Theorising Popular Sovereignty in the Colony: Abul Aʿla Maududi's “Theodemocracy”

Widely seen as an ideologue of what today we call Islamism—although this was not a term that he would have recognized—Abul Aʿla Maududi (1903–1979), the influentialFootnote ¹ Indo-Pakistani thinker proposed a detailed vision of what he called “theodemocracy.” This has received some academic attention,Footnote ² as well as significant misunderstanding, particularly in popular media. His theodemocracy is seen primarily as a theocracy,Footnote ³ despite his explicitly stated interest in rejecting theocracy by provincializing its philosophical underpinnings as specifically European. I show here that Maududi's vision of theodemocracy opened up a productive space for reflection on the relationship between popular and state sovereignty, particularly within the colonial context. Maududi saw popular sovereignty as a moral problem. Popular sovereignty, he thought, corrupted the potential for individual moral development that the institutional mechanism of the state could otherwise allow for. He recognized that the idea of popular sovereignty held a complicated, nonlinear relationship with the sovereignty of the modern state, and was prescient in his intuition that one possible implication of this obfuscated relationship was the enhanced autonomy of the state against its own citizens. Yet he was also enthusiastic about the potential for the state to transform individual morality, using the colonial liberal state as both a model and a foil for his arguments. Highlighting the complicated relationship of his ideas with colonial rule, involving both rejection and selective appropriation, I show here that “theodemocracy” was his attempt at divorcing sovereignty from the state while retaining the state's institutional framework for the moral transformation of individuals. This endeavor generated creative tensions and forms an important contribution to the ideas about the state and sovereignty that have inspired political action and debate around the world.Footnote ⁴

Scholars have tended to place Maududi's ideas only within the Islamic or the Indian context,Footnote ⁵ imposing limits Maududi sought actively to transcend. I add depth to our understanding of Maududi's vision of theodemocracy by providing a glimpse of the rich hinterland of ideas that he drew upon, including Islamic, Pan-Asian, and European debates, as well as his lived experience in colonial British India. Placing Maududi's thought in this wider context goes beyond the Indian and Islamic concerns that scholars have tended to highlight, but also beyond the diffusionist vision of European ideas.Footnote ⁶ Internalist histories of the emergence of the modern state within Europe do not recognize the role of colonialism, and forget that the modern state was not a fully developed entity at any stage that was “brought over” to the colonies. I suggest that Maududi's theodemocracy has to be viewed as an immensely influential and critical engagement with the emergence of the state, both the idea and the institution, as the dominant political frame of the twentieth century for social, political, and individual transformation. Taking seriously the state as an institution, Maududi created one of the more systematic, albeit problematic, bridges over the gap between shariʿa, the Islamic normative framework including but not restricted to legal reasoning, and European political theory.

In the first section I elaborate Maududi's critique of popular sovereignty by placing it within the context of international debates that Maududi was exposed to and participated in. The second section fleshes out the innovations in Islamic thought that Maududi undertook to develop his concepts of hakimiyyat ilahi and theodemocracy as alternatives to popular sovereignty. The third section focuses on Maududi's fascination with the state as an agent of individual transformation at the mass level, and the inspiration provided by the liberal, colonial state for his vision of theodemocracy.

Popular Sovereignty or Hakimiyyat ilahi?

Writing in the mid-1930s, Maududi defined the state as that entity or “system” (nizām) that has “coercive power” (qahirāna taqat) over a population within a determined geographical region.Footnote ⁷ But, he asked, how does the state establish that coercive power, and more critically, how is this coercion legitimized? Maududi implied that since the state was essentially an entity that exercised coercive power, obedience could not be obtained without some level of chicanery. Popular obedience to the state, he suggested, is obtained through a conception of sovereignty that allows the population to believe that it has not been enslaved.Footnote ⁸ The sense that the state is the collective form of the population and its will, which is then supplied with coercive force, is, he claimed, the basic principle of democracy. The deception involved here lies in the fact that while in theory hakimiyyat or sovereignty belongs to each person within the state, practically this is not possible. Thus, for practical purposes, democratic governments claim to respond to the desires of the majority, and not all members of the polity (TA, 269–70). How that majority is formed, along what lines, and in which ways, he worried had grave implications for democratic governance.

