Right Word | Banna, Qutb, Maududi: Three keys to understanding Islamist violence from Jahangirpuri to Stockholm

The ideological foundation for the fanatic and violent identity politics of Islamists was laid down by Hassan al Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Maulana Abul Ala Maududi in the 20th century What has triggered the violence in Hindu processions of Ram Navami and Hanuman Janmaotsav at several places across Bharat recently? Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, Palestine, Saudi-Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria and Morocco all form one bloc, the Moslem bloc, which God has promised to grant victory saying: ‘We shall grant victory unto the faithful.’ But this is impossible to reach other than through the way of Islam.” Banna was assassinated in 1949 but Syyid Qutb, the top theorist of Muslim Brotherhood, carried the movement forward. In 2015 Nadeem F Pracha, a senior columnist for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, wrote an interesting article titled “Abul Ala Maududi: An existentialist history” where he observed candidly, “Maududi had formed his party in 1941 like a Leninist outfit in which a vanguard and select group of learned and ‘pious Muslims’ would work to bring an ‘Islamic revolution’ and do away with the forces of what Maududi called modern-day jahiliya. Maududi’s theories in this context attracted certain segments of Pakistan’s urban middle-classes and was also adopted by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which tried to jettison the process through a ‘jihad’ within Egypt.” Kepel says, “Towards the end of the 1960s, the bisecting influences of Qutb and Maududi prepared the ground within Sunni Muslim world for the emergence of Islamist movement over the next ten years.