Jizyaagainst Nationalism: Abul A‘la Maududi’s Attempt at Decolonizing Political Theory

Abul A‘la Maududi (1903–79), the influential Indo-Pakistani Islamist thinker and founder of Jama‘at-e-Islami, was deeply concerned with the dominance of European political ideas on Muslim thought. Showing that Maududi’s critique of nationalism had greater depth and complexity than most commentators have recognized, and taking seriously his stated interest in moving beyond the “intellectual slavery” engendered by colonialism the essay argues for reading his analysis of nationalism in modern democracies and his proposed solution of jizya as an attempt at decolonizing political theory through conceptual innovation that employed Islamic resources to address limitations of European thought and practice, and inverted colonial hierarchies of thought. Recognizing it as such deepens our understanding of the challenges involved in and raised by decolonizing political theory.