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.