Imam Sayyid Abul A'la Al-Mawdudi

"Sayyid Abul A'la Al-Mawdudi (1903-1979) was one of the chief architects of contemporary Islamic resurgence, and a most outstanding Islamic thinker and writer of his time. He devoted his entire life to expound the meaning and message of Islam and to organise a collective movement to establish the Islamic Order. In this struggle, he had to pass through all kinds of sufferings. Between 1948-67, he was put behind bars on four occasions, spending a total of five years in different prisons of Pakistan. In 1953, he was also sentenced to death by a Martial Law court for writing a 'seditious' pamphlet, this sentence being later commuted to life imprisonment. In 1941, he founded Jama'at-I Islami, of which he remained Amir (chief) until 1972 and which is one of the most prominent Islamic movements of our day. He authored more than one hundred works on Islam, both scholarly and popular, and his writings have been translated into forty languages."