran was banned. Such "erroneous and ill-founded charges," Mawdudi complained, had led even Gandhi to say that "Islam was born in an atmosphere of violence" where the sword was paramount and that it was still a little too much in evidence among Indian Muslims.? Gandhi later issued a retraction in Young India: "The more I study the more I discover that the strength of Islam does not lie in the sword."8 But the Mahatma's initial statement rankled with Mawdudi. It seemed to corroborate the depiction by the Hindu reformist Arya Samaj of Islam as an aggressive religion whose followers were intent on looting, arson, and rape. In 1924 a bookseller in Lahore called Rajpal had published an anonymous tract provocatively entitled Rangila Rasul (The Playboy Prophet). It noted that whereas the founder of the Arya Samaj, Swami Dayanand, preached celibacy, the life and faith of the Prophet of Islam were marked by relationships with women.9 Aided by the bigotry of the provincial press, communitarian hostility in the Punjab reached new heights.10

This was the historical context that shaped Mawdudi's exclusionary discourse on Indian Muslim identity. Eager to draw the external boundaries of Muslim identity, he had no qualms about stretching the logic of the Islamic message to meet the needs of the situation at hand. He attributed Hindu attacks on Islam to Western attempts to subjugate Muslims. In February 1927 he began writing an essay on jihad, which was published in the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Hind's paper, Al-Jamiat, in several installments, before being abruptly discontinued. The complete essay was printed in September 1927 as AI-Jihad fi-ul Islam.ll Directed more at the West than at the Hindus who had precipitated its writing, it is the earliest source on Mawdudi's concept of jihad. Mawdudi found it remarkable that the image of Islam as a religion of the sword started gaining prominence from the moment ‘the dragon’ of Western expansionism began devouring the weak and infirm nations of the world. The West, being in self-denial about its alleged tyrannical acts and anxious to escape the antipathy and hatred that they had created, had succeeded in shifting the blame to Islam because Western dominance extended to controlling the production of knowledge. Consequently, the concept of Islamic jihad had been thoroughly distorted, he thought, and the distortion accepted wholesale, without investigation. During the nineteenth and the twentieth century’s, Muslims had repeatedly tried to refute the false interpretation of jihad. But they had either adopted the position of apologist or, Mawdudi said, passed over certain aspects of Islam to curry favor with the West. It was unacceptable to tinker with Islamic teachings merely to satisfy others.12

That critique of Muslim "apologists" has earned Mawdudi the criticism of scholars who doubt that jihad was ever interpreted as anything nobler than warfare against infidels.13 Like anticolonial Muslims, he did not reject jihad as armed conflict, but he denied the allegation that Islam taught its followers to kill. He quoted the Quranic verse (5:32): "If anyone slay a person unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land, it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people." The right to life is the first law of human society, and no religion preached the killing of one person by another, Mawdudi asserted. Unlike secular laws, which employ coercive measures to prevent people from killing, Islam creates revulsion for killing in the hearts of men.14 If "apologetics" is taken to mean glorifying one's own religion, Mawdudi can be reproached for saying that Islamic teachings are more humane than the Sermon on the Mount and the message of ahimsa. Like Azad, he maintained that haq (truth or justice), was more sacrosanct in Islam than human life. To kill a human being who murders or causes social disruption (fitna) is just. Islam, as a practical code for living based on freedom of conscience, justifies the shedding of blood to establish peace and root out evil. Even Christianity modified the ban against killing once Christians gained political power.

The Quranic law of qisas not only protects the individual from violence but corrects the greed and arrogance of the collective. Individual sedition affects a few, but that of the collective creates havoc among nations through economic, political, and spiritual exploitation.15

War against oppression becomes an ethical imperative when verbal persuasion fails to stop the community from engaging in evil and malicious practices. True faith demands that the friend of humanity should take up the sword and should not rest until the rights of God's creation have been restored. To oppose shedding an oppressor's blood on idealistic grounds is sheer cowardice-a policy of inaction incapable of securing the world against tyranny and oppression. By turning a war against injustice into a war for God, Mawdudi conflates a just war with jihad fi sabil allah, making no distinction between the greater and the lesser jihad or, for that matter, between jihad and qital. The two are indistinguishable in his mind when the battle is against disbelief, the source of moral insensitivity and inhumanity. In one example of the literalism that characterizes quantitative notions of virtue and goodness in his view of Islam, Mawdudi spoke of "this war for the truth in which staying awake one night is equivalent to staying awake for a thousand nights to pray and for which fighting resolutely on the battlefield is greater than staying at home and praying for sixty years." Tyranny was rife because Muslims had abandoned jihad. Revealing his anticolonial agenda, Mawdudi asserted that a nation incapable of resisting external domination was devoid of self-respect and guilty of inflicting oppression (zulm) on itself In order to prosper, not perish, nations must cultivate the spirit of self-sacrifice; otherwise they will be ruled by outsiders, and that is the lowest form of existence. Spiritual and mental subjugation in a sense precede physical and material conquest, because a people strong in spirit and mind could never allow themselves to be ruled by others.16 He attacked the nineteenth-century modernist Indian Muslim view of a defensive jihad. The success of Islam as a world religion lay in its use of the sword-not to compel people to convert, but to tear away the veil from their understanding, so that they voluntarily accepted its teachings. Just as it was wrong to say that Islam had by the sword forced people to become Muslims, it was incorrect to say that the sword had no role in its propagation. The truth lay somewhere in between. No civilization in history had established itself in which both the power of the sword and the power of preaching had not played a vital part.17

In his widely quoted lecture "Jihad in Islam" Mawdudi chided the West for "conjuring up the vision of a marching band of religious fanatics with savage beards and fiery eyes brandishing drawn swords and attacking the infidels wherever they meet them and pressing them under the edge of the sword for the recital of the Kalima." It was paradoxical that those now "pillaging" the world for markets and raw materials, "armed to the teeth with all kinds of deadly weapons," were berating Muslims for their bloodstained past. Whatever the Muslims may have done was "now part of history," but "their deeds are a present matter witnessed by the world day and night." Asia, Africa, Europe, and America-"which portion of this planet has been spared from bloodbath resulting from their unholy war?" He derided Muslim "apologists" for taking the Western depiction of jihad as religious mania to heart: "Sir, what do we know of war and slaughter? We are pacifist preachers like the mendicants and religious divines. To refute certain religious beliefs and convert the people to government which sustains these principles." The Islamic idea of war was unlike the temporal wars of Western imperialism. Although both conquer other countries, "an elemental difference" existed, akin to the space between heaven and earth. As Iqbal had put it: "Both fly in space, yet the world of the Eagle is far removed from that of the Crow."20

A political practitioner and a journalist by training, Mawdudi may have lacked the uplifting quality of Iqbal's poetic and philosophic vision or the depths of Azad's scholarship. But he made up for it by offering a piercing critique of Muslim societies and their hapless servitude to Western imperialism.21 He attributed the demise of the Ottoman caliphate to the narrow calculations of Turkish and Arab nationalists. Calling for God's government to replace the tyrannical government of man over man, Mawdudi's writings and speeches aimed to help Muslims deal with the dichotomy between the precepts of Islam and their political and cultural subjugation. That so few rallied to the banner of the Jamaat-i-Islami, which Mawdudi founded in 1941, lent greater force to his condemnation of their jahaliya, a term for pre-Islamic Arabia, but which he used to refer to anything not conforming to his idea of Islam. See also:

His belief that Islam could not borrow from lesser civilizations shows up Mawdudi as a cultural exclusivist.22 The most antidemocratic characteristic of this uncompromising attitude lies in the refusal to coexist with difference. As the antithesis of Islam, jahaliya justified a jihad to bring about a revolution in the mental and emotional outlook of humankind. Mawdudi saw a relationship between pagan and Western civilizations in their practice of polytheism. A civilization is as good as its ethics. The Islamic worldview based on God's sovereignty over the universe was ethically superior to those of other civilizations. Unfortunately, Muslims had reverted to jahaliya after the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty. This amounted to a counterrevolution. But because the opportunistic state paid lip service to the tenets of Islam, Muslims refused to disturb the status quo. The result of this disingenuousness was that instead of the teachings of Islam, the art, literature, and philosophy of jahaliya had taken hold of Muslim consciousness. Dance, music, and painting, in Mawdudi's estimation, were jahaliya art and the source of social discord. Muslims were treading the path of moral degeneration because some ulema permitted polytheism to parade as Islam. In spite of such worldly corruption, elements ofIslam's ethical teachings survived, and for that reason Muslim nations always maintained a higher moral status than non-Muslim ones. Individual Muslims continued to practice true Islam, but individual piety was not enough. An organized collective approach was needed to restore Islam to a state of purity.23

This is where the role of a mujaddid-a renewer of faith-acquires significance for Mawdudi. He dismissed the popular view that mujaddids appeared only at the beginning or end of the century. They had existed in all periods of Muslim history and often coexisted in time. An aspirant to the position, Mawdudi differentiated between a partial mujaddid and the promised Mahdi. A partial mujaddid was capable of assessing the contemporary political situation and determining what was Islamic and un-Islamic. He had to be prepared to seize political power and establish an Islamic system, not just in one country but the world over. Mawdudi conceded that the idea of the Mahdi had contributed to laxity of morals among ordinary people-or at least no good had come from the vision of the Mahdi as a mystic with beads in hand who would wage jihad against the enemy's planes and tanks with the help of a mysterious spiritual force. In actuality, the Mahdi would be the "most modern of the modernists" and would be attacked by the religious leaders of the day. Like other revolutionary leaders, he would initiate a powerful movement for cultural and political reform. This would enable him to seize power and establish a state based on Islam and the latest scientific knowledge.24

Among the mujaddids whom Mawdudi singled out for praise were Taymiyya, Ahmad Sirhandi, and Waliullah. Living in an age of Mongol ascendancy and the devastation of Muslim lands, Taymiyya presented Islam in commonsensical terms to ordinary people. Sirhandi was the savior of Islam in India at a time when it was being maligned by Akbar's pro-Hindu policies. Waliullah was a mujaddid worthy of emulation, for he had carried out the most thorough critique of Indian Muslim religious practices. Even though he had not wielded the sword, his successors had made up for the omission. Shah Ismail and Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi, though not mujaddids, had propagated Waliullah's thought. Lacking interest in material and worldly matters, they putsued jihad ji sabil allah. Their army was exemplary in discipline and in its regard for the Islamic laws of war. The soldiers did not mistreat women or endanger any life unnecessarily. These men sat on horseback during the day and on the prayer mat at night. When a government was formed, a life of simplicity and poverty was the norm. There was complete equality for all. A consultative assembly dispensed advice, and enforced justice in accordance with the sharia.25

Mawdudi noted how Muslims in the subcontinent revered the mujahideen and praised their sacrifices. But not delving into the reasons for the failure of this quintessential example of jihad ji sabil allah would encourage the line of thinking of the Aligarh school-namely, that there was no place for religious reform and piety, much less jihad, under British rule. This assumption was patently false. Tracing the historical reasons for the debacle, Mawdudi noted that all the work by reformists from Sirhandi to Waliullah to correct Sufi practices had been in vain: deviations had been unwittingly reintroduced. Even these two giants of Muslim religious thought could not resist proclaiming themselves qutb, the towering spiritual masters of their time. In doing so, they revived the very master-disciple system that their reforms had discredited. They used careless language to describe their mystical experiences. Mawdudi did not allude to the possibility that Sirhandi and Waliullah, and Sayyid Ahmad after them, chose not to undercut the popular beliefs that gave them mystical stature.

Mawdudi thought that Sayyid Ahmad and Shah Ismail had erred on a more practical level, in not preparing the tribesmen for the Islamic revolution. They had naively assumed that since the Pathans (in what is now Pakistan but also Afghanistan), were suffering under non-Muslim rule, they would welcome an Islamic government. What ultimately doomed the cause was the gross military imbalance between Sayyid Ahmad's followers and European power. Libraries in Europe were overflowing with books by philosophers, scientists, and thinkers whose critiques of ancient society had brought a revolution in mental attitudes. Waliullah and his sons had written books for a small circle of people. In India the debate on philosophy, ethics, collective life, politics, and economics remained in the early stages. In Europe entire systems were constructed on the basis of such debates. Scientific discoveries transformed the balance decisively. New discoveries in engineering and modes of waging war had made the French Revolution and the industrial revolution possible. It had not occurred to Sayyid Ahmad and Shah Ismail to send a delegation of ulema to Europe to find out the reasons for its rapid strides in scientific knowledge. Nor had they realized that the English and not the Sikhs posed the real threat to Islam in India.