The idea of majority rule, he thought, could work well where the population had deep “agreement about fundamental concerns” (asasi umūr) (TA, 271) and the discussion is primarily about “means and methods” (TA, 281). However, this was likely to be the case for a very small number of situations. The more likely and prevalent outcome was that majority rule would very easily descend into racist and competitive nationalism as had happened in the case of white oppression of blacks in America, Nazi atrocities in Germany, and English oppression of Irish and Catholic citizens of Britain.Footnote ⁹ Once the logic of majority rule was allowed to operate unhindered the state could legitimize any action, however immoral, through the mythical notion of popular will. There was no philosophical justification in that case for any minimum standards of decency or humanity; popular will could and had, Maududi argued, legitimized the flouting of such norms in some of the most developed democracies already. Shariʿa, on the other hand, for him, provided a clear normative framework for governance.

His concern about this conflation of popular and state sovereignty was part of his attempt at parsing out the implications of European history for political ideas and practice, and was directly linked to his concern about the reductive conceptualization of religion in European thought. He repeatedly pointed out that Europeans are mistaken when they translate dīn as “religion,” by which they mean some rituals and beliefs unconnected with other aspects of life.Footnote ¹⁰ Equally, his Indian and Muslim audiences were mistaken when they did not realize that the one idea that offered direct competition to dīn, in terms of its comprehensiveness and its demands for sovereignty, was “the idea of the state [istait] . . . even though it needs more depth to fully take over the meaning of dīn.”Footnote ¹¹ He reminded his audiences that the state's arena had almost become as all-encompassing as that of dīn and aspects of life that were in the past regulated by dīn were increasingly being taken over by the state.

Maududi's suspicion was not unfounded; recent research has suggested that a historically specific conception of religion was critical to the emergence of the idea of popular sovereignty providing legitimacy to the state in Europe as it separated from the church and established an independent basis for lawfulness.Footnote ¹² Given the very specific historical contingencies of the coming together of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, the struggles in Europe were certainly different from much of the Muslim world where such a structured clerical hierarchy with institutionalized access to the state did not exist. Imagining religion as interiorized, individualized belief was a specifically European development,Footnote ¹³ as the church-state's attempt “at uniformity failed” and policies of limited toleration were instituted that allowed political power to move “out of a purely derivative status into its own unique role.”Footnote ¹⁴ This was not a linear, nor a simple, process, but from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century various developments led to an increase in the reliance on the idea of popular will for state legitimacy. The authority of the church when replaced by the sanction of popular will sharpened the focus on territoriality and belonging; popular sovereignty was the expression of the will of a territorially and culturally distinct people.Footnote ¹⁵ Nineteenth-century European thought increasingly conflated nationalism with popular sovereignty and the two with the state.Footnote ¹⁶ Duncan Kelly has rightly suggested that “if the nineteenth century does have a theory of popular sovereignty, it exists only with reference to the particular development of a new state theory of national, indirect and representative government.”Footnote ¹⁷ Resounding echoes of this conflation between representative democracy, nationalism, and statehood can still be found in contemporary liberal nationalist theories.Footnote ¹⁸

One way in which many within the colonized world, particularly the Western-educated elites, interpreted and contributed to this conflation was to believe that they needed to be identified as a nation for their claims to popular sovereignty to be recognized.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, many nationalist movements were predicated on a claim that their nation had existed before colonialism and had the right to self-determination as a nation. In India, this position was articulated by leaders as diverse as the socialist Nehru, the liberal nationalist Jinnah, and the Hindu revivalist ideologue Savarkar. Recognizing this confusion between nation, sovereignty, and the state but also rejecting it, Maududi argued against the need to establish nationhood in the mold of European nation-states for demanding self-determination. He developed a detailed critique of nationalism that built on his analysis of the differences between European and Islamic historical experiences as well as philosophical divergences.

He also built on ideas critiquing popular sovereignty that had been articulated by a number of European and Indian thinkers and activists from the late nineteenth century as mass democracy began to seem an actual political possibility. Foremost among them was Gandhi, of whom Maududi had reportedly been an admirer until the early 1920s, and whose notion of self-rule or swaraj was tinged with a deep mistrust of mass democracy.Footnote ²⁰ Maududi suggested that while the legitimacy of the state rested on the idea of popular sovereignty, the difficulty in operationalizing this meant that the state as an institution established its sovereignty over the people.Footnote ²¹ Two important consequences flowed from this for him. First, the state had become an institution without any moral limits to its power,Footnote ²² and second, its value as a vehicle of societal and individual transformation was squandered because the state was not dedicated to establishing justice through the imposition of shariʿa, which was for him connected with the moral transformation of individual lives.Footnote ²³

