Throughout its existence, the Jama`at-i Islami has suffered from a tension between an intention to create a holy community of the righteous and the (frustrated) desire to attain power through the political process. Mawdudi himself bounced from one unattainable goal to another: in the mid-1930s he rejected the Pakistan movement, arguing that Muslims should seek to rule the whole of India. By 1940 he accepted the inevitability of a Pakistan and began a decades-long effort to dominate that state.

All that's missing from Nasr's fine study is a consideration of Mawdudi's profound influence on the fundamentalist movement outside Pakistan, and specifically on Ayatollah Khomeini; in other words, how exactly was the Jama`at-i Islami "the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution"? That's such an important and large subject, it's surely worthy of another volume by the same author.

Middle East Quarterly, December 1994