The failure of the jihad proved that religious reform cannot be carried out simply by reviving the sharia. A comprehensive Islamic movement is needed based on the exercise of ijtihad Modern jahaliya had created new problems for which the Quran and the sunna provided answers. Muslims should avoid restricting themselves to the doctrines of anyone scholar from the past. A modern mujaddid could not be a replica of the prophets of yesteryear. He might even be devoid of elementary signs of piety. Those who made outward displays of piety or made uncorroborated claims to mystical experience were like counterfeiters. The Indian Sufi tradition abounded in examples of localized cults pitting their own sovereignty against that of God. Mawdudi warned Muslims not to be hoodwinked by such men. Adopting the Sunni attitude of postponing moral judgment, he held that anyone capable of engaging in religious reform should leave it to God to decide whether that work was meritorious or not. He considered Sirhandi and Waliullah mujaddids because of their work but did not believe in their claims to be God's anointed. Mawdudi strongly denied Maulana Sulaiman Nadwi's allegation that he was posing as a mujaddid and intended to declare himself a Mahdi.26

The doubt has remained in the minds of those who have taken exception to his claim to be an authoritative interpreter of Islam. Conservative ulema object to his rejection of traditional authority. The liberal intelligentsia is repelled by the cultural exclusivity and authoritarianism inherent in his thought. But there was some overlap in the ideas of Mawdudi and his Muslim opponents. His extended essay on jihad impressed Iqbal, who thought he had discovered a young scholar capable of revising the sharia to meet the demands of the modern age. Apart from helping Mawdudi get a job in Gurdaspur, Iqbal is said to have recommended him as imam of the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore. The two met toward the end of 1937 and considered collaborating on a systematic reform of Islamic law.27

The project was aborted with Iqbal's death in 1938, fueling misconceptions about his affinity with Mawdudi. Some Western scholars find no difference between the poet of the East and the ideologue of radical Islam. Conflating the two is to misinform and mislead. Where the entire thrust of Iqbal's thought was on the dynamic individual using the right of independent judgment, Mawdudi reposed that authority in a mujaddid. Iqbal posed the paradox of being a Muslim in a witty couplet:

The religious bigot considers me an infidel And the infidel deems me to be a Muslim.28

Mawdudi had a sterner conception of Muslim identity. Being a Muslim was not an inborn characteristic but a state attained by striving for Islamic knowledge.29 Like Iqbal, Mawdudi considered faith to be more important than life itself. But unlike this ideologue who could not countenance a believer's doubt, Iqbal, the poet-philosopher, had emphasized the importance of the initial negation in the Muslim profession La iLaha ilaLLah. An affirmation of faith after sincere doubt is qualitatively different from ideological indoctrination drawing on a particular view of Islam.

After a cursory study of Marxism, Mawdudi concluded that there was no room for disagreement in a revolutionary program. An astute reader of his times, he saw the modern state as the key to the realization of his ultimate aims. He interpreted din as government, the sharia as its law, and worship as submission through obedience to the law. Acceptance of a ruler entailed submitting to the sovereign's religion and obeying his laws. A human being cannot follow two religions. To believe in divinity and also obey temporal law constituted polytheism, because the dual allegiance caused confusion between the ruler's law and God's sharia. The prayers of a Muslim who does not conform to the shari a are artificial, because it is actions that count, and not belief. No scope is left for God's religion where democracy or territorial nationalism is worshipped as din.

Until God's laws were enforced in the courts and his sovereignty recognized, the practice of Islam in India was pure self-deception. Mawdudi marshaled Quranic verses in support of his arguments, but he conveniently overlooked the fact that most of them proclaim the supremacy of God rather than reject the legitimacy of diversity in religious practices. He was closer to the mark in his assertion that like any other religion, Islam is not satisfied with the mere declaration of faith or the demonstration of ritual piety. Islam left Muslims with no alternative but to wage jihad to establish God's government on earth:
This is the litmus test for the truth or certitude of your faith. If your certitude is genuine, then you will not be able to sleep peacefully being part of another din. To follow Islam and abide by the norms of another religion would mean that every moment in life would be like sleeping on a bed of thorns, food would be like poison, and the desire to establish God's religion would be an all-consuming desire. But if one was at peace co-existing with another din, then one would not be a momin, no matter how many genuine prayers and other forms of worship one might perform or [how much] Islamic philosophy one might expound.
Such a stark distinction between Muslims and nonbelievers excludes the majority of the faithful from Mawdudi's brand of Islam. He was contemptuous of Muslim hypocrites who fought jihads for democracy: "If such people consider themselves to be Muslims, they are grossly mistaken ... One cannot subscribe to one religion and work to establish another one."30

There is no denying the originality of Mawdudi's contribution to the contemporary discourse on jihad. His understanding of Islam's mission to save humanity from moral and cultural depravity through jihad and the acquisition of state power sets him apart from other anticolonial Muslim thinkers. Iqbal had considered it "a mistake" to suppose that the idea of the state is dominant in Islam. Muslims needed independent reasoning (ijtihad) to adapt to social change. The state in Islam was "theocratic" only insofar as its aim was to establish a "spiritual democracy." There was no place for "a representative of God on earth who can always screen his despotic will behind his supposed infallibility." Iqbal was confident that the "inner catholicity of the spirit of Islam is bound to work itself out in spite of the rigorous conservatism of our doctors." With the end of the Ottoman caliphate, the right of ijtihad had to be vested in an elected Muslim assembly, which "in view of the growth of opposing sects" in Islam was the "only possible form Ijma [consensus] can take in modern times." He applauded the Turks for vesting responsibility for collective ijtihad in an elected assembly. The "republican form of government is not only thoroughly consistent with the spirit of Islam, but has also become a necessity in view of the new forces that are set free in the world ofIslam."31

Mawdudi's notion of God's government forecloses the possibility of vesting sovereignty in the people. He accepted the consensus of the community as opposed to one restricted to the ulema. But this concession to democracy was qualified by an insistence on leaving interpretations of the sharia to the state, which would receive advice from ulema knowledgeable in Arabic and the juristic literature. Although he differentiated between the immutable and the mutable aspects of Islamic law, he restricted human legislation by equating the sharia with state law. There was no chance for citizens to influence state policy or question the infallibility of the party of God. This exclusion he justified on the grounds that since justice and equity would prevail in an ideal Islamic state, dissent would amount to apostasy. Submission to Allah meant obeying whoever could claim to be the authoritative interpreter of divine will.32

Mawdudi considered himself a contender for that job. He ends all debate by privileging ideology over individual choice and prohibiting critical dialogue about the merits and demerits of his Is lamic state. Iqbal's most exuberantly Muslim expressions exhibited none of the narrow cultural and religious outlook, if not outright bigotry, that marked Mawdudi's utterances. A good example of this is the assertion that a Brahman can be a Brahman without knowledge, but to be a Muslim requires knowledge ofIslam.33 Iqbal had put it more delicately: he preferred the idol worshipper alive at heart to the Muslim asleep in the holy sanctuary of Mecca. An act belonged to the temporal world, Iqbal noted, if it was carried out in a "spirit of detachment from the infinite complexity of life," and it could be considered "spiritual if it [was] inspired by that complexity."34 Sayyid Ahmad Khan, for his part, held that narrow-mindedness is a product of worldly and not religious concerns. In Iqbal's and Sayyid Ahmad's view, bigotry is based on an arrogant refusal to enter into reasoned debates with others.

Nowhere is this tendency more in evidence than in Mawdudi's literal-minded interpretation of the Quran and hadith to promote his bigoted view of women's role in Islam. Although he was a critic of the ulema's obsessive attachment to custom, he exceeded even their social conservatism and perverted sense of justice when it came to women. Social control of women was the ultimate line of defense for a Muslim whose stated aversion to Western culture often bordered on the pathological. He decried the "white jaundice" that had assumed epidemic proportions among Westernized Muslims, the "fifth columnists," in his political terminology. He shared Iqbal's opinion that a woman's role was to be a nurturing mother, doting sister, devoted wife, and dutiful daughter. But he went further, arguing that women should be excluded from the public sphere altogether because their menstrual cycles left them so physically and mentally infirm that they were unsuited for jobs outside the home. The West denied women their feminine identity in the name of progress and development. What was being called women's emancipation in the West was in fact exploitation of women by the forces of capitalism.35

Mawdudi's critique of Western imperialism seems flawed by comparison with Iqbal's, on account of its cultural and religious arrogance. Mawdudi cannot countenance any disagreement with his belief in the ethical superiority of Islam. Morality was impossible withour religion. A godless social ethics cannot judge between good and evil, right and wrong. The absence of any authority behind moral law had resulted in chaos and confusion. One nation's ethical standards conflicted with those of another. Powerful nations infringed the rules of morality they expected others to observe. The "conscience of humanity had been deadened" by man's "escape from the Lord." Islam provided an authentic, reliable, and comprehensive code of life that could rescue humanity from the pit of moral depravity. It was "a perfect ethical system" with "no [possibility] of escape from moral responsibility" such as that found in "the ethics of idolatrous religions and of secular creeds." Nor did it "divide humanity into warring sections" along lines of class, clan, or country. The Islamic moral outlook was "dynamic and progressive." While allowing for the "development of civilization and the advancement of society," Islam does not permit its adherents to behave like "moral weathercock[s]" with "no set of uniform ethical norms."36

Asserting God's absolute sovereignty in all matters of morality evades the issue of who ultimately interprets his law and will. Non-Muslims had no possibility of debating with Muslims on the ethical validity of Islamic ideas. Though assured of "perfect freedom of religious belief," non-Muslims were barred from the administration of the Islamic state, for their lack of faith in its ideology might compromise the public interest. As soon as "the Ummah of Islam capture[d] State power," it would ban usury and all forms of business and financial dealings prohibited by Islamic law, dose down dens of prostitution, and put a stop to all other vices. It would be "obligatory for non-Muslim women to observe the minimum standards of modesty as required by Islamic Law." The Muslim party would "clamp censorship on the Cinema" and put a stop to non-Muslim cultural activities "corrosive of moral fibres." Anticipating criticism, Mawdudi declared that "no creed in the world" had "shown more tolerance to the votaries of other faiths" than Islam. It offered "full opportunity for self advancement to the people of other faiths under conditions of peace and tranquility and displays such magnanimity towards them that the world has yet to show a parallel example."37

That Muslims fare even worse in Mawdudi's scheme of sociopolitical transformation is cold comfort for non-Muslims. The faithful have no choice but to fulfill the demands of an all-encompassing din and are denied the satisfaction of spiritual and mental salvation in personal faith. In attempting to pull humanity out of the maelstrom of moral relativism, Mawdudi broke with Islamic tradition, by shifting the purpose of religious practice away from individual piety and toward a worldly ideology capable of mobilizing Muslims to submit themselves actively to God. Only an Islamic society and polity could guarantee the believer's piety and salvation. Instead of saving human souls in the hereafter, Mawdudi's Islamic revolution seeks success in this world. To add to the secular character of his ideology, he considered the ulema and not the spiritual community as the architects of a God-based ethics. Like the legists who focused on monitoring the outward behavior of the believer, he considered as law only that part of the sharia which required backing from the coercive power of the state. This expectation left the domain of conscience, the core of individual ethics in Islam, outside the purview of the state. Since Mawdudi subsumed human free will under state power, the ethical society he envisioned relied on draconian enforcement of the principle of preaching what is good and prohibiting what is wrong.

In transferring faith into the realm of politics, Mawdudi rationalized and secularized religion. His neat division of the world into Islam (as interpreted by him) and jahaliya-which now included the overwhelming majority of Muslims-negated the possibility of establishing an ethical polity, let alone a humane ethics. In principle, the immediate jihad had to be fought against "bad" Muslims who were in collusion with the Western infidels. Yet it was one thing to proclaim an ideology of world revolution and quite another to translate it into practice. Mawdudi the political practitioner proved to be more moderate and conservative than Mawdudi the theoretician of radical Islam. After rejecting the demand to establish a separate state of Pakistan, he pragmatically accepted its legitimacy and tried to influence the constitutional debate by demanding the establishment of an Islamic state. Instead of being revolutionary, his political approach to state power turned out to be evolutionary. He rejected violent overthrow of the established government and distanced himself politically from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. In keeping with his belief in constitutional change, the Jamaat-i-Islami has participated in electoral politics ever since the creation of Pakistan, even if its student wing has resorted to sporadic violence in pursuit of its aims.

Looking to establish his Islamic credentials in a country whose creation he had opposed, Mawdudi showed political guile in exploiting two issues that have remained central to the self-definition of the Pakistani state: the dispute with India over Kashmir and the controversy over the status of the Ahmadi community in Islam. The Ahmadi’s in Europe (headquartered in London) are known for their claim that Jesus Christ was buried in Kashmir, and they--the Ahmadi’s-- own his gravesite. In 1948 he challenged Pakistan's endorsement of a jihad declared by local religious leaders in Kashmir during a ceasefire with India.38 So long as Pakistan maintained diplomatic relations with India, its covert assistance to the Kashmiri mujahideen was contrary to the sharia. Mawdudi considered the Kashmiri jihd-o-jihad a just war that qualified as jihad according to the standards of Islamic jiqh. Thus, believing that Kashmir's rightful place was in Pakistan, he advocated breaking off relations with India. Doing so would have eliminated the ethical and sharia-based constraints on Pakistan's throwing its full weight behind the Kashmiri cause.39

In theological terms, Islamic orthodoxy objects to the Ahmadis because Ghulam Ahmad declared himself to be the second messiah, considered a blasphemous statement by those who believe in the finality of prophet hood claimed by Muhammad. Yet Ahmadis were not persecuted in a widespread way or with state sanction, either in pre-independence India, including the territories now comprising Pakistan, or in Pakistan immediately following independence. One must acknowledge that the theological complaint of Ahmadiyya blasphemy appeared to gain sociopolitical ground only from 1949 onward. Indeed, Pakistan's first foreign minister was a member of the Ahmadiyya community. For convincing argument that the Ahmadis do not differ much from other Muslims, see “The Ahmadis” (2004) by Antonio Gualtieri.