It was with this concern about the importance of a moral framework directing state actions that he developed his notion of divine sovereignty and theodemocracy. Maududi is credited, perhaps incorrectly,Footnote ²⁴ with coining the neologism hakimiyyat ilahi. The term and related ideas were already in circulation, and one important Indian scholar that Maududi would have known about, Abul Mahasin Muhammad Sajjad (1883–1940), had initiated a discussion about the notion of divine governance, albeit with a different inflection regarding the role of the state.Footnote ²⁵ However, Maududi gave the idea its most systematic and influential treatment. Maududi argued as early as his first major publication, Al-Jihād fil Islam (1930), that only an alternative moral framework could provide an antidote to the exclusions engendered by secular, national democracy and imperial rule. He concluded his discussions about the ineffectual international legal regime by arguing that

Moving smoothly, and somewhat disingenuously, between qānun (state law) and shariʿa (the normative framework), which he well knew were considered different elements by Islamic jurists, he argued that the core principles of shariʿa were clearly defined and could not be modified or reneged upon, unlike the promises made by the European empires to the Ottoman Empire and reneged upon at the end of the First World War.

This was an important debate of the period that provided inspiration to Maududi, and to which he had been exposed in his role as a journalist at a time when the Khilafat movement swept through India. The Khilafat movement, a broad-based mobilization in India that included not just Muslims but also Hindus, Sikhs, and others, was part of a wider anticolonial movement that called for the restoration of the Ottoman Caliphate as part of its opposition to European colonialism. Gandhi, a non-Muslim, was an important leader of the Khilafat movement. The Ottomans themselves had been ambivalent about the international association of their putative spiritual leadership of an entity called “the Muslim World.”Footnote ²⁸ Many Pan-Asian anticolonialists, including the Japanese and the Chinese, viewed the treatment of the Ottoman Empire as a failure of the international-law regime as well as a manifestation of rapacious European colonialism, and saw it primarily as another form of “anti-Western internationalism,” not thinking of it “as a conservative religious movement.”Footnote ²⁹

Another somewhat surprising source of inspiration for Maududi and for viewing Islamic ideas as vehicles for anticolonial movements was the Bolshevik government in Russia, which supported various regional movements that used Islamic ideas and practices as expressions of antitsarism and anticolonialism into the mid-1920s. The coming together of communist support for subnational anti-imperial groups and the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire created intellectual ripples in direct, as well as subtle and nonlinear, ways. As an example of the more circuitous intellectual influences, consider the paradox that despite the association of communism with atheism, many of the first Muslim communists in India were deeply religious menFootnote ³⁰ who had left India declaring it a Dār-ul-Harb (Land of War against Islam) as a result of the failure of Khilafat movement, and decided to move to Afghanistan to be able to live their lives in close accordance with Islamic principles. The Afghan government's suspicious treatment led many of these migrants to move to Tashkent. Welcomed by the Soviet Union, some enrolled in the University of Eastern Toilers and went on to become prominent Indian communist leaders.

Maududi too was involved in the earlier stages of this movement, called the Hijrat (migration) movement, but moved away from it after disputes with its leaders, apparently because of his insistence that the strategies and goals be planned and realistic.Footnote ³¹ In the late 1920s and 1930s Maududi also attended meetings organized by the socialist Khairi brothers in Delhi,Footnote ³² who had in their appearance before the Central Committee of the Soviets in Russia in 1918 proclaimed, “The time had come for India to free herself, following what had been done in Russia.”Footnote ³³ The imprint of discussions among Indian communists and socialists is readily discernible on Maududi's thought—from his insistence on organizing Jamaat-e-Islami as a cadre-based Leninist party to his rhetoric around revolutionary takeover of the state.Footnote ³⁴

Yet Maududi remained deeply suspicious of the role that ideas of popular sovereignty had played in fascist dictatorships, communist purges, and imperial nationalisms. He argued that popular sovereignty decimated the existential and epistemic humilityFootnote ³⁵ with which humans and previous political orders had approached lawmaking. He claimed that the “real cause of persecution [fitna] and conflict [fasād] in this world is man's desire to act like God over other men [insān par insān kī khudai hai]” (NS, 7). The framework of popular sovereignty legitimated this impulse to dominate through majoritarian rule.Footnote ³⁶ In contrast, in a polity defined by the humility engendered by shariʿa, he argued, laws existed to reinforce moral values, not the whims of the majority, and thus the violation of certain minimum standards of behavior towards minorities and vulnerable populations could not be publicly justified (ILC, 231, 266). It was to return the state and its citizens to moral reasoning that human beings had to be stripped, conceptually and politically, of their pretensions of being the lawgivers in either their individual or collective capacity.

