The Shifting Politics of Identity 269Islamism
Islamists are more clearly known for supporting a completely particularistic
approach to Islam. They presented Islam as a unique system, a way of life that
is absolutely singular and distinct from any other form of government, social
life or religious persuasion. As a political ideology, Islamism seems to make no
space for a universalism of the type that Khan and other reformist Muslims were
seen to be struggling with. Islamists seem not to be concerned about attempt-
ing to represent Islam as embodying universal values. The question that needs
to be asked is whether they make any concessions to universalism. Do they
allow any door to remain open for a shared debate where a universal articula-
tion of Islamic identity is open to the other? Islamist identity is dependent on
modernist identity in an unmistakable manner. But it attempts to collapse the
particular and the universal into individualist subjectivity, which provides the
ground sometimes for religious nationalism, sometimes for highly individualist
projects of piety and politics (Roy 1994; Van der Veer 1994). This construction,
in varying degrees, can be traced in the work of prominent Islamist intellectuals
of the twentieth century like Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), Abu al-Ala Mawdudi
(1903–79) and Sayyid Qutb (1906–66). In order to maintain continuity with
Khan, I will focus on Mawdudi in this chapter.
Mawdudi is recognised as the most prolifi c and consistent source for
Islamists. His biographer, Seyyid Vali Nasr (1994), has pointed out that he was
certainly familiar with the modernist writings of the Indian subcontinent. Traces
of these ideas are clearly present in his earlier writings, and hardly ever disap-
pear. I will go one step further and claim that Mawdudi’s particular approach
to Muslim identity was entirely elaborated from a fundamental thesis in Khan.
From Khan, he obtained a universal foundation for identity. His internal cri-
tique is also initially directed at the history of Muslims. Eventually, however, the
second critique was directed at the self, which must balance the universal and
the particular within a subjective conception. The second critical movement
and its resolution cannot be ignored when addressing the meaning of modern
Islamic identities.
Mawdudi wrote a small pamphlet in 1932 entitled Risala Diniyyat, which
has been translated into many languages. In a preface to the second edition,
Mawdudi (1982) characterised the book as an explanation of the ‘rational basis
of belief’. Refl ections on this Islamic rationality were further elaborated upon
in his sermons (Khutubat), presented in 1940 and also translated into many dif-
ferent languages (Mawdudi 1985: 14). The fi rst English translation of this book
appeared in 1975 as The Fundamentals of Islam, and was later retranslated as Let
Us Be Muslims in 1985. Both these books provide us with interesting material to
identify his approach to identity. In Risala Diniyyat, Mawdudi begins with the
familiar theme of the pervasiveness of laws that govern all reality. Human beings