Mawdudi's role in the 1953 agitation to exclude Ahmadis from the Muslim community was linked to his conception of jihad in Kashmir.40 The Pakistani state, having been created in the name of Islam, had an obligation to define what it meant to be Muslim. Ahmadis were apostates, and Islamic law demanded waging a jihad against them. Pakistan also had to fight the Kashmir jihad in accordance with the sharia. Snapping diplomatic ties with India and stirring up a hornet's nest with such definitions was too radical for the Pakistani establishment. Mawdudi found no takers for his extreme views in 1950s Pakistan. Instead of praising him for his hard-line positions, a military court charged him with sedition in 1953 and sentenced him to death. The offence, interestingly enough, was not his intervention in the Kashmir jihad but his stance on the Ahmadi question.

His opposition to the Ahmadis was a bid to establish himself and the Jamaat-i-Islami as the intellectual and moral bulwark of Islam. Charging the followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad with offending faith, Mawdudi argued that declaring them a non-Muslim minority was "a natural and reasonable result" of the course they had chosen. In considering their leader a prophet and renouncing jihad, the Ahmadis violated fundamental tenets of Islam. Most unacceptable were the political irritants that Ahmadis had imposed on Muslims. By avoiding social and religious relations with Muslims, they had separated themselves from the community. It was wrong to say that setting such a dangerous "Side me bounds” the floodgates to the exclusion of other sects. No sect posed a bigger threat than the Ahmadis, who "hide behind Islam" and sow disunity among Muslims. "By their cunning method of pretending Islam [sic]," they had grabbed "more administrative positions and employments." This subterfuge was harmful to the community, which could not tolerate a minority that was persecuting the majority.41

The 1953 agitation brought the sectarian pot in Pakistan to a dangerous boil. Some Barelvis demanded that Deobandis be declared a separate minority-and included Mawdudi among the prominent representatives of the sect!42 Undeterred, the anti-Ahmadi protesters billed their struggle as a jihad against infidels and called on police and military personnel not to fire on their Muslim brethren. Branding the Ahmadis agents of the British, the agitators demanded to have them removed from top government posts. Chaudhry Muhammad Zafrullah Khan, Pakistan's Ahmadi foreign minister, was the main target of the attack. Yet all the ulema, with the exception of one Shia divine, insisted that the demands were based on religious convictions.

The commission of inquiry investigating the movement considered this a tactical ploy "to avoid ... being held responsible for the disturbances for a worldly reason." The principal agitators, particularly the Majlis-Ahrar, had been supporters of the Congress ideal of secular nationalism. Together with the ]amaat-i-Islami, they had opposed the Muslim League's demand for a separate state of Pakistan. Consequently, they "found themselves distinctly embarrassed and in a position of inconsistency and self-contradiction in view of their previous utterances." After all, "if the demands were religious ... [and by implication] both immutable and inflexible, then it becomes somewhat difficult to comprehend how ideology which is based on religion changes from time to time and from place to place." After this jibe at the sincerity of the agitators, the commission dealt the decisive blow, by pointing out that "the most important ... parties ... clamoring for the enforcement of the three demands on religious grounds were all against the idea of an Islamic State." Even Mawdudi had conceded that the "form of Government in the new Muslim State ... could only be secular."43

Mawdudi, who had long been adept at changing tack and reinventing himself, easily got around the commission's charges. His international fame and his national stature combined to bring about his pardon and release in 1955. The experience left him chastened. In his later years, he toned down the more authoritarian features of his scheme. He argued that curbs on individual rights that would have been permissible if imposed by a genuinely Islamic state were not justified in a non-Islamic state, which he likened to a tyranny. Until the establishment of an Islamic state, the sharia was an ideal, not a practical set of religious injunctions and laws that could be enforced piecemeal.44 Before independence, he had proclaimed armed jihad a legitimate weapon to replace human government with divine sovereignty. In 1954, he was more circumspect. A jihad could be declared, he told the commission of inquiry, only if the state was at war with a non-Muslim country. It was not necessary for an Islamic state to give the call to jihad; a Muslim national government could do so in its legitimate interest. This alternative had the merit of being more acceptable to the Pakistani state. As the governmental commission put it, if jihad meant the "spread of Islam by arms and conquest," then "Pakistan [could not] be a party to it," for that was tantamount to sanctioning "aggression" and "genocide," which were "offences against humanity."45

If Mawdudi had watered down his "revolutionary" agenda to respond to political exigencies, his enthusiasm for an armed jihad remained unabated-provided a Muslim victory was assured. After his initial jab at the Pakistani state's misuse of jihad, he was cautious about taking the extra-constitutional route. A willingness to swim with the tide, even to the extent of modifying a cherished ideal like jihad, helped the Jamaat-i-Islami survive the political storms of military-dominated Pakistan. Using the state's self-professed Islamic identity as his point of entry, Mawdudi launched an ethical and cultural critique of Pakistani society and politics. He identified immorality and forbidden acts rather than issues of socioeconomic injustice as the primary barrier to an Islamic state. Given that revolution had become more of a slogan than a cherished concept, Mawdudi had settled for a long secular trek toward the attainment of an Islamic state.46

Using the educational system to carry out a potent kind of sociocultural engineering was the first step toward seizing state power. At the ideological level, the Jamaat-i-Islami has remained committed to Mawdudi's ideal of precipitating an intellectual revolution through education and the systematic infiltration of key state institutions like the army. Instead of opening its membership to all, the Jamaat prides itself on being a party of ethically upright and religious individuals. With its limited social base, it has fared poorly at the hustings. It has made up for this by playing the role of a hypervigilant and well-organized cultural police, ready and able to embarrass the Pakistani state and its personnel for their lack of Islamic rectitude. Armed with Mawdudi's dicturns in simple Urdu and the zeal of its student wing, the ]amiat-i-Tulaba, the ]amaat has made a mark on the moral economy of Pakistani society in the Punjab and the North West Frontier Province. But political engagement has also entailed deviation from the precepts of the party's founding father. This has created internal schisms and allowed sectarian and other Islamic revivalist organizations to try to steal the Mawdudian thunder in the field of educational and cultural reform. Although the ]amaat has scrupulously refrained from exploiting Muslim sectarian divisions for political purposes, its electoral alliances and public stances have been based on the same calculations as those of secularly aligned parties in Pakistan.

Mawdudi's ideas, thanks to their skillful dissemination by the ]amaat-i-Islami's publicity wing, have continued to enliven political and cultural debates in Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world. Yet the cutting edge of those ideas in initiating revolutionary change and ethical reform has been blunted by the weight of temporal compromises. Followers of Mawdudi have lost sight of his principles in the rush to achieve practical implementation. The Jamaat-i-Islami's influence in Pakistani politics remained limited until Mawdudi's death in 1979, which coincided with the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Mawdudi's impact on contemporary Islamic radicalism is best understood in the light of the criticisms his ideas elicited not only within the Jamaat-i-Islami but also from rival organizations in Pakistan.

An inauspicious beginning on the wrong side of Pakistan's military authoritarian state left Mawdudi whistling ultra-nationalist tunes and posing as the moral conscience of the Muslim nation. If a belated endorsement of Pakistani nationalism spared him the wrath of the state's intelligence agencies, his sniping at the ethical lapses of his countrymen won him more enemies than friends. Pakistan's first constituent assembly produced a document that alluded in only the most perfunctory way to Mawdudi's notion of God's government. While acknowledging God's sovereignty over the entire universe, the constitution vested sovereignty in the people. Far from being a religious theocracy, Pakistan was to be based on Islamic principles of democracy: freedom, equality, tolerance, and social justice were guaranteed for all, including minorities. The only concession to the religious lobby was that the state undertook to ensure that its Muslim citizens lived according to the tenets of Islam.47

The constitution afforded the Jamaat-i-Islami opportunities to carp about the misguided secular path the nation was taking, but the party's vacillation over state authoritarianism left it open to criticism. Disagreements within the party led to defections and the setting up of alternative organizations directly or indirectly inspired by Mawdudi's Islamic revivalist philosophy. In 1957, Maulvi Israr Ahmad broke away from the Jamaat-i-Islami, on the grounds that electoral participation was incompatible with revolution. Although Ahmad is a vocal advocate of jihad, his organizational network has focused on education rather than politics.48 During the era of General Zia-ul-Haq, Ahmad erupted onto the public scene with his socially conservative and misogynist opinions. A man of considerable financial means, Israr Ahmad has wielded political influence without contesting elections. His admirers included Mian Nawaz Sharif, who was twice prime minister in the 1990S. Sharif asked him to frame the 15th Amendment (the Shariat Bill of 1998) making the Quran and the sunna the supreme law of the land.

Across the great divide of 1947, the Indian wing of the Jamaati-Islami had to adapt to the realities of a formally democratic state in which Muslims are in a minority. Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, decrying Mawdudi's emphasis on politics over the spiritual reform of the individual believer, left the party after more than fifteen years of dedicated organizational work. The author of several hundred books on Islam and modernity, Wahiduddin has been one of the principal voices accusing Mawdudi of distorting Islam to serve his political agenda of resisting colonial subjugation and Western cultural dominance. Wahiduddin, being committed to a democratic and pluralist India, condemns Mawdudi's cultural exclusivism and hostile perceptions of the "other." Islam promotes dialogue, not confrontation with non-Muslims. In foregrounding politics to achieve narrowly construed temporal objectives, Mawdudi undermined the principle of the unity of creation (tawhid), which is the heart of Islam. As the central concern of all Islamic activity, tawhid can be realized only through propagation of the faith, which is one form of jihad as peaceful struggle. A prolific writer, Wahiduddin has recently published True Jihad, which dispels misconceptions about the term as limited to armed warfare against non-Muslims. In his opinion, jihad is "a continuous action" to live a virtuous life through strict observance of God's commands.49

The stress on spiritual perfection through propagation of the faith connects Wahiduddin with a series of traditional scholars who have accused Mawdudi of damaging Islam. Sayyid Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi denounced the shift in emphasis from the spiritual salvation of the believer to the achievement of worldly power. These views found their most energetic expression in the Tablighi Jamaat, a Deobandi organization focusing on individual character building through acts of piety and spiritual devotion, which would then lead to a religious revival and the establishment of an Islamic state.50 The organization rivals Mawdudi in missionary zeal, something that initially elicited his admiration for the movement, but the Tablighi Jamaat considers criticism of traditional authority to be a deviation from Islam.51

Established in the late 1920s by Maulana Mohammad Ilyas (1885-1944), the organization avoids politics and debates on Islamic jurisprudence, out of preference for a life of spirituality modeled on the sunna. The Tablighi Jamaat aimed to move Islam out of the religious seminary, so that Muslims of all walks of life, from the lowest laborer to the wealthiest businessman, could share the obligation of exhorting their co-religionists to faithful religious practice. Educated in the Deobandi tradition, Maulana Ilyas came from a family devoted to the Waliullah clan. Some of his ancestors had given the oath of allegiance to Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi.52 Ilyas received his early education from his spiritual mentor, Rashid Ahmad Gangohi. Later he studied hadith with Maulana Mahmudul Hasan and joined the circle of mujahideen organized to fight against British imperialism. 53 According to Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, he was gripped by the spirit of jihad:

"Throughout his life, he was never without it, and had, in fact, taken the pledge of Jehad at the hand of Maulana Mahmood Hasan for that very reason. "54

Yet Maulana Ilyas did not participate in an armed jihad. Dedicated to a life of piety and worship, he concentrated on spreading Islamic religious practices among the Meos of Mewat, an area south of Delhi. Mewat was the focal point of Arya Samajist and Muslim proselytizing activities after the collapse of the Khilafat movement. Even though the Tablighi Jamaat maintained a studied aloofness from politics, the organization was as much an exponent of Muslim identity as any other. Unlike the Jamaat-i-Islami, which sought an exclusive following, the Tablighi Jamaat cast its net widely among all classes of Muslim South Asian society. At the organizational level, it has avoided the hierarchical strains that, as Mawdudism demonstrated, are implicit in the favoring of a select group of ulema who derive religious authority by following a mujaddid 55 But political and organizational fluidity has made the Tablighi Jamaat prone to manipulation by the state as well as by mainstream political parties, secular and religious. The military regime of General Ayub Khan (1958-1968) tried to pit the Tablighis against the Jamaat-i-Islami. Maulana Zakariya Khandhlawi, a leading ideologue of the movement and a nephew of Maulana Ilyas, was deputed to condemn Mawdudi's ideology as un-Islamic, a task he duly fulfilled with the publication of the Fitna-i-Mawdudiyat (the sedition of Mawdudi) in the early 1950s.56

A revival based on the reaffirmation of individual faith is closer to the traditional Islamic view than the one that Mawdudi's born-again Muslim followers attempted. But in entrusting the faith to individual Muslims, the Tablighi Jamaat effectively relegated the attainment of an Islamic state to an indefinite future. While Mawdudi served one jail sentence after the other, the Tablighi Jamaat made it through the postcolonial transmon relatively unscathed. Political neutrality has helped its followers come to terms with their minority status in a democratic and secular India.57

 State bureaucrats and army personnel in Pakistan have been able to join the Tablighi Jamaat in large numbers because of its apolitical image. This has played an important role in its rapid growth within Pakistan as well as worldwide. Since many state officials are also sympathizers of the Jamaat-i-Islami, the overlapping membership has acted as a brake on their otherwise withering critiques of each other. ]amaat-i-Islami's spokesmen chide the Tabligh for its disengagement from politics. They claim that it has killed the spirit of armed jihad, a point that accords with the opinion of several other so-called jihadist outfits in contemporary Pakistan. Tablighi activists, for their part, exalt the virtue of personal piety over the ]amaat-i-Islami's worldly politics.

