#59: Maududi & the Making of Political Islam: Theo-Democracy, & the Islamic State | Humeira Iqtidar

What does it mean for God to be sovereign — not just in the heart, but in the law, the state, the constitution?

This question sits at the centre of one of the most consequential and misunderstood political philosophies of the 20th century. In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka (AZD) sits down with Prof. Humeira Iqtidar (King's College London) — the world's leading scholar on Abul A'la Maududi's political thought — to undertake a rigorous, fair, and intellectually fearless examination of the man who, more than any other thinker, gave political Islam its modern architecture.

Maududi (1903–1979) founded Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941, coined the concept of hakimiyyat-i ilahiyya (divine sovereignty), proposed "theodemocracy" as an alternative to liberal democracy, and wrote the ideas that Sayyid Qutb would later carry — and radicalise — across the Arab world. His fingerprints are on movements from Hamas to Hezbollah, on Pakistan's Islamisation under Zia ul-Haq, on the Iranian Revolution, and on Islamist thought from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur. And yet, as Iqtidar's landmark scholarship reveals, the real Maududi is far more complex, more philosophically serious, and more politically original than either his admirers or his critics tend to acknowledge.

In this conversation, we ask:

— What did Maududi actually mean by divine sovereignty — and is it as anti-democratic as it sounds?

— What is "theodemocracy," and is it a genuine alternative to liberal democracy or a contradiction in terms?

— Was Maududi a decolonial thinker using Islamic resources to dismantle European intellectual dominance?

— How did his concept of jahiliyya — contemporary barbarism — travel from his disciplined political theory into revolutionary jihadism through Qutb?

— Can a thinker be held responsible for what others do with his ideas?

— What does jizya — a tax on non-Muslims — look like when read not as discrimination but as a theory of minority protection beyond liberal citizenship?

— And what does Maududi's Chishti Sufi lineage tell us about the man who became the founding theorist of modern political Islam?

Prof. Iqtidar's forthcoming Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition of Maududi's Al Jihad fil Islam places him in the same canonical series as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx — a scholarly act of defamiliarisation that forces political theory to confront what it has excluded. Her prior work, Secularising Islamists? (University of Chicago Press), made the provocative argument that Islamist movements may, paradoxically, be among the most effective forces of secularisation in contemporary Muslim societies.

This is not a conversation about terrorism, extremism, or political polemics. It is a conversation about political philosophy — about sovereignty, legitimacy, democracy, minority rights, and what it might mean to build a just political order grounded in divine rather than popular authority. It is a conversation that takes Islamic political thought seriously as political thought.

Guest: Prof. Humeira Iqtidar, Associate Professor in Politics, King's College London

Host: Ali Zaka (AZD) — author, educator, and host of The Prometheans