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It has been asserted that "no discussion of the demand for an Islamic state in Pakistan and no account of the contemporary resurgence of Islam would be complete without attention to the major role played by Abu'l A'Ia Mawdudi in these movements."1 He is regarded as "one of the most influential and prolific of contemporary Muslim thinkers" whose "interpretive reading of Islam has contributed greatly to the articulation of Islamic revivalist thought and has influenced Muslim thinkers and activists from Morocco to Indonesia. His impact is evident in the exegesis of Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, as well as in the ideas and actions of Algerian, Iranian, Malaysian, and Sudanese revivalist activities."2 It is widely acknowledged that "as one of the chief architects of this [revivalist] movement3 . . . Mawdudi along with Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) and Khomeini (1900-89) was one of the twentieth century's most important Islamic thinkers, and an articulate spokesman for the holistic vision of Islam.4
The Islamic resurgence in Southeast Asia, which manifested as a regional phenomenon in the seventies and gained new momentum after the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979, has its roots in the Islamic reformist (islab) movements of the early twentieth century when Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines and Cambodia were under Western colonial dominance.5 The Islamic reformism movements, in the cases of Indonesia and Malaysia, later joined hands with the nationalist movements in a common struggle against Dutch rule in the case of Indonesia and British rule in the case of Malaysia. The intellectual inspiration for anti-imperialist action and the reformist struggle then came mainly from the writings of Sayyid Jamal al-DIn al-Afghani (1838/ 9-1897), Muhammad 'Abduh (1849-1905) and Rashid Rida (1865-1935).6
The emergence of what was known in Malaysia and Indonesia as the dakwah movement or the phenomenon of Islamic revivalism in the seventies was in fact a continuation and a later development of the reformist Islamic spirit of the early twentieth century.7 It was basically a response of the Muslim intelligentsia and Islamic youth movements to the trends of Westernization, secularization and materialism in their own countries, which they believed were the products of secular-oriented nationalistic policies of post-colonial ruling elite. The ideas that inspired their thinking and action were drawn from multiple sources -...