One of the most virulent modernist critics of Mawdudi in postindependence Pakistan was Ghulam Ahmad Parvez (1903-1995), a follower of the anti-hadith Ahl-i-Quran movement. A graduate of the Punjab University, Parvez was among the Muslim government servants who elected to move to Pakistan where he retired in 1955 to concentrate on studying Islam. In 1938 he had started a journal called Tulu-i-Islam, apparently on the advice of Iqbal and Mohammed Ali ]innah, the founder of Pakistan. An avid admirer of Iqbal, Parvez is said to have been among those responsible for arranging the poet's meeting with Mawdudi. But whatever camaraderie may have existed between Parvez and Mawdudi was short-lived. Before partition, the Tulu-i-Islam attacked the Congress and its affiliate, the ]amiat-ul-Ulema-i-Hind, and voiced support for the Muslim League. Mter the creation of Pakistan, Parvez, backed by a state bureaucracy looking for ways to deflect the ]amaat-i-Islami's calls for an Islamic state, turned his venom against Mawdudi.58

A brilliant propagandist, Parvez likened Mawdudi's commentary on the Quran to "a mouse-trap: the mouse can get in, but cannot escape."59 In weekly lectures in Lahore during the late 1950S, he castigated Mawdudi on the basis of his own interpretations of the Quran. While agreeing that Islam was a din and not a religion (mazhab), Parvez went a step further, in claiming that the two were mutually contradictory. Echoing Waliullah, he held that there was only one din, which he defined as a social ethic or a code of law. Different prophets taught the true din, but their followers made a mazhab out of it. Human history was "a perpetual conflict between din and ma[z]hab terminating in the success of one over the other." The idea of "religion" was "a deliberate creation of the minds of men devoted to the pursuit of self-interest." Lacking spirit and soul, "ma[z]hab is in fact the embalmed corpse of din." Religion was a rope trick mesmerizing people through "a sustained process of indoctrination" in such a way that "the masses learnt to hail and bless those who cheated them." In all their attempts, "the standard-bearers of 'religion' had always relied ... on one technique: they attributed their own aims and ambitions ... [to] the 'Will of God."60

In this blistering attack on impostors claiming the authority of God, Parvez reiterated many of Iqbal's ideas. But Parvez's interpretation of Islam was influenced by the standoff between the religious lobby and supporters of the postcolonial state in Pakistan during the 1950S and 1960s. The 1954 commission of inquiry had offered the best exposition of the Pakistani state position on religion. Its published findings, known as the Munir Report, noted that "no two learned divines ... agreed" on the definition of a Muslim: "If we attempt our own definition as each learned divine has done and that definition differs from that given by all others, we unanimously go out of the fold of Islam. And if we adopt the definition given by anyone of the ulama, we remain Muslims according to the view of that alim but kafirs according to the definition of every one else."61 In the absence of agreement on the definition of a Muslim, it was hardly possible to talk about an Islamic state. Parvez made this the bedrock of his attack on self-serving ulema who peddled religion for cheap publicity.

Mawdudi claimed that in 1951 thirty-one ulema representing different sects had endorsed a common minimum program. According to the agreement, the constitution would be based on the sharia accepted by a majority of Muslims, but each sect could follow its own individual laws. Parvez dismissed this as a pack of lies. Not only were the ulema bitterly divided on the definition of a Muslim, but each member had his own peculiar interpretation of the sunna. The Ahl-i-Hadith was ready to declare a jihad against Mawdudism. Whereas Hanafis considered several hadith in the authoritative collections of Bukhari and of Muslim to be suspect, the Ahl-i-Hadith dubbed them infidels. Sunnis thought all hadith from Shia sources were spurious. Shias had the same opinion of Sunni hadith. Mawdudi opposed the Hanafi conception of the sharia, which the majority of Pakistani Muslims upheld. If no agreement could be reached on the sharia, the only course available was to base the constitution on laws that were not repugnant to Islam, as had already been done. In harping on the topic of the Islamic state, Parvez claimed, Mawdudi had been laying the groundwork to seize political power and impose his own ideas on the people. This was a sure recipe for chaos, rebellion, and bloodshed.62

Even if state power remained beyond the reach of the Jamaat-iIslami, the concordat it had concluded with the traditional ulema and some mainstream political parties could create mayhem and confusion. The Ahmadi controversy showed how pressure politics clothed in Islamic rhetoric could be applied in Pakistan. The demand to expel Ahmadis from the community, although it had met with categorical rejection in the early fifties, remained the focal point of the movement for Islamization of the state. By buckling under pressure and declaring Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority in 1974, the elected government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto undermined the basis of the nation-state in affirming an exclusionary conception of citizenship. The counternarrative of an Ahmadi critic of Mawdudi is eye-opening. It both conveys the apprehensions of non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan and encapsulates the opinion of Pakistan's liberal intelligentsia, who were appalled by the cynical use of religion for political ends.

In the early fifties Mirza Tahir Ahmad, the fourth caliph of the Ahmadi community, wrote Murder in the Name of Allah, a searing critique of Mawdudi's understanding of jihad. To assert that Islam had been spread by the sword was to parrot the accusation of "biased orientalists." Mawdudi's mania for political power "so dominated his thinking that . . . he converted . . . the Holy Prophet ... into ... a warrior putting the world to rights with the blade of a sword." Mawdudi's plan to overthrow existing government by force amounted to letting "the fires of civil war consume the very fabric of society." It was false to say that members of God's party were "pious" and "free of lust and greed," whereas their opponents were "cruel, unjust or evil." Mawdudi and his followers could preach what they wished in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, "but let them take their creed of 'Islam by force' elsewhere and just see what reception it gets." The Jamaat-iIslami made Islam "a target of ridicule." The movement was "devoid of spiritual values" and "hungry for power," and it was furthermore "inspired by Moscow, not Mecca." Since Mawdudi could not institute reform through "persuasion, patience and humility," he had adopted the Marxist-Leninist "policy of violence and disorder." Tahir Ahmad excoriated Mawdudi for saying that killing an apostate was an act of mercy because it was better to die than to live like a hypocrite. His assertion that all Muslims who disagreed with him were committing apostasy punishable by death showed "the Maulana's dictatorial, manipulative and intolerant personality." There was no possibility of non-Islamic minorities' carrying out missionary work in a state wedded to a foreign policy of perpetual war against neighboring non-Muslim states.63

The objects of Mawdudi's aggression were not non-Muslims living in other countries but homegrown Muslim sects. Although the maulana's followers claimed to promote nonsectarian views, the insistence on capital punishment for apostasy was an implicit declaration of jihad against Muslims who refused to embrace the Jamaat-i-Islami's ideology. Once the Pakistani state took the novel step of winnowing out Muslims from non-Muslims, no sect was safe from the charge of apostasy, not even the Jamaat-i-Islami. Deobandis and the Ahl-i-Hadith issued fatwas declaring Mawdudi an infidel, thereby highlighting the dangers of a state policy based on a set definition of what it meant to be Muslim. Far from resolving the ethical dilemmas posed by the concept of jihad, Pakistan after 1974 was up for grabs for anyone who could muster the street power to pronounce any Pakistani a non-Muslim. The nation had started unraveling; any external shock would suffice for religious bigotry to tear apart the fragile social weave of a country where an all-powerful military exercised authority in the name of Allah.

Pakistan's descent into sectarian hatred, violence, political instability, and economic chaos is attributable to the policies pursued by a military-dominated state anxious to exploit opportunities at the international level to strengthen its domestic and regional profile. It is possible to discern three interlocking phases in the military establishment's flirtation with the idea of jihad. They help elucidate the shift in Pakistan's role from "frontline" state in the war against communism to hub of Islamic "terrorism," before the country became a key ally in the war against terror. The first phase lasted from 1979 until 1996, when the Taliban seized control in Kabul; the second, ending in 2000, was the golden age of Deobandi power; the third, following attacks on the United States in September 2001, forced the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf to crack down on the militias without jeopardizing the army's much-vaunted Kashmir policy. Charting the chronological trajectory of Pakistan's jihadist policies in each of the three phases makes it possible to assess whether the uses the state and the different militant organizations have made of jihad have been in line with its ethical basis in the Quran or have rather been ignored for strategic, economic, and political advantage.

Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 the Jamaat-i-Islami found the opportunity to make a decisive break-through in Pakistani politics. By throwing its weight behind the Afghan resistance movement, the organization catapulted itself onto center stage in the American-backed jihad orchestrated with the help of the Pakistani army and its intelligence services. The July 1977 military coup by General Zia-ul-Haq gave the Jamaat-i-Islami unprecedented political influence. In July 1979, a few months before Mawdudi's death in Rochester, New York, U.S. President Jimmy Carter allegedly gave his secret sanction to fostering the spread of Islamic "fundamentalism" in Central Asia, to "destabilize" the Soviet Union.64 The aim was to overthrow the Soviet-backed Marxist regime in Mghanistan. Communist haters in Washington had found an opening to deal a blow to America's archenemy. Charlie Wilson, a Texas Congressman, is said to have single-handedly transformed a routine CIA assignment into the largest covert operation in American history.65

Once America began pouring billions of dollars into financing the Afghan jihad, Pakistan became a hotbed of religious extremism. The state's intelligence agencies were acting as patrons to madrassas projecting a bigoted and violent form of Islam to boys between the ages of five and eighteen. The main recruits were youth from deprived socioeconomic backgrounds with no prospect of finding jobs in a stagnant economy. General Zia-ul-Haq, who craved the cachet of legitimacy, was quick to cash in on the windfall. In a decisive break with the past, he changed the motto of the Pakistani army to "Islam, Piety, and Jihad." Mohammed AIi Jinnah, the architect of Pakistan who had pronounced religion to be of no concern to the state, had reiterated the theme of "unity, faith, and discipline" in a nation where all citizens would be on an equal footing, free to practice their different creeds. The melding of American strategic interests with the institutional concerns of the Pakistani military, however, tarnished the founder's ideals. Domestically, the die had been cast in 1974 with Bhutto's cynical policy to appease the religious lobby to achieve narrow political gains. But Pakistan in the late seventies was still a relatively moderate Muslim state. The American- and Saudi Arabian-funded Afghan jihad gave extremist forces a crucial opening to alter the tenor of politics in Pakistan.

Future members of AI Qaeda were trained by American and British intelligence with the enthusiastic help of Pakistan's own Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). With plenty of money to back the cause, jihad was lucrative business for the merchants of death. Over three million Mghan refugees fled to Pakistan in the early 1980s. Gulbadin Hekmatyar, the Afghan leader, was an ardent admirer of Mawdudi. Until the mid-1990s, Pakistani sponsorship of Hizb-i-Islami, the party Hekmatyar led, gave the Jamaat-i-Islami a preeminent position in the Mghan jihad. The Jamaat-i-Islami also called the shots in the Kashmir jihad through its militant wing, Hezbul Mujahideen. But the Jarnaat-i-Islarni was soon overshadowed by Deobandi parties. A considerable portion of the monies had been funneled into Deobandi madrassas in the NWFP, which shared a Pathan culture with the Mghan refugees. The main beneficiaries of state largesse were the Deobandi party, Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam QUI), headed by Maulana Fazlur Rahman, and its breakaway faction led by Maulana Samiul Haq. It was at Haq's Dar-ul-Ulum Haqqania that future leaders of the Taliban, including Mullah Omar, learned the Quran by rote, with a smattering of traditional jurisprudence for good measure.

State support for Deobandis upset the sectarian balance in the country, where Barelvis represented by the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Pakistan were in the majority. Before it became an assembly line supplying jihadists for America's covert war in Afghanistan, Pakistan was a Barelvi-Deobandi state that subscribed to the Hanafi school of jurisprudence. Mawdudism served as a sort of buffer between the Ahl-i-Hadith and the Hanafites. Deobandis have their strongest following among Pathans in the NWFP and Baluchistan. Pakistan's largest province, the Punjab, is overwhelmingly Barelvi. State patronage of Deobandi imams in government-run mosques and the rise of the sect's militias spurred both the Barelvis and the Ahl-i-Hadith into action. As the politics of local influence tilted in favor of the Deobandis, the Barelvis and the Ahl-i-Hadith entered the business of exploiting religion for profit by building mosques and madrassas with money contribured by the Pakistani expatriate community.