One implication of Maududi's arguments was that while individuals and groups had controlled states in the past, their oppression of others was seen for what it was—illegitimate and immoral. In contrast, decisions made through popular sovereignty had a seal of legitimacy and were undergirded by the idea that humans knew best what they or others under their control needed. Discussions about popular sovereignty, he thought, had remained mired in questions about the processes of selecting and electing representatives, and had led humans to believe that they could also decide what was right and good. However, humans are unable to work through the implications of their own decisions not only because human knowledge is limited, but also because it is frequently clouded over by short-term interests, habits, and social norms (ILC, 13–14). Human attempts at becoming lawgivers are destined to perpetuate oppression and can only be combated through a clear recognition of human limitations.Footnote ³⁷ At a philosophical level, then, for Maududi, popular sovereignty legitimated the oppression of man by man, whether in the form of colonialism, racist nationalism, or fascism. He characterized this oppression as fitna, reconceptualizing the term beyond its classical and still dominantFootnote ³⁸ usage in Islamic thought as chaos in society, to mean persecution.Footnote ³⁹ In the interwar period, when he first articulated these ideas, exclusionary nationalism, colonial control, and fascism were associated almost exclusively with the most developed democracies of the world.

Theodemocracy as Limited Sovereignty: Reimagining Dīn

At the same time, Maududi could not but recognize the appeal, particularly among the colonized, of the idea of popular sovereignty as anticolonial self-determination. He needed to articulate a response that addressed this enthusiasm for popular sovereignty and did so by fundamentally reimaging dīn, the lived Islamic tradition. The first element of his response was establishing the idea of sovereignty of Allah or hakimiyyat ilahi as a conceptual alternative to popular sovereignty. Maududi modified existing ideas in Islamic thought about Allah being the creator (khāliq) and owner (mālik) to claim that hakimiyyat or political sovereignty belonged to Allah. As Muhammad Qasim Zaman has perceptively noted, Maududi presented an unusual and innovative reading of the Quranic verses affirming Allah's authority. Zaman argues that medieval and early modern jurists had debated the nature and extent of God's authority without showing much interest in or enthusiasm for establishing God's political authority. The Quranic verse which proclaimed that “authority [al-hukm] belongs to God alone” and was central to Maududi's interpretation of hakimiyyat was, if at all, debated by other jurists with an emphasis on the relationship between reason and revelation. Modern Islamists, Maududi foremost among them, reinterpreted this and other related verses to argue that “anything less than exclusive submission to God's law is . . . idolatory.”Footnote ⁴⁰

A key difficulty that Maududi faced here was that Islamic history did not really help him in making the case for divine sovereignty as the guiding principle of statecraft. Islamic political thought contained in the vast “mirrors for princes” literature conceived of religion as an ethical framework that may or may not be helpful in statecraft and did not require any direct management of the souls of citizens through the state, even though the sovereign was exhorted to be an exemplar for his subjects.Footnote ⁴¹ Premodern and early modern Islamic empires and kingdoms had remained uninterested in managing the individual conscience and lives of all their subjects.Footnote ⁴² Maududi avoided reference to the vast body of akhlaq or ethical literature that emphasized individual piety rather than political transformation, and to which the Persianate South Asian Islamic scholars had made significant contributions.Footnote ⁴³ Moreover, despite its local relevance and historical proximity the Indian context, the Mughal Empire seems to have been, if anything, a source of embarrassment for him, and there is scarcely a mention of it in his writings. In his native India and neighboring Iran, Mughal and Safavid emperors had crafted forms of sovereignty that locked kingship with sainthood such that embodied practices of sovereignty by these kings bordered on heresy and blasphemy by doctrinal standards.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Mughal king Akbar (1542–1605) had gone so far as to proclaim a new synthetic religion dīn-e-ilahī,Footnote ⁴⁵ of which Maududi thoroughly disapproved. Apart from noting, quite correctly, in his discussion regarding the rights of minorities that the Ottoman and Mughal Empires had demonstrated greater inclusion of non-Muslims in economic, political, and social elites than contemporary European empires had in the case of their minorities, Maududi could not really draw upon these historical examples for his ideal Islamic state.

