Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi ( – alternative spellings of last name
Maudoodi,
Mawdudi, also known as
Shaykh al-Hadith Maududi), ( – ), was an Indian-Pakistani
scholar,
philosopher,
jurist,
journalist,
islamist and
imam. His numerous works were written in
Urdu, but then translated into
English,
Arabic,
Hindi,
Bengali,
Tamil,
Burmese and many other languages. He strove not only to revive Islam as a renewer of the religion, but to propagate "true Islam", a remedy for the weakness from which Islam had suffered over the centuries. He believed that politics was essential for Islam and that it was necessary to institute
sharia and preserve Islamic culture from what he saw as the evils of
secularism,
nationalism, and
women's emancipation.