The burgeoning of rival madrassas altered Pakistan's sociopolitical landscape in decisive ways. Most madrassas have a sectarian base. Their curricula are adaptations of the eighteenth-century Waliullah and Nizami models of Muslim education. Students are forced to memorize the Quran, so that they can serve as religious functionaries. The teacher is not merely a vessel of knowledge but a sage divinely endowed with unquestionable authority. Stiff discipline is paired with an isolationist worldview. The beliefs of the sect are held sacred. Muslims who do not adhere to them are instantly declared infidels. Students are taught to refute the beliefs of other sects and hate all manifestations of Western modernity.66 The contempt for secular and rational forms NWFP had the greatest stake in the new dispensation. In an offshoot of the Iran-Iraq war and General Zia-ul-Haq's social and political engineering, the Anjuman-i-Sipah-i-Sahaba emerged as the main Sunni sectarian organization in the country. Formed in ]hang, Punjab, in 1984 by Maulana Haq Nawaz ]hangvi, the Sipah-i-Sahaba spouted hatred against Shias, who were the landlords and spiritual leaders in the district. After 1986 the organization started a campaign of targeted assassinations of Shias. In December 1990 its operatives killed the Iranian Consul General in Lahore, an act that brought relations between Pakistan and its Shia neighbor to an all-time low. The Sipah-i-Sahaba disowned responsibility, but Jhangvi was sentenced and executed for his hand in the conspiracy. This made him a martyr in the eyes of Shia haters and strengthened the organization's base of support in the Punjab. With a string of madrassas in the province, the Sipah-i-Sahaba actively provided recruits for the Mghan jihad. It curried favor with other Deobandi parties to become an influential political force in Pakistan. It got easier once Azam Tariq rose to the helm of the organization. He had given an oath of allegiance to the prominent Deobandi figure, Maulana Yusuf Ludhianvi, a virulent opponent of Mawdudi and the spiritual mentor of the ]UI's Maulana Fazlur Rahman. The Sipah-i-Sahaba shares the Deobandi idea of an Islamic society. Long before his assassination, Azam Tariq vowed to convert several of Pakistan's large cities into "model Islamic cities," by enforcing five rules: I) the closure of all shops at the time of the Muslim call to prayer, 2) designation of Friday as a holiday; 3) boycott of businesses based on bribery or illegal money; 4) the elimination of cable television; and 5) calling on the ulema to vet all decisions from an Islamic point of view.70

The Wahabi-Deobandi alliance was cemented in 1989 after Osama bin Laden's meeting with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar at the Deobandi Banuri Mosque in Karachi. The Banuri Mosque, headed by Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, became the hub of Deobandism in Pakistan. Azam Tariq and Fazlur Rahman had close links with Shamzai and through him with Mullah Omar and the Al Qaeda network. The emergence of "the grand Deobandi consensus" eclipsed the Jamaat-i-Islami in Mghanistan and Kashmir and heightened sectarian tensions in Pakistan. Once the Taliban gained power in Mghanistan, the JUI acquired greater prominence. Meanwhile, the Deobandi Harkat-ul-Ansar overshadowed the Jamaat's Hezbul Mujahideen in Kashmir. An estimated 80,000 Taliban students from Deobandi seminaries in the NWFP and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) were dispatched to help the Taliban fight against the Iranian-supported Northern Alliance directed by the Tajik leader, Ahmad Shah Masud. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia's recognition of the Taliban government strengthened the anti-Shia Deobandi- Wahabi coalition.71

Another important support arm for the ISI-managed Mghan and Kashmir jihads has been provided by Lashkar-i- Tayyiba, a branch of the Ahl-i-Hadith's Markaz Dawat-al-Irshad with contacts in the Arab world. The Lashkar enjoys a flow of funds from expatriate Muslims living in the West. General Zia-ul-Haq granted the Markaz several acres of land in Muridke for the construction of its headquarters. The pro-Wahabi leanings of its founder, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, a former teacher of Islamic studies at the government-owned Engineering University of Lahore, made the Lashkar a natural ally of Al Qaeda. Its influential contacts with the ISI and its training camps in Mghanistan and Central Asia have made the Lashkar one of the most enterprising militant organizations operating in Indian-occupied Kashmir.72

When the Kashmir jihad started in 1989, it was the secular-oriented Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and the Jamaat-i-Islami that enjoyed the most militant support on both sides of the Line of Control separating the Indian- and Pakistani-occupied pans of the state. Once the Afghan jihad began to peter out, the ISI redirected the returning warriors to Kashmir. The entry of war-hardened militants from Afghanistan injected sectarian and Wahabi tendencies into what had started as a freedom struggle with no specific religious agenda. Both the Pakistani and Indian intelligence agencies set about smashing the JKLF, which splintered into as many as twenty different organizations. The Hezbul Mujahideen in Indian-held Kashmir shared intelligence with the Indian army to help it locate JKLF militants; as a result five hundred of them died.73 The ISI wanted to weaken the JKLF and gain control of the freedom struggle by converting it into a jihad. As in Afghanistan, which local warlords plunged into civil war after the Soviet withdrawal, the fragmentation of the jihad in Kashmir has caused its Pakistani paymasters to lose control to smaller outfits operating under the direction of local commanders.

In the second phase, starting in 1996, the Jamaat-i-Islami's Hezbul Mujahideen paid for its sins (helping undermine the JKLF) by losing out to Deobandi groups. The eventual beneficiary proved to be the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba, which introduced the Ahl-i-Hadith's pro-Wahabi doctrines into the Kashmiri struggle. The Deobandi-Wahabi combine was at its height once Mullah Omar, with Osama bin Laden's financial backing and advice, turned Afghanistan into a clone of the emirate. Arab funding and state support helped the membership of the Tablighi Jamaat grow by leaps and bounds in Pakistan, even though the organization formally opposes jihad in both Afghanistan and Kashmir. An estimated two million people typically converge at the Tablighi Jamaat's annual meeting in Lahore, of which 90 percent are said to be Pathans from Peshawar and the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.74 Not all members of the Tablighi Jamaat are "the stealthy legions of jihad," though some belong to sectarian and militant groups like the Sipah-i-Sahaba and the Harkatul Ansar, which was renamed Harkatul Mujahideen after being declared a terrorist organization by America in 1997.75

More than two decades of state support for militant organizations flush with money from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and expatriate communities in the West, not to mention the state's own welfare funds, had left Pakistan languishing on the fringes of the international polity. During the nineties, the Pakistani army had sought to gain "strategic depth" for its policy of jihad, by extending its influence in Mghanistan and undertaking a punishing low-intensity war with India in Kashmir with the assistance of its underlings. Between 1979 and 1990 there was a 100 percent increase in the number of militant parties, and sectarian parties grew by 90 percent. Taking advantage of the religious sentiments of socially marginal groups, these organizations converted the lesser jihad of the sword to the greater jihad, in an inversion of the Islamic tradition. An estimated thirty thousand young Pakistanis were martyred in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Two thousand more were killed in sectarian clashes in Pakistan; some two hundred thousand young men belonged to militant and sectarian organizations,76 The impact on the social landscape of Pakistan has been devastating. Deobandi dominance was resented by Shias and Barelvis alike. Both reacted by creating their own militant organizations, initially to carry out revenge killings against the Sipah-i-Sahaba and later to wield political influence in their own right.

The Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Fiqha-i-]afaria had rallied Shias against Zia-ul-Haq's Islamization policies. In the 1990S it founded the Sipah-i-Mohammadi to combat the menace posed by the Sipahi-Sahaba. While staying away from the Mghan and Kashmir jihads, some members of the Fiqha-i-]afaria's student wing participated in the Hezbollah's war against Israel in Lebanon. The Barelvis have for the most part avoided jihad and have tried to make common cause with the Shias. The Sunni Tehrik was established to counter Deobandi influence and restore some semblance of Shia-Sunni amity after a rash of horrific killings by the Sipah-i-Sahaba. Sunnis fed up with sectarian tensions and Deobandi extremism flocked to Allama Ilyas Qadri of the Dawat-i-Islami and Allama Tahirul Qadri of the Pakistani Awami Tehrik. Both claim spiritual status and attract handsome sums of money from expatriate Pakistanis with no direct involvement in the state-sponsored militant nerwork.77 Barelvi reassertion in Pakistan has not been entirely salutary in effect. Incensed by creeping Deobandism in what had been their stronghold, the Barelvis condemn their rivals as infidels and apostates who, if they cannot be killed at random, at least ought not to be befriended. The Barelvis have protested the appointment of Deobandis in mosques and have tried to reassert control over the anti-Ahmadi Khatm-i-Nabuwwat movement, which was started by Maulana Abul Sattar Niazi of the Barelvi Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Pakistan.

The sectarian component of the Deobandi alliance became several shades more dangerous with the release of Maulana Masood Azhar from an Indian jail after the hijacking in December 1999 of an Indian Airlines plane from Kathmandu to Kandahar in Afghanistan. Azhar, a follower of the Sipah-i-Sahaba leader, Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, split the Harkatul Mujahideen in January 2000 to form the dreaded Jaish-i-Muhammad, which has a militant sectarian orientation. The ISI's complicity in this development was revealed when Azhar traveled to Lahore, escorted by scores of armed guards sporting Kalashnikovs. This was extreme provocation for New Delhi, which was still reeling under the decision to exchange Azhar and other extremists for the passengers on the hijacked Indian Airlines plane marooned in the wilds of Kandahar. Its revenge was not long in coming. Since the May 1998 nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, Washington had been pressing Islamabad to suspend its Kashmir jihad in the interests of dialogue with New Delhi. Facing international isolation for its support of the Taliban and a rising graph of sectarian violence domestically, the military regime of Pervez Musharraf was taking preliminary steps to begin dislodging the militant infrastructure when the September II attacks on American soil dramatically altered old alignments and compelled the choice of new and more difficult ones.78

Musharraf's volte-face on Pakistan's Taliban policy met with ferocious resistance from organizers of madrassas as well as leaders of religious parties as far apart as the Jamaat-i-Islami and the JUI. But when it came to demonstrating their strength on the streets, the pro-jihadi Pak-Afghan Defence Council failed to muster popular backing. It did have the support of the independent tribes in Pakistan's wild northwest, but most agitators in the urban areas were madrassa-educated youth whose average age was nineteen.79 By comparison with the half-million protestors who had thronged the streets of Karachi during the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991, no more than fifty thousand assembled this time to raise clenched fists, while shouting slogans against America and its stooges in the Pakistani establishment. The reason for this poor showing was quite simple: the state was urging moderation, instead of encouraging the extremism that had fueled the militant culture. Several supporters of the Taliban were imprisoned or placed under preventive detention. The tide had turned. But there was a qualitative difference between stated intentions and actual achievements. The deweaponization campaign had ended in failure because the military was unwilling to disarm the militias by force.80

It had long been characteristic of the Pakistani state for the left hand not to know what the right hand was doing. For the cornered regime of Musharraf such a lack of coordination could produce deadly results. His resolve to clamp down on militias was counterbalanced by a firm determination not to compromise the army's Kashmir policy. Walking a tightrope in his attempt to reverse the culture of militancy previously nurtured by the state, Musharraf made duplicity the better part of valor. The crackdown on militias and religious seminaries offering military training was highly selective. Since sectarian militias posed the greatest threat to the regime's agenda for economic revival, they were the first to come under fire. But cleansing Pakistan of its sectarian malaise was no mean enterprise.

The militant infrastructure cultivated by the ISI over a period of twenty-two years was too closely enmeshed with the sectarian militias to be dismantled without damaging the army's strategic doctrine. This situation gave Musharraf some scope to bargain with Washington. If Americans could help resolve the Kashmir dispute, the Pakistani army was ready to abandon support for the militants. But neither America nor India was convinced that Musharraf could deliver the peace dividend. Such success as the regime has had in eliminating the most objectionable sectarian militias has come at a great risk to Musharraf's personal security. He has survived six assassination attempts linked to individuals and militias that the state's intelligence agencies had once propped up.

Many analysts fear that disarming the militias will lead to internal conflict and the collapse of Pakistan.8l A member of the Jaish-i-Muhammad conceded that Pakistan was next in line for jihad, given that injustices were quite as prevalent there as in Kashmir. The leader of the Kashmiri Jamaat-i-Islami confirmed that after the jihad had been won against India, the system in Pakistan would be set aright.82 If sectarian tendencies in the jihad threaten Shias, Ahmadis, and religious minorities, the class composition of the fighters makes it the ideal instrument for an onslaught against the pro-Western ruling elites. The products of religious seminaries come mainly from the lower and middle classes and have the support of middle-class officers in the army and the state bureaucracy. Agencies of the state often let those involved in sectarian killings off the hook and permitted other lawbreakers to go underground. Popular support for the militias has been another obstacle, and one that a military dictator is least well placed to overcome. Pakistan's robust Urdu press has championed jihad to score points against English newspapers catering to the upper middle classes. One prominent journalist complained that when the English press "agonises over the extremism and defiance of the jehadi groups," influential Urdu columnists "deliver warnings of bodily harm" to them for "adopting an anti-Islamic posture at the behest of Pakistan's enemies."83

The predicament of Musharraf, who has no real base of political support outside the army, is as unenviable as his resolve to hold on to power has been remarkable. Before and after the 2002 general elections, the regime won the grudging support of a six-party religious-political alliance called the Mutahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA). The MMA, which includes the Barelvi ]amiat-ulUlema-i-Pakistan, the Jamaat-i-Islami, the tWO factions of the Deobandi JUI, the Jamiat Ahl-i-Hadith and the Shia Tehrik-i-Jafaria, is an inherently volatile grouping. Although Samiul Haq's faction of the ]UI has parted company with the MMA, political ambitions have kept the alliance together in form more than in substance. Apart from lambasting Musharraf for refusing to give up his position as chief of army staff and for serving as the civilian president of a democratic country, the MMA accuses him of compromising state sovereignty and secularizing Pakistani culture and politics, actions it equates with la-diniyat (irreligiousness). The clerics, while falling short of declaring a jihad against Musharraf's godless regime, have shown no signs of diminished opposition to his alliance with America. The MMA, already incensed by the state's betrayal of the Afghan and Kashmiri jihads, sees his appeals for enlightened moderation as adding insult.