Instead he attempted to articulate a systematic theoretical vision that built on his involvement in debates around state sovereignty and alternatives to imperialism. In 1939 he published Islām ka Nazariya Siyāsi.Footnote ⁴⁶ Here Maududi made the first detailed attempt at presenting Islam as a set of coherent and mutually reinforcing ideas that should dictate action—in his words, “a regulated system” (bāzābita nizām), or what we might call an ideology. This was, by his own admission, at least in part a response to those commentators who he claimed had generated the impression that Islam was a collection of “scattered ideas and practices” in their haste to demonstrate Islam's compatibility with socialism, dictatorship, democracy, or other dominant ideologies (NS, 1–2). In this essay he first used the terms hakimiyyat; “theodemocracy”; and ʿamūmī khilāfat (popular caliphate), terms that were to become the foundations of his theory of Islamic state.

Maududi defined sovereignty as the final authority to make laws and argued that only a being prior to the state or any particular group of people could claim that role: “hakimiyyat (sovereignty) belongs only to God. The only qānun sāz (law-giver) is God.” His use of the terms “sovereignty” and “law-giver” in English in the Urdu text was in part an indication of his familiarity with European political theory,Footnote ⁴⁷ but perhaps most importantly it was an attempt at helping his readers understand what he meant by the Urdu neologisms not in wide circulation yet. Hakimiyyat ilahi for him was a fundamental characteristic of an Islamic state such that “any person, family, class, or group, in fact the whole population of a state [istait, transliterated in Urdu text] combined, cannot claim hakimiyyat or sovereignty [English word in Urdu text]. The true sovereign is only Allah, everybody else is a subject” (NS, 12). In his elaboration of hakimiyyat ilahi Maududi conceived of shariʿa as a divine “constitution” (dastūr) that defined some overarching principles for social, political, and economic life (NS, 16).

Conceiving of Islam in this way allowed him to move beyond the limits of both communism and liberalism. This was an explicitly stated aim for him and he argued that this constitution, shariʿa, supported both personal freedom and freedom from class oppression. This was possible, he argued, because the economic limits on interest, a clearly defined law of inheritance for both men and women, the injunction for zakat (a tax on all wealth to be distributed directly to the needy), and a prohibition on speculation existed in Islam, at the same time as complete support for private ownership (NS, 15). The notion of hakimiyyat ilahi then allowed a polity to circumvent the divisive politics of both liberalism and communism.

Characteristically, he was also not entirely willing to give up on the idea of popular sovereignty and the second element of his response to widespread enthusiasm for it was the idea of a popular viceregency (his term), which he translated as ʿamūmī khilāfat. He needed to reconcile this new notion of Allah's sovereignty with his ideas about the rationality of human beings. Democracy to him represented the ability of humans to make rational decisions about their everyday life, which was for him entirely compatible with the Islamic tradition. To him democratic decision-making was not the problem; it was the notion of popular sovereignty that allowed for no limits on what majorities could decide to do with the minorities, or even with themselves.

For making an argument about political engagement and establishing the right kind of a state as a responsibility for all Muslims, Maududi relied heavily on the Quranic verse (al-Nur-7) “Allah has promised those who believe in you, and practice good deeds that they will be made his viceregents [khalifa] just like He made others before them his viceregents.” Maududi argued that the Quran addresses all Muslims here. Thus, all Muslims are eligible for viceregency, and the role has not been specified for any group, family, or class. For Maududi, “every believer [momin] is God's viceregent, and thus responsible to God for his deeds” (NS, 19). Rather than interpreting this verse to mean that each human is responsible for her own actions, as the vast majority of ulema, or Islamic scholars, had done, Maududi expanded its implications to include the responsibility to political involvement. He argued that the verse implied that each Muslim was accountable for making sure the state operated within the overarching framing of the shariʿa. Political engagement was not an optional extra but a central requirement for leading a good Muslim life. Going against the dominant ulema opinion, Maududi made political engagement an obligation for Muslims.Footnote ⁴⁸

Another implication that he drew from this Quranic verse and others was that there was no space for dictatorship (a word Maududi transliterates in Urdu) of an individual or a class in an Islamic state (NS, 20). Ordinary Muslims had the right to make decisions about their profession, skills, children's education, and so forth. He claimed that in Islamic historical experience slaves had become kings, low caste individuals had led prayers, and weavers and cloth sellers had become qāzi (judge) and muftī (legal scholar) (NS, 20). All this showed, to him, that there were no legal and discursive barriers to leadership and active participation across classes in Islam.

