17 July 2010

It is wrong to ban the good, the bad and Maududi

.... The BBC report’s description of Abul Ala Maududi as a “controversial Islamic scholar” is an amusing piece of journalistic understatement. Maududi was unashamedly ”controversial”; the party he created, the Jamaat-e-Islam (JI) was and continues to be a far-right religious supremacist party.

He used both the pulpit and the political platform to become the foremost South Asian Islamist ideologue whose ideas were quickly absorbed into the “mainstream” of Islamist discourse spanning the Middle East and Far East Asia. You could say he is Pakistan’s first cross-over Islamist icon. And of course, he was a rabble rouser par excellence. [The Spittoon] Read more