Whether Pakistan implodes under the weight of the tensions between the state's jihadi and anti-jihadi policies will depend on Musharraf's ability to practice what he preaches. If Pakistan is to adopt a moderate and enlightened view of Islam, it cannot avoid an open debate on the ethical basis of the Quranic concept of jihad. The military-dominated state has used jihad, which is intrinsic to faith and ethics in Islam, to advance its strategic, economic, and political ends. Such a skewed strategic vision, backed by political denial and policies of economic exclusion, violates elementary Islamic principles of equity and justice. The army has capitalized on the jihadi industry to further ensconce itself in the power structure. If Pakistan is to turn over a new leaf, the army will have to drastically modify its strategic vision. The monumentality of the task can be gauged from the discourse on jihad that state policies have helped promote. The vast literature on the subject, which focuses narrowly on jihad as war against infidels, variously defined, reaches a wide market in Pakistan. During the heyday of state sponsorship for jihad, militant outfits published newspapers, journals, books, and pamphlets on jihad, in addition to hosting Web sites as propaganda and marketing tools. Apart from being hugely profitable for its promoters, jihad is a powerful means for militant organizations to extend their political influence by making sensational claims about their members' courage and spirit of sacrifice. Some continue to do so with gusto, most notably the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba, which has flourished as the Jamaat-ud-Dawah since the crackdown on sectarian and pro-Al Qaeda outfits. The Lashkar-i-Tayyiba, created by the ISI, played a critical role in the Kashmir jihad after 1990. The Lashkar has escaped the tightening noose on militant groups because the state's intelligence agencies needed an alternative to the troublesome Jaish-i-Muhammad, which was directly involved in the murder of the "Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and has well-advertised links with Al- Qaeda.84

Picking up on themes promoted by several of the now defunct militant organizations, the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba has pieced together a coherent ideology of jihad that merits careful analysis. The appeal of its message is best understood against the backdrop of popular ideas about fighting in the way of Allah to gain the ultimate honor of martyrdom. By lauding death on the field of battle as the highest service to Islam, the militias have created a compelling incentive, the promise that jihadis can attain worldly status and religious virtue simultaneously. This perception has dramatically altered Pakistan's cultural ethos. Young men, and some women too, long to die for their religion.85 Martyrs' families are promised material comforts, respect, and the greatest reward of all-a guaranteed place in paradise. Parents, who are encouraged to send their sons to battle Hindu infidels, celebrate news of their death by distributing sweets and offering prayers of thanksgiving to Allah. Jihad has done roaring business in Pakistan because it appeals to the imagination of people whose prospects are severely limited. Death offers worldly glory and security in the hereafter, whereas their lives would otherwise promise nothing but oppression and humiliation. The political culture that supports the ideology of jihad is rooted in both material culture and religion, albeit religion reduced to a series of formulaic rituals and customs based on a superficial understanding of Islamic ethics.

Contrary to the perception that extremism incubates in religious seminaries, most recruits to militant organizations in major cities of the Punjab have come from government schools and colleges. The province provided nearly half the manpower to all militant organizations in the country. Most Pakistanis killed in Afghanistan and Kashmir have been Punjabis. A sampling of statements by the recruits reveals the mindset of contemporary militants. Many recruits to the Jaish-i-Muhammad were trained in a madrassa in Balakot named after Sayyid Ahmad Shaheed. One of its members quipped that there was "more honor in jihad" than in any other profession, and "the money too was good." Another said jihad was the only honorable thing left for Muslims. Asked if the focus had not shifted from the greater to the lesser jihad, he remarked that several religious parties in Pakistan had taken up the struggle against the existing system. This was the greater jihad, and Jaish's purpose was to "bring more people around to this objective." A Harkatul Mujahideen militant with seven years of schooling decided to join the jihad after hearing about the treatment of Kashmiri women. A twenty-year-old high school graduate said that since he had joined the Harkatul Mujahideen, jihad had become a complete way of life for him and he could not conceive of doing anything else. He denied that the organization was sectarian in orientation. Deobandis believed only in what was correct unlike the sectarian Lashkar-i- Tayyiba, which forced new recruits to position their hands in a strictly prescribed manner while praying.86

Since the personal ambition of the leaders outweighs ethical considerations, a distinguishing feature of militant groups has been the intense rivalries that erupt into verbal abuse and physical violence. Before Musharraf pulled the plug in response to the Indian outcry against the militant infrastructure in Azad Kashmir, the mujahideen were a law unto themselves, and the local administration abetted their behavior rather than curbing it. They flaunted their weapons and extorted money and other services from local shopkeepers. Members of one militant Kashmiri outfit took to visiting a billiard hall and, to the owner's distress, using grenades with the pins pulled out as billiard balls. Others acted in a lewd fashion, teasing schoolgirls and displaying weapons to advertise their heroism-a tendency that assumed epidemic proportions. One local commander named himself Commander Shah Rukh Khan, after the popular Indian Hindi film star.87

All militant outfits attribute miracles to their men and describe them as models of Islamic ethics, purity, and heroism. Such portrayals, intended to generate enthusiasm for the jihad, paint a dazzling canvas in which fantasy and passion, blood and glory blend in improbable ways to erase distinctions between the imaginary and the rational, the spiritual and the temporal. Harkatul Mujahideen's monthly, Sada-i-Mujahid, in its April 2000 issue recounts the story of three mujahideen traveling in pitch darkness who suddenly find their hands and feet lit up in miraculous fashion. A mujahid injured in an encounter with Indian troops is carried off by an angel and wakes up in a jungle with no sign of the injury. In the Majallah AI-Dawah Lashkar-i-Tayyiba delights in publicizing the amazing deeds of its men. Some read like spoofs in a humor magazine, especially stories about bears, cats, and monkeys helping the mujahideen. The more glamorous yarns could put some Bollywood scriptwriters out of business. In one the clothing of a mujahid is riddled with bullet holes, but his body remains unscarred. Stories of knives directing tanks and armored vehicles outdo the best science fiction.88

Amid the bravado and glitzy romanticism of the would-be warriors of Allah, the idea of jihad popularized by militant groups displays a deeply troubling side. By far the most disturbing aspect is the slogans deployed to attract impressionable youth to the cause. The Lashkar-i- Tayyiba's call for recruits in September 2002 reads like an advertisement for a trendy health spa. Under the caption "Let Us Become Mujahids" appear four rhetorical questions:

1.Do you want the dominance of Allah's D[i]n, the destruction of forces of evil and disbelief, the death of systems of injustice and oppression?

2.Do you want Muslim Ummah to rise again as a dignified nation and do you want that a befitting reply is given to all activities and machinations against Muslims?

3.Do you want that peace and tranquility prevail in Muslim society, humanity is adored with the virtues of piety, morality and other attributes of good character?

4.Do you want an end to all evils and western culture? Do you want that the rights of Allah and the rights of people are taken care of?
Those answering in the affirmative were asked to join the Dawatal-Irshad's training camps, which "prepare such pious individuals and Mujahideen" who "do not like any evil prevailing anywhere in the world." Thousands of such brave and virtuous souls, the organization stated, were fighting unbelievers and propagating faith and jihad among Muslims. Training for jihad was ordained by both Allah and the necessity of the moment. Muslims had to learn the use of swords, spears, and daggers to attack the forces of unbelief and master the art of planning an ambush and laying siege to the camps and cantonments of the enemy. They also had to know how to protect themselves and "other oppressed Muslims during crackdowns and blackouts." When Muslims were being trampled under the feet of infidel armies, it was inappropriate to "waste ... precious time in playfields, or in enjoying useless things like music, films, vulgar novels and magazines." The time had come to "spread Allah's D[i]n and destroy disbelief."89

Elaborating on the theme of militarization, the Lashkar's main spokesman, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, rebuked the West for asking Muslims to renounce jihad in the interest of economic progress at a time when India was brutalizing Kashmiris and Israel had "unleashed a horrible reign of terror" in Palestine. Muslims had to "stand united and raise the banner of Jihad." Breaking with Islamic tradition, Saeed asked Muslims to join the jihad on an individual basis if their governments were unwilling to take action. In deference to his patrons, he added that those who chose jihad must not create conflict with their governments or expect help from them. Their "earnestness," courage, and sacrifices would, by the grace of Allah, suffice to "open up new avenues." Muslim youth should not to be daunted by the power of the unbelievers. Non-Muslim hegemony would prevail only so long as the mujahideen kept "sitting on the fence." Once jihad was launched, "the storms of evil and disbelief [would] soon subside," as had happened in Afghanistan and was now happening in Kashmir.90

The success of the mujahideen in Kashmir had forced India to seek help from Israel, the United States, and Russia. Given that "all decisions were made in the heavens," it was owing to the grace of God that the enemies of Islam were coalescing. In keeping with the heavenly plan to "foil the machinations of the enemies," their attention had been diverted to Palestine. Hafiz Saeed was proud of the Kashmir jihad's power of demonstration. The Lashkar-i- Tayyiba's activities were "creating an understanding of Jihad in the Muslim world." Palestinians were resisting their oppressors, and that resistance in turn was "benefiting Jihad in Kashmir." Saeed warned Muslims of the "conspiracies of the disbelievers" and the futility of engaging in negotiations with the enemy. If Muslim leaders could not take up jihad, they ought to at least ban American and Indian products and withdraw investments from non-Muslim countries. They should expel all non-Muslim workers and give the jobs to their own people. Muslims had to cooperate with one another. They had to realize that "Muslims are distinct from non-believers and our friendship with them can be anything but fruitful."91

Hafiz Saeed's exclusionary vision would have done Mawdudi proud. But the two are radically at odds on the legality of the Kashmir jihad. Saeed's notion about individual Muslims fighting a jihad without state sanction or the consensus of the religious scholars is without parallel in the Islamic tradition. In opposing Pakistan's policy toward the Kashmir jihad in 1948, Mawdudi had placed the burden of responsibility on the state, not the individual. He believed in the legitimacy of a jihad fought by Kashmiris and denied saying that Pakistanis killed in Kashmir would not die a martyr's death. Pakistanis could send food and medical aid and even sell arms to their co-religionists. But so long as Pakistan maintained diplomatic relations with India, its citizens were not permitted under the sharia to fight in Kashmir. Anyone who maintained the opposite was treading on thin ice. 92

The Lashkar-i-Tayyiba, which is acutely vulnerable to the charge, has expended considerable energy countering the impression that jihad is not an individual duty. It has issued a spate of pamphlets and books in both English and Urdu to put an end to the controversy.93 These publications, which have prefaces by Hafiz Saeed, invoke the authority of the Quran and the hadith, even as they refuse to be hemmed in by traditional Muslim scholarship. The reprint of a book by Maulana Fazal Illahi Vazirabadi from the late 1940S defending the Kashmir jihad has lent support to the Lashkar's ideology.94 In 1915 he was instrumental in assisting the group of Punjab University students to reach the mujahideen center on the frontier and cross the border into Mghanistan to join Obaidullah Sindhi.95 The Lashkar's own publicationjehad in the Present Times draws on Vazirabadi's arguments and targets an English-speaking audience. Apart from providing a rationale for waging an armed struggle in Kashmir, both works offer vivid glimpses into the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba's conception of Islamic ethics.