Muslims, he argued, have the right and duty to elect an amīr or a president whose “position is no more than . . . the concentration of the viceregency of all the Muslims” (NS, 22). He—and it had to be a manFootnote ⁴⁹—would not be above criticism and oversight. Ideally as a sign of his piety and modesty, the contender would not put his own candidacy forward (NS, 23). The amīr would also be directly responsible to the majlis-e-shūra, a body elected through general election. Maududi recognized that elections were not part of the state in Medina and noted his support for electing a shūra “even though there is no example of this among the first caliphs” (NS, 23). The Medinian polity of the Prophet and his first caliphs provided some hints but not the full picture of his ideal Islamic state. In Maududi's Islamic state, democratic decision-making was to be facilitated by the shūra, where each individual member was to be responsible for voting based on his conscience rather than party discipline. In keeping with long-running Islamic practice, the courts would be entirely independent of the executive.Footnote ⁵⁰

This is the form of government that Maududi called “theodemocracy”Footnote ⁵¹ or ilahi jamhūrī hakumat. He was conscious that he was coining a term and declared that it was necessary because people were likely to confuse his Islamic state with a theocracy. This Islamic “theory of the state” (NS, 19) he insisted was different from the European experience. Europe, he wrote, “is familiar with that theocracy in which a particular religious class (priestly class) uses God's name to make its own rule and impose it on others, and establishes its God-like writ [khudai] on common citizens” (NS, 12). Maududi's ideal Islamic state drew upon the historical experience of Muslim ulema who as a class had not been imbricated with the state in the way the clergy had been in Europe.Footnote ⁵² Maududi wanted to incorporate these important differences in historical experiences into his theory of the state, at the same time as recognizing the transformed institutional and ideational context of the twentieth century. He thus claimed that his theodemocracy was a democracy to the extent that it supported limited popular will for rational decision making, but also produced epistemic humility by recognizing conceptually and practically that shariʿa, not unbounded human will, provided the overarching moral framework for this state.

The State as an Agent of Ethical Perfection

Ironically, given his concerns regarding the sovereignty that the state appropriated for itself, Maududi ended up moving the state center stage in Islamic normative thinking and argued more forcefully than others before him for bringing the state and shariʿa, the normative ethico-legal framework, together.Footnote ⁵³ He viewed the modern state with awe precisely because he recognized its power as an institution in shaping individual behavior, declaring that “the nineteenth-century vision of the state is now utterly outdated. . . . The state is no longer outside of society. . . . Now the state's arena has almost become as all-encompassing as that of dīn” (TA, 292–93). Maududi's sensitivity to the state's ability to catalyze social and individual transformations places him clearly within a global intellectual and political conversation of his time. The early to mid-twentieth century was a period of particular openness to alternative utopias and many different visions, the vast majority of which revolved around the idea of the state.

Some scholars have already noted the importance of the lived experience of the British colonial state for Maududi;Footnote ⁵⁴ in this section I highlight its role as both a foil and a model for his vision of theodemocracy. In the Indian context, the British colonial state—liberal, secular, and modern by its own reckoning—intensified its hold after the 1857 rebellion that attempted to overthrow the creeping control that the East India Company had exerted. In the ensuing years, the British state took explicit control, and an unprecedented raft of new interventions in everyday life followed along with the intensification of older initiatives: revamping the form and substance of mass education;Footnote ⁵⁵ consolidation of spiritual, economic, and political power to create a pernicious form of feudalism;Footnote ⁵⁶ sharpening of individual religious identities through census, separate electorates, and, critically, codification and stultification of Muslim and Hindu laws,Footnote ⁵⁷ in addition to the increased legalization of social life.Footnote ⁵⁸ All this highlighted the power and role of the state in a very dramatic manner to Indians. More critically, and even with the best of intentions, British colonial administrators’ own understanding of religion as a set of privatized rituals combined with the interests of governance meant that the norms and values that the British saw as secular were perceived as particularly European Christian by most Indians.Footnote ⁵⁹ The appropriation of neutrality by the colonial state in this increasingly polarized context directly impinged on the capacity for cross-religious political engagement by local actors while permitting the colonial state greater reach into their everyday life.Footnote ⁶⁰

