The Shifting Politics of Identity 271of Islam in the modern world. This universality was an assertion that Islam in all
its details matched the claims of science and the West.
The Islamist construction also included a critique of the self, a critique of
Muslims. Not surprisingly, this critique was preoccupied with the intense diver-
sity of and confl ict over Islam within Muslim societies. Such diversity under-
mined the harmonious totality that Mawdudi claimed for Islam in his vision.
Mawdudi seemed to have attempted two possible ways of resolving the dilemma
that his universal framework brought forth. The fi rst approach was a modernist
approach, albeit directed in a moralist direction. In a highly controversial and
popular book on the history of Islam, Khilafat awr Mulukiyyat, Mawdudi ques-
tioned the role of some of the closest companions of the Prophet, all revered by
Sunni Muslims as the paragons of virtue and correct Islamic practice.^3 Their
moral choices had undermined the universality of Islam. Apart from this histori-
cal critique, Mawdudi can also be credited for developing a different resolution.
And this solution, which focused even more on a subjective resolution, seems to
have greater acceptance among Muslims. Mawdudi urged Muslims to develop
a conviction that would resolve these differences. He further argued that ‘each
one of us will be following his respective method in full consciousness of the fact
that it was followed by the Prophet... And that we have the evidence to support
this claim’ (Mawdudi 1985: 132). The gap between a diverse reality within Islam
and a conviction that Islam was a natural system in conformity with the laws of
nature could be resolved only in a highly selective conceptualisation of the past.^4
Mawdudi advanced a vision as a means to resolve a confl ict between a system
for human nature, and human frailty and doubt. In both cases, we might say,
the contradiction was resolved by resorting to subjectivity within the individual.^5
The reconciliation between one’s own ineptitude, and a global vision of a divine
natural order, was fi nally resolved within the subjective self.
The support for subjectivity was complicated by another equally funda-
mental argument in the Islamist vision. Like other Muslim scholars, Mawdudi
believed that human beings could not be trusted to determine universal values
on their own. In an equally infl uential pamphlet on the political theory of Islam,
Mawdudi (1976: 162) wrote that human beings could not be trusted to know
their own states and conditions. Legislation guided by human rationality was
doomed to lead both to individual and social chaos, and to destruction. Humans
could not develop or suggest the limits and contours of the Islamic state and the
Islamic method. Only God and the Prophet could save human beings from this
destructive course. Only God and the Prophet knew the truth about human life
on earth, and only they knew what was good and evil. This particular position
does not differ much from the traditional Asharite position of Islamic theol-
ogy. It underlines the belief that good and evil cannot be produced by human
initiative. God had assigned such values that human beings cannot perceive in
their entirety. But there was something new in the formulations of Mawdudi.