An active participant in the 1948 Kashmir jihad, Vazirabadi was a devotee of Sayyid Ahmad Shaheed and a staunch Pakistani nationalist. He wrote the book in response to a questionnaire inquiring whether the war being waged in Kashmir since August 1947 was a jihad ji sabil allah. The bulk ofVazirabadi's work is devoted to answering this question, with references to the history of the jihad in Kashmir and suitable quotations throughout from the Quran, the hadith, and Sayyid Ahmad's and Shah Ismail's writings. A dogged insistence on the Kashmir jihad as the panacea for all evils explains Vazirabadi's appeal for the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba. In his preface, Hafiz Saeed decries America's designation of jihad as terrorism. While admitting that the international situation is not conducive to jihad, he endorses Vazirabadi's thesis, and incidentally also the I51's, that Pakistan can become the strongest force in the subcontinent by helping the Kashmiris. He categorically asserts that freeing Kashmir from India will result in the success of other Muslim dissidence movements in the world.96

Like Mawdudi, Vazirabadi did not distinguish between jihad and qital (fighting) or forcible and voluntary conversion. Despite assurances from the Indian government, Muslims had been forced our of areas with Hindu majorities. Vazirabadi called for a decisive war against India, so that in future it would not dare break agreements with Muslims. This would not be a national war but a jihad fi sabil allah. What Hindus had done to Muslims in India was akin to what the Meccan Quraish did to the fledgling Islamic community. The loss of Muslim sovereignty in India had weakened Islam. Instead of worrying about the causes of ethical degeneration, Muslims needed to concentrate energy and resources on fighting a continuous jihad until victory was won. Making use of Quranic stories about Moses and the Pharaoh as embellishment, Vazirabadi argued that a war to wrest political control from non-Muslims was the primary religious duty for Muslims. Restoring Kashmir as Dar-ul-Islam--house of islam--and merging it with Pakistan would secure both of them, as well as Afghanistan, from the threat posed by Hinduism. Muslims who opposed the jihad on grounds that it was a nationalistic war were doomed; seventy intercessions by the Prophet would not spare them the fires of hell! India was in flagrant violation of its agreements and it was legitimate for individual Pakistanis to plot its demise. The woeful condition of Indian Muslims hinted at what awaited Pakistanis. Any who opposed the Kashmir jihad were helping the enemy achieve what it otherwise could not with all the military power at it disposal.97

The questionnaire had asked whether the imam and the mujahideen had to be men of high ethical character. Drawing on Islamic law, Vazirabadi retorted that the imam could be the most unethical of men. Even if he was a model of immorality, Muslims would be obliged to wage jihad under his command. There was no need for the mujahideen to be upright men. If saying prayers was mandatory for sinful Muslims, why not jihad? This was not to suggest that Islam was devoid of ethical concerns. Jihad had to stand alongside the other pillars of Islam. The lovers of God put a premium on spiritual virtues and abstinence from material pleasures. But their preoccupation with ascetic practices ran counter to the Quran and the Prophetic sunna. The only way to achieve nearness to God was to wage jihad fi sabil allah. Jihad was a magic wand that washed away the sins of the warrior and could turn the unethical into the ethical.98

If Vazirabadi provided a dubious ethical gloss to the Kashmir jihad, Jehad in the Present Times, by Abdus Salam Bin Muhammad, exposes the inherent bigotry of the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba's worldview. Infidels had not damaged the cause of jihad as much as the "so-called virtuous preachers and scholars of Islam" had. They had set impossible conditions for jihad, condemning Muslims to remain in their "present position of disgrace and slavery." There was no need for an Islamic state or caliphate to wage a legitimate jihad. A "believer is quite free to start a war against the disbelievers, particularly when it is with a view to saving his life." While jihad is not obligatory for all Muslims, those who did not fight had a lesser religious status. "Muslims had to continue fighting against the disbelievers" anywhere in the world, if they had the power to persecute Muslims or prevent anyone from accepting and practicing Islam. As a corollary, Muslims had to defend their co-religionists if they were oppressed or attacked and retrieve any conquered territories. Muslims were also obliged to fight against a nation that broke its pledge to them. Revenge had to be taken against unbelievers who killed Muslims. Whereas a Muslim murdering a Muslim can pay blood money or secure forgiveness from the victim's relatives, conversion to Islam is the only escape available to an unbeliever accused of killing a Muslim. It was "binding and incumbent upon the Muslims" to fight the infidels until they agreed to pay the jizya and Islam became the dominant way of life in the world.99

The pamphlet also tackles the delicate issue of why a jihad is not being fought in Pakistan, where persecution and oppression are as rampant as in Kashmir. The reasoning has all the hallmarks of the Pakistani statist mentality. Unlike India's Hindu rulers, the rulers in Pakistan did not disown Islam, even if their policies were hypocritical. Muslims are prohibited to kill people because they are hypocrites. The "restlessness and violence" in Pakistan were akin to a civil war among Muslims, "not a struggle between Islam and disbelief." Indian Muslims were being slaughtered for professing Islam. Their possessions were plundered, their women disgraced, and their mosques razed to the ground. The Shiv Sena leader in India, Bal Thackeray had given Muslims three choices: they could convert to Hinduism, leave India, or face death. Pakistani Muslims were under no such threat. It was the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba's "utmost desire to have in Pakistan a just Islamic society where no one was wronged" or made to suffer violent oppression as in Kashmir. But the most effective way of waging jihad in Pakistan was to fight the unbelievers. This battle would unite Muslims, who were "bound to go on fighting among [them]selves" if they renounced jihad. Muslims had to avenge "the oppression, wholesale massacre, wrongs and persecution" they had suffered in 1947 at the hands of the Hindus.100

For our separate case study about the perils of Lashkar-i-Tayyiba see P.1 and P.2.

In a classic statement of the exclusionary doctrine, Abdus Salam warned Muslims of the perils of not maintaining boundaries with the other. "It really pains me very much," he professed, "to find any of my Muslim brothers equalizing India and Pakistan, as he, then, is following and advocating the Hindu point of view." He accepted that strengthening the outer aspects meant neglecting the inner facets of Islam, which continued to be a sham in his opinion. But it is through jihad that "we strengthen the outer as well as the/inner parts of the building ofIslam." Only those with a sense of honor can fight the unbelievers. Pakistan's rulers were "devoid of any sense of honour." He who "fights the disbelievers for a cause no other than their disbelief is surely a true believer, a Man of Faith." God would "bless us with inner (as well as outer) establishment, strength and integrity" because of such men.101

Those objecting to the Kashmir jihad were in "a strange dilemma" and behaving in "a ridiculous manner." While evading their duty, they claimed to believe in jihad. Not one of these "esteemed scholars" of Islam could load a gun. This showed that "they were not true in their claims and ... just gossip." They may have good reasons for not going to the front, "but what hindres [sic] them from attending a military camp to prepare themselves for Jehad if they sincerely intend to take part in it?" It was puerile to say that since no one qualified as caliph, jihad was impossible. There was "no such condition" in Islam. The caliphate had ended in 1924. If Muslims had no need of guns, they would have to "polish the shoes" of the unbelievers to "enjoy ... the sweet sleep of peace and rest."102

A living death in humiliation and oppression is far less attractive than the rewards of martyrdom promised by the propagandists of jihad. Although Pakistan has formally disavowed a two-decade-long jihadist policy, the legacy has been difficult to dispel. The Lashkar-i-Tayyiba, banned in January 2002 as part of Musharraf's purported dismantling of the jihad infrastructure, has continued to thrive, by exploiting the Pakistani state's anti-Indian stance. After the carnage at Gujarat, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed used the ideology of Pakistan to his advantage to ask the state to allow Indian Muslims to emigrate. It was wrong to say that they were Indian citizens; they had every right to come to Pakistan and were suffering only because they had supported the creation of a Muslim homeland. Pakistan had to protect the Muslims of the subcontinent. If the rulers of Pakistan, who claimed to be admirers of Allama Iqbal, could not understand their faith according to the Quran and the hadith, they should at least try to understand the ideology of Pakistan according to the statements of that poetic visionary. The borders were for Hindus, not Muslims. If the borders were unlocked for Mghan Muslims, they ought to be thrown open for Indian Muslims. In India, Hindus called Muslims Pakistanis and referred to parts of Gujarat as little Pakistan. It was unconscionable for Pakistani Muslims not to aid Indian Muslims.103

The American-led war against terror in which the principal victims have been Muslims has lent force to the militants' claims. In highlighting Western duplicity in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and other parts of the world, groups like the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba have recast anticolonial ideas in a new mold. The militants' focus is on fighting not just imperialism but the forces of unbelief in every nook and cranny of the world. Freely drawing on Mawdudi's thought, modern-day militants of Hafiz Saeed's breed are hard-nosed political practitioners who are not daunted by legal niceties, least of all the charge of terrorism. Even before the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba was declared a terrorist organization by the United States and forced to change its name, it insisted that its operations in Kashmir were directed at the Indian army, with the "sole purpose of protecting the local population from its repression." It harbored no ill will toward Hindus or any other community in Kashmir, it claimed, and had scrupulously avoided targeting civilians. Those killed during encounters with the Indian security forces were, like other collateral damage, "a regrettable exception." The Lashkar-i-Tayyiba had engaged in "no direct confrontation with any nation, Muslim or non-Muslim," and there was no question of its being "involved in any activity that may endanger US property or citizens either in US or anywhere else in the world,"104

When pleading failed to do the trick, the Lashkar renamed itself the Jamaat-ud-Dawah, making only nominal changes to its logistical operations in Kashmir. Saeed publicly fulminated against Musharraf's "cowardly" policy of "bow[ing] down before the US pressure." He proclaimed: "For us jihad is sacred like praying and fasting." India had raised the specter of "cross-border terrorism" to "befool the world." There was no border between the two parts of Kashmir, "just a control line and no world forum or institution acknowledges it as border [sic]." Kashmiris were fighting for their freedom, and "no law could stop them crossing the LoC [line of control], because it was their territory that is under Indian occupation." He sneered at the suggestion that Pakistan wanted only to extend moral support to the Kashmiris. "It is sheer immorality," he declared, to offer consolation, after the Indian army killed, maimed, and tortured Kashmiris, besides burning their property. His courageous legions would never call off their jihad until they had rid the world of injustice.105

The Lashkar-i-Tayyiba and its offshoots have been involved in a series of suicide bombings in Kashmir and India. Though he denies the charge, Hafiz Saeed has been quoted as saying that suicide bombing is the best kind of jihad in the contemporary world.106 The attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 and the targeting of civilians in New Delhi and Benares punctures his claim that the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba attacks only Indian military personnel and installations. A little tactful prodding brings out the secular nature of his agenda. Asked how he could justify sending young men to their certain death in Kashmir when the jurists of Islam maintain that jihad is legitimate only if it has a chance of military success, Saeed's disingenuous reply is that his organization is fighting a guerilla war against India and the question of superior and inferior strength does not come into the equation.IO? Calling a guerilla war a jihad is a novel claim, as is his confident assertion that because Kashmiris are fighting a struggle against tyranny, the only ethical course for individual Muslims to adopt is to join them in defeating the oppressors.

Hafiz Saeed's ethical challenge is difficult to counter in a country where civil society has been pulverized by decades of military rule. In the post-September II global scenario, the theme of Western hypocrisy has dominated popular Muslim discourse the world over. After an initial surge of sympathy for Americans, Pakistanis were revolted by the cluster bombing of Afghanistan. The daily death toll in postwar Iraq has only deepened resentments: Muslim lives are cheap; American lives sacred. The "silence" of the moderate Muslims is laden with significance, because at one level it strikes an anticolonial chord in common with the militants' message. Like those whom they oppose as "religious" obscurantists, "secular" and liberal Muslims do not question the legitimacy of fighting injustice in Kashmir. Rather they point to those in their own society who have allowed extremist views to gain prominence. That the Lashkar-i- Tayyiba has been operating in full view of the state's security apparatus underscores its continuing utility to Pakistan's Kashmir policy.

In such an ambiguous situation, marred by the denial of democratic freedoms and the absence of critical debate, bouts of moderation and enlightenment are unlikely to dissipate the fog hovering over notions of jihad in Pakistan. Voices from a broad cross-section of society continue to speak out against the militaristic connotations assigned to this key ethical idea in Islam. Leading the resistance is the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which has chosen to name its journal jahd-i-Haq (The Struggle for Rights). A liberal Urdu literary publication is called Jid-o-Jehad. Attach on unarmed civilians-one definition of terrorism-are regularly condemned.108

But daily doses of disquieting news from Iraq, Mghanistan, and Pakistan's own independent tribal areas ensure guarded sympathy for the would-be warriors of Allah. And so the business of jihad continues, albeit less overtly, for the state is as yet uncertain whether peace with India will be worth the price it may have to pay for a solution of the Kashmir dispute. Until then, Pakistan's democratically enfeebled society is unlikely to succeed in restoring the broader meanings of jihad as an ethical struggle to be human. Not only are noncivil actions the bane of civil society in Pakistan, but ideologues like Hafiz Saeed justifY them as ethical. With belief (aqida) in sectarian teachings replacing faith as the central feature in a believer's life, jihad is a weapon to be unleashed in a particular time and place against unbelievers, whether Muslim or non-Muslim. Jihad has gone from being the core ethical principle of Islam to becoming a justification for unethical actions, in the pursuit of worldly aims. Muslims opposed to armed jihad for humanistic reasons are routinely dismissed as heretics and apostates.

The contextually specific nature of the debate on jihad is evident in the opinions of an anonymous Ahl-i-Hadith scholar in India who condemns the terror networks of the Lashkar-iTayyiba in unequivocal terms: "Islam enjoins upon Muslims to cultivate good relations with others," not to fight a perpetual war to dominate and decimate them. The Lashkar was giving the Ahl-i-Hadith "a very bad name" by spreading hatred against nonMuslims. Most of its members were "ignorant, crazy and stupid youth." Hardly any scholar of note was associated with the Lashkar, which abused many respectable ulema of the Ahl-iHadith in Pakistan. In talking of an "Islamic state," they did not "observe the rules of Islamic morality." The Lashkar was "defaming Islam by empty slogans of flying the Islamic flag atop the Red Fort in Delhi!" By dragging Islam through the streets like a com-modity, the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba was "spreading oppression." The "Lashkar," he said, "has nothing to do with Islam"-its operatives were "simply puppets in the hands of the Americans and the Pakistan government."109

Moderate Pakistanis share many of these opinions. But mindful of the Lashkar's close relations with the IS I, most have desisted from pressing the point aggressively. Transgressing the limits of public discourse on jihad can have fateful consequences. The military authoritarian state is of two minds about the value of jihad for strategic and political ends, and with homegrown militias using jihad to fight the "other," an informed critical debate on its meaning as an ethical struggle to be human runs the risk of being labeled both antinational and un-Islamic! In the absence of democratic norms in Pakistan, and given the frequent recourse to the untenable dichotomy between the religious and the secular, discussion of what kind of ethics Pakistani Muslims need to uphold will remain stifled, as always.