Maududi often reminded his audiences that a unique feature of the modern state seems to be its intrusive management of individuals and communities, which he implied was tied to European historical experience. Some recent researches have explored these differences between modern imperial states of Asia and Europe.Footnote ⁶¹ Influential scholars such as the postcolonial theorist Talal Asad and European intellectual historian Larry Siedentop have, from very different perspectives, highlighted the centrality of European Christian ideas about the management of individual conscience and its implications for modern governance.Footnote ⁶² These ideas came together with resources and ideas from colonies in making the modern liberal state European, global, and an ongoing project at the same time.Footnote ⁶³ In this context, state power grewFootnote ⁶⁴ in tandem with liberal ideas about wresting individual freedom from the state. This complicated, passionate yet oppositional, relationship with individual liberty remains the substantive core and historical legacy of the intertwined emergence of both the modern state and liberal thought. A broad range of thinkers and activists—from fascists to communists, socialists, and liberal nationalistsFootnote ⁶⁵—began to view the state as the primary vehicle for societal transformation, even as they differed on the exact contours of the state and the purposes to which it must be deployed. It was not despite the contradictions within the “state idea,”Footnote ⁶⁶ but because these contradictions offered capacious possibilities for interpretation of its relationship with individuals and communities, that there was immense excitement about it. By the twentieth century the state had emerged as the master concept of political vocabularyFootnote ⁶⁷ at an international scale, such that popular sovereignty has “no form, place and time apart from the state itself.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Maududi participated in this global conversation by imaging a state wedded to shariʿa norms to bring about much-needed social and individual transformation. Here the colonial state provided an important model for him. With mass democratic participation becoming a reality only close to the beginning of the twentieth century—and we sometimes forget that through the nineteenth century,“popular sovereignty did not mean popular government”Footnote ⁶⁹—various kinds of thinkers around the world were beginning to articulate anxieties about the implications of allowing “the people” access to the state.Footnote ⁷⁰ The colonial state exhibited these anxieties in a more pronounced manner. Mill, influential in Britain and relatedly India, tempered his powerful articulation of freedom from compulsion as a basic principle, by adding caveats that legitimated rule over those deemed too immature to govern, including the colonized.Footnote ⁷¹ Moreover, despite his deep sympathy for classical economic theory, he endorsed an expanded role for the state to develop the right kind of citizens.Footnote ⁷² The transformations that the British colonial state brought about were couched in the language of scientific progress and civilizational development; the empire was increasingly legitimized in the name of scientific expertise that would facilitate progress.Footnote ⁷³ Influential liberal thinkers had endorsed and supported this role for the state in the service of progress. Indian urban audiences had been thoroughly primed by the first decades of the twentieth century to imagine and accept the need for improvement at the individual and social levels managed primarily by the state.

Maududi's fractured attempt to bring together the centrality of the individual in shariʿa with the institutional mechanisms of the modern state paralleled the conflicted relationship between individual, state, and sovereignty manifest in the limited democratic procedures introduced in India by the colonial state. The 1919 reforms introduced a contradictory dynamic with each individual responsible for his vote in a dual capacity: as the holder of an individual conscience that must stand apart from society, as well as in his capacity as a member and representative of a community or social group, defined often through class, religion, or ethnicity. This vision of “the individual as both an active player in the world, and yet, at the very same time, as an autonomous moral agent, transcending the bonds of society,”Footnote ⁷⁴ created deep tensions. How was the individual to understand herself: as a member of a community with the right to communal sovereign decision-making, or as an isolated, sovereign being? How was individual ethical perfection, central to the task of religious piety, linked to the political order?

This was an important question for Maududi, as it was for many other influential Indian thinkers who saw liberal ideas around popular sovereignty as creating new ethical dilemmas and possibilities, for individuals as well as for society. Gandhi, as Devji has argued, expressed a deep concern about the reliance on the state for establishing the value of human life. His solution was to entirely bypass the state by locating sovereignty firmly within each individual. This sovereignty could only be achieved by following one's ethical duty.Footnote ⁷⁵ Sovereignty, then, was not an automatic attribute but one that each individual had to strive for. For Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Har Dayal, otherwise very different thinkers, the idea of popular sovereignty was linked inexorably to the attempt at personal reformation through the “freedom to pursue one's ethical potential.”Footnote ⁷⁶ It was within this context that Maududi too foregrounded the ethical, but with a different inflection.

