News Desk
SRINAGAR, Kashmir, India — In the winding alleys of this city, Indian police have launched a peculiar offensive: raiding bookstores and seizing hundreds of volumes penned by the late Abul Ala Maududi, an India-born Islamic thinker whose ideas still reverberate decades after his death in 1979. Maududi, the founder of the sub-continent political party Jamaat-e-Islami, envisioned a society governed by Islamic principles—a vision that, from his grave, appears to unsettle the Indian state more than ever. But this crackdown, which began in mid-February 2025, raises a deeper question: Why does a man long dead, whose words are widely available online, provoke such fear in a nation that prides itself on its democratic credentials?
The raids, which swept through dozens of shops in Srinagar and beyond, targeted literature linked to Jamaat-e-Islami, banned by Indian government in 2019 as an “unlawful association.” Police justified the seizures with claims of “credible intelligence” about the “clandestine sale and distribution of literature promoting the ideology of a banned organization.” Yet, they didn’t name Maududi outright—store owners did, reporting that his books were the primary haul. Maududi’s works, written largely in Urdu, explore Islamic governance, morality, and resistance to secularism. To those who can read them in their original tongue, they offer a trenchant critique of modernity—hardly a call to arms, but perhaps a spark for minds to rethink about the Creator and His creation.
Abul Ala Maududi’s books were originally written in Urdu, his works are known to have been rendered into at least 20 languages. These include English, Arabic, German, French, Italian, Turkish, Portuguese, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Burmese, Malayalam, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Gujarati, and Sindhi, among others.
His most famous work, Tafhim-ul-Quran, a six-volume Quranic commentary, has been particularly widely translated, with some estimates suggesting it alone has reached over a dozen languages. This is available in all the Quran apps available in OS and android.
This isn’t just about Maududi. The specter of other towering Islamic thinkers—Hassan al-Banna, founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and Sayyid Qutb, whose writings inspired generations of Islamists—looms over the subcontinent’s intellectual landscape. Their books, too, circulate in India in Urdu and Arabic and other languages, feeding a growing awareness of Islamic thought that outpaces the era Maududi inhabited.
Compared to the radical political Islam of Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna, Maududi’s ideas are more moderate, as is Jamaat-e-Islami, which—unlike the Muslim Brotherhood—draws on the mystical traditions of Sufism (Tasawwuf) of sub-continent to soften its ideology with spiritual depth. One could simplify this by saying Maududi’s thought is an enlightened blend of India’s towering figures like; Ashraf Ali Thanwi’s and Zakariyya Kandhlavi’s teachings—hardly something to fear.
Ignorance, it seems, doesn’t end where knowledge begins; it festers where understanding is stifled. And in South Asia—a region pulsing with religious extremist fervor across Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and more—such suppression only fans the flames of extremism. The irony is stark: in trying to bury Maududi’s ideas, India may be amplifying the very radicalism it fears.
The parallels with Israel’s raids on Palestinian bookstores are uncanny. In the occupied territories, Israeli forces have long targeted shops and libraries, confiscating texts deemed threatening to state security—often works by Palestinian poets, historians, or, yes, Islamic scholars like Qutb. Both campaigns share a grim logic: control the narrative by controlling the page.
In Kashmir, the state wields its power not just over bodies but over minds, policing thought in an age when ideas slip effortlessly through digital cracks and apps.
As Kashmir’s chief cleric, Umar Farooq, put it, “Cracking down on Islamic literature and seizing them from bookstores is ridiculous” when “all information” is accessible “on information super highways.” The absurdity isn’t lost on critics who see these raids as a relic of authoritarian playbook, ill-suited to the 21st century.
Yet, the Indian government’s anxiety has roots. Kashmir remains a tinderbox of rebellion and resentment. Maududi’s ideas, born in British India, took root in Pakistan after partition, where he shaped Jamaat-e-Islami into a political force. In Kashmir, the group’s local branch once backed armed insurgency before pivoting to political advocacy in the 1990s. New Delhi’s revocation of Article 370 in 2019, which stripped Jammu and Kashmir of special status, reflects a broader clampdown on dissent.
The seizure of Maududi’s books—they preach “good moral values and responsible citizenship,”—feels less like a security measure and more like a symbolic purge of intellectual heritage.
This isn’t about Urdu readers alone. Maududi’s works have been translated globally, influencing Islamic movements from Cairo to Jakarta. Muslims worldwide, in 2025, are more attuned to their faith’s intellectual currents than in Maududi’s time, when literacy was scarcer and colonial shadows longer. Suppressing his books in Kashmir won’t erase that awareness; it might sharpen it.
YouTube videos featuring preachers like the late Dr. Asrar Ahmed, who espouse similar ideas, are readily available. Will those be banned too?
Banning ideas doesn’t kill them—it martyr’s them, as Israel’s own experience in Palestine suggests. Each confiscated volume risks becoming a rallying cry for a region already chafing under surveillance and censorship.
South Asia’s religious tapestry, often celebrated, has a darker thread: fanaticism thrives here, not just among Muslims but across all faiths. India’s Hindu-nationalist thread weaving a feedback loop of radicalization. Seizing Maududi’s books—or those of al-Banna and Qutb, should they be next—won’t stem that tide. It’s a futile gesture in a world where ideas defy borders, and it betrays an intellectual oppression that undermines India’s democratic veneer.