 

 

1. While Sayyid Qutb and his acolytes have covered Sayyid Qutb on our World Jihad page, because of his  strong influence on Pakistans current dilemma--we now in turn cover Mawdudi. For Sayyid Qutb see also:

2. Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2005), p. 65.

3. David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 2.

4. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity (Stanford, Cali£: Stanford University Press), 2003, pp. 187-201.

5. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).

6. Rafiuddin Hashmi and Salim Mansur Khalid (eds.), Khutut-iMawdudi (Lahore: Al-Badar, 1983), 1:15-16.

7. Abul Ala Mawdudi, AI-Jihad fi-ul Islam, 2nd ed. (Lahore: Tarjamanul-Quran, 1948), pp. 10-11.

8. Cited in Hazrat Mirza Tahir Ahmad, Murder in the Name of Allah (Cambridge, Eng.: Lutterworth, 1989), p. 15.

9. Ibid.

10. Muhammad Iqbal, who in 1926 had been elected to the provincial council, took a leading part in the disturbances. For a discussion of his role, see Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since I8S0 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 295-296.

11. Hashmi and Khalid, Khutut-i-Mawdudi, 1:17.

12. Mawdudi, AI-Jihad fi-ul Islam, pp. 8-10.

13. See, for instance, Cook, Understanding Jihad, pp. 99-102.

14. Mawdudi, AI-Jihad fi-ul Islam, pp. 14-16.

15. Ibid., pp. 18-24.

16. Ibid., pp. 25-38.

17. Ibid., pp. 120, 138-139.

18. Abul Ala Mawdudi, "Jihad in Islam," reprint (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 2001), pp. 5-6.

19. Ibid., pp. 6-n, 19-21.

20. Ibid., pp. 27. 31.

21. For a detailed discussion of Mawdudi's thought, see Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 49-68, 72-106.

22. Abul Ala Mawdudi, Tajdid wa Ihya-i-Din, 9th ed. (Lahore: Islamic Publishers, 1966), pp. 30-32. 23. Ibid., pp. 36-41.

24. Ibid., pp. 42-54.

25. Ibid., pp. 77-88, 91, I09, n4-n7.

26. Ibid., pp. 12-13, 128-129, 144-147.

27. Hashmi and Khalid, Khutut-i-Mawdudi, pp. 17-18.

28."Zuhd taang nazar ne mujhe kafir jana / Aur kafir samajhta hai Musalman hoon main."

29. Abul Ala Mawdudi, Haqiqat-i-Islam-Khutbat (Lahore: Idara Tarjuman-ul-Quran, 2003), 1:64.

30. Abul Ala Mawdudi, Khutbat (Lahore: Din Muhammad Electric Press, n.d.), pp. 238-244.

31. Muhammad Iqbal, Recomtruction of Religious Thought in Islam, reprint (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 1996), pp. 135-138, 144, 157.

32. For an analysis of the difference in their conception of the relation between the state and religion in Islam, see Ayesha Jalal, "In the Shadows of Modernity? Theology and Sovereignty in South Asian Islam," in Charles Cohen and Leonard V. Kaplan (eds.), Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State, forthcoming.

33. Mawdudi, Khutbat, pp. 6-7.

34. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, p. 135.

35.Abul Ala Mawdudi, Purclah and the Status of Women in Islam, 8th ed. (Lahore: Al-Ashari, 1986), p. 2II.

36. See Abul Ala Mawdudi, "Ethical Viewpoint of Islam," Khurshid Ahmad (trans. and ed.), www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/Books/M_EVI.

37. Mawdudi, "Jihad in Islam," pp. 28-29.

38. For the most detailed exposition of the rationale for the declaration of jihad in Kashmir, see Fazal Ilahi Vazirabadi, Maslah-i-Jihad-i-Kashmir aur us ki Mukhtasar Tarikh (Rawalpindi: Tanzim-ud-Dawat-ul-Quran wa Sunnah, 1997 [1948]); see also the Lashkat-i-Tayyiba edition, Jihad-i-Kashmir: Farziyat, Fazliyat aud Tarikh, compo Hafiz Mohammed Saeed (Lahore: Dar-ul-Andlus, 2004), hencefonhJihad-i-Kashmir. My references are to this last edition.

39. Abul Ala Mawdudi, Maslah Kashmir aur us ka hat, 2lld ed. (Lahore: Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba, 1981), pp. 73-76.

40. The Ahmadi connection with Kashmir has deep historical roots. For a discussion of its relevance in late colonial Punjab, see Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, pp. 356-360, 362-369.

41. Abu! Ala Mawdudi, "The Problem of Qadiyanism: How the Heretical Beliefs of the Ahmadiya Sect, Who Accept Their Founder Ghulam Ahmad as a Prophet, Have Put Them outside the Fold of Islam and Left Them Designated as Non-Muslims in Pakistan"; www.islamfortoday.com/ mawdudi.1.htm.

42. Tulu-i-Islam, May 1953, p. 64; http://aaiil.info/misconceptions/ fatwas/bvsd.htm.

43. Report of the Court of Inquiry Constituted under Punjab Act II of I954 to Enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of I953 (Lahore: Superintendent Government Printing Press, 1954), henceforth, Munir Report, pp. 124, 158, 185, 201.

44. Abul Ala Mawdudi, Islami Nizam aur Maghribi La Dinyat, IZth ed. (Lahore: Islamic Publishers), 1974.

45. Munir Report, pp. 221-222, 224, 226.

46. Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism, pp. 71, 76.

47. Cited in Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan's Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 285.

48. See Israr Ahmad, Jihad sey Ghurez ki Saza Nijaq: Surah-tul-Munafiqin ki Roshani Mein (Lahore: Markazi Anjuman Khudam-al-Quran, 2002).

49. Mau!ana Wahiduddin Khan, The True Jihad: The Concept of Peace, Tolerance and Non- Violence in Islam (New Delhi: Goodword, 2002), pp. 14, 16.

50. Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism, p. 65.

51. Barbara D. Metcalf, "Nationalism, Modernity, and Muslim Identity in India before 1947," in Perer van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe andAsia (Princeton, N.].: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 136.

52. Excerpt from Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, Life and Mission of Maulana Muhammad Ilyas, at www.central-mosque.com.

53. Zia-ul-Hasan Faruqi, "The Tablighi Jamat," in V. K. Gokak (ed.), Transactions of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (Simla: n.p., 1965), p.6L

54. Nadwi, Life and Mission of Maulana Muhammad Ilyas.

55. For a discussion of the Tablighi Jamaat's role in the politics of Muslim nationalism in the preindependence era, see Metcalf, "Nationalism, Modernity, and Muslim Identity."

56. Yoginder Sikand, "The Tablighi Jama' at and Politics: A Critical Reappraisal," Qalandar, May 2005, www.islaminterfaith.org.

57. Ibid.

58. Khaled Ahmed, "The Genius of Ghulam Ahmad Pervez," Friday Times (Lahore), II December 1999.

59. Cited in Ahmad, Murder in the Name of Allah, p. 56.

60. Chaudhri Ghulam Ahmad Parvez, Islam: A Challenge to Religion (Lahore: Idara-e-Tulu-i-Islam, 1968), pp. 8-10.

61. Munir Report, p. 218.

62. Islami Mumlakat Ka Khwab Uo Kasrat-i- Tabir sty Pareshan Ho Gaya) (Lahore: Tulu-i-Islam, n.d.), pp. 4-6, 9-10, 28.

63. Ahmad, Murder in the Name of Allah, pp. 13, 37, 45-60.

64. Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur, 15-21 January 1998, p. 76.

65. George Crile, Charlie Wilson's ~r: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic, 2004).

66. Syed Talat Hussain, "Breeding Ground of Extremism," Dawn (Karachi), 3 December 2001.

67. Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 42.

68. Hussain, "Breeding Ground of Extremism."

69. Muhammad Amar Rana, Jihad Kashmir wa Afghanistan: Jihadi Tanzimeen aur Mazhabi Jamatoon ka Aik Jyiza (Lahore: Mashal, 2002), pp. 18-19. The book has been translated into English as A to Z of Jihad Organizations in Pakistan (Lahore: Mashal, 2004). My references are to the original Urdu edition.

70. Rana, Jihad KiJshmir wa Afghanistan, pp. 122-123.

71. Khaled Ahmed, "The Grand Deobandi Consensus," Friday Times (Lahore), 4 February 2000.

72. Ibid.

73. Rana, Jihad Kashmir wa Afghanistan, pp. 19-20.

74. KhaledAhmed, "The Grand Deobandi Consensus."

75. For the statement that not all members are jihadis, see Alex Alexiev, "Tablighi Jamaat: The Stealthy Legions of Jihad," Middle East Quarterly 12, no. 1 Qanuary 2005).

76. Rana, Jihad KiJshmir wa Afghanistan, pp. 17, 49.

77. Khaled Ahmed, "Re-Assertion of the Barelvis in Pakistan," Friday Times (Lahore), 8 September 2000.

78. Corroboration can be found in newspaper reports from mid-1999 to the summer of 2001.

79. Syed Talat Hussain, "Breeding Ground of Extremism," Dawn (Karachi), 3 December 2001.

80. Ansar Abbasi, "Anti-Arms Campaign a Failure So Far: Musharraf," News (Lahore), 26 August 2001.

81. For an interesting analysis of the dilemma, see Khaled Ahmed, "Is There Life after Kashmir?" Friday Times (Lahore), 27 August 2001.

82. Rana, Jihad KiJshmir wa Afghanistan, p. 51.

83. Ahmed, "Is There Life after Kashmir?"

84.Mubashir Zaidi, "ISI Still Playing a Double Game as Talks Become Imminent," South Asia Tribune, 18-24 May 2003.

85. See, for instance, the letters written to Masood Azhar by young women pining to participate in jihad, in Jaish-i-Muhammad (Karachi), July 2000, pp. 35-36.

86. Rana, Jihad KiJshmir wa Afghanistan, pp. 30, 34-37.

87. Ibid., pp. 22-28.

88. Ibid., p. 54.

89. Voice of Islam, September 2000, n.p.

90. Editorial by Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, Voice of Islam, November 2000.

91. Ibid.

92. Mawdudi, Maslah Kashmir aur us ka hal p. 75.

93. In addition to the two considered here, see the voluminous book by Mufti Abdur Rahman AI-Rahmani, AI-]ihadAI-Islami, compo Abu Yusuf Ijaz Ahmad Tanvir (Lahore: AI-Andlus, 2004). Gulistan-i-]ihad (The Garden of Jihad) (Lahore: AI-Andlus, 2004) is a short pamphlet consisting of AI-Rahmani's sermons. Other titles include Obaidur Rahman Mohammadi, Difa-i-]ihad (Lahore: AI-Andlus, 2003); and two pamphlets: Maulana Emir Hamza, Insaniyat ka Qatil: Hindu Dharam (Killer of Humanity: The Hindu Religion) (Lahore: Al-Andlus, n.d.), and Hamza, Kashmiri Aurat aur America (The Kashmiri Woman and America) (Lahore: AI-Andlus, n.d.).

94. Vazirabadi, Maslah-i-]ihad-i-Kashmir.

95. Ibid., pp. 109, n6.

96. Ibid., pp. 19-22.

97. Ibid., pp. 66-67.

98. Ibid., pp. 137-140.

99. Abdus Salam Bin Muhammad, ]ehad in the Present Times, trans., Khalid Mahmood (Lahore: Dar-ul-Andlus, n.d.), pp. 10-22. 100. Ibid., p. 61.

101. Ibid.

102. Ibid., pp. 62-65.

103. Weekly Ghazvah Time, 22-28 March 2002.

104. Voice of Islam, November 2000, p. 15.

105. News, 21 November 2002.

106. The denial was made to me in person by Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, whom I interviewed in Lahore in November 2005. This contradicts his statement in an interview with Mohammad Shehzad published in the Friday Times (Lahore), 17 April 2003.

107. Interview with Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, November 2005.

108. For the condemnation, see Mohammed Hanif Ramay, Islam ki Rohani Qadreen: Maut Nahin Zindagi (Islam's Spiritual Vision: Life Not Death) (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 2005); and Abu Sulaiman Shahjahanpuri (comp.),jihad-Islami aur Daur-i-Hazar ki fang (Lahore: Jamiat, 2002).

109. Yoginder Sikand, ''Ahl-i Hadith Scholar Denounces Lashkar-i Tayyeba Terrorism," at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indiathinkersnet/message/8600?viscount= 100.

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