Unlike Gandhi, Maududi saw immense potential in the state as a vehicle of individual moral transformation and thought that “the evils which are not eradicated through the preachings of the Quran need the coercive power of the state to eradicate them” (ILC, 231). The imprint of the liberal imperial state's power to remodel individuals and communities and the desire to modify behavior in Maududi's thought came even more forcefully to the fore with the formation of Pakistan in 1947. Maududi's Islamic state could only be effective in bringing about the social and individual moral revolution that he envisioned if it continued along the institutional pathways established by the colonial administration. Operating in a secular state formed as a state for Muslims of India, but not one committed to Islamic governance, forced new challenges upon MaududiFootnote ⁷⁷ and required him to operationalize his theory of the state in more detail than before. It is in these elaborations that the contours of the colonial liberal state underlying his Islamic state begin to emerge more sharply.

Soon after the formation of Pakistan, Maududi argued that the establishment of democratic procedures was critical to the enterprise of establishing an Islamic state. In an address to a law college in Lahore in 1948 he argued that the new state had an unprecedented opportunity to shape its constitution entirely in consonance with shariʿa through democratic procedures. Refuting the claim that shariʿa was not compatible with a modern state legal system, Maududi first established that law was indeed central to the enterprise of running a state (ILC, 45–46). It was, he declared, only that the different vocabulary of Islamic legal language as well as the diffuse ways in which shariʿa was practiced meant that some effort had to be expended in systematizing it so that its compatibility with the modern state could be revealed. Dividing shariʿa into its core elements and central mechanics and vehemently rebutting criticisms that shariʿa was “archaic, barbarian and riven by internal divisions” (ILC, 69), Maududi worked hard, but not entirely persuasively, to assure his critics that many aspects of the state as they knew it would remain unchanged. The organs of the Islamic state, he said, would be the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. These organs would function independently of one another (ILC, 225–27).

Identifying the ahl al-hal wal ʿaqd (those who bind and loosen) with the legislature (ILC, 221), Maududi presented an unconventional reading of the role of scholars who had in medieval practice been seen as those who had the responsibility and right to elect a leader. Further, Maududi argued that consultation is an imperative for the Islamic state, but while the amīr is obliged to consult his advisers, he is not required to follow their “unanimous or even majority opinion” if it contradicts shariʿa (ILC, 228). How different interpretations of shariʿa were to be reconciled he left vague, implying only that the legislature would be the body that would debate such matters, and ultimately, the amīr must always follow his conscience. On surer historical footing regarding the role of the judiciary in Islamic history, Maududi argued at length that the judiciary had to be independent of the executive.

What saved Maududi's vision of a theodemocratic Islamic state from descending quickly into fascism was, in his view, his insistence on the importance of individual conscience —for the amīr, as noted above, and individual members of the shūra, as well as each citizen. Maududi did not elaborate upon the modalities of how this would work. Perhaps this was because he was relying on the deep entrenchment of ideas about nonbureaucratic individual ethical responsibility in Islamic thought to render unnecessary further elaboration for a Muslim audience. Hallaq has argued that the wide range of shariʿa practices converged on “a common denominator, namely, the cultivation of the individual as a moral subject,” where individual conscience did not have to suffer from “theistic tyranny and the absence of individual moral autonomy . . . against which the Reformation and Enlightenment constituted reactions.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Within the classical shariʿa framework, individual ethical responsibility did not have to be separated from piety and/or managed through bureaucratic procedures but instead provided an important building block of sound governance that Maududi took for granted.

From the 1950s on, Maududi expanded upon his vision of the Islamic state, detailing the qualifications for rulers, the norms of citizenship, the terms of inclusion of non-Muslims into his Islamic state, and the duties of different organs of the state. Responding to debates within the Pakistani constitutional assembly and criticism of his position regarding non-Muslims in his Islamic state, he now elaborated that non-Muslims could be members of the legislature as long as the constitution clearly stated that laws repugnant to shariʿa could not be passed. They could rise to the high offices, barring that of the president, because having a non-Muslim leader (including those Muslims who do not agree with the ideology of the Islamic state) of an ideological Islamic state would be as nonsensical as “a non-communist becoming the leader of a communist state, or a fascist becoming a leader of a democratic state.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In short, he transformed Muslim and non-Muslim into political rather than purely religious categories. Much like the colonial liberal state, his Islamic state would incorporate difference up to a point, frame norms based on its own normative architecture, and allow the individual freedom while binding her closely to her community. The project of individual ethical perfection his Islamic state would be committed to, with some differences in its substance, was similar to the colonial state's civilizing mission in form.