The Case Against Maulana Maududi’s Jihad in Islam
A Logical Empiricist and Secular Humanist Reply
By Panini
Maududi and His Book
Maulana Abul A’la Maududi (1903-1979) was an Indian-born Muslim journalist, theologian and political ideologue who founded Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941 and became one of the twentieth century’s most influential advocates of an Islamic state. Born in Aurangabad in the princely state of Hyderabad, he formed his ideas under British colonial rule, amid Western political dominance and the decline of traditional Muslim power. He later moved to Pakistan after Partition and died in Buffalo, New York, while receiving medical treatment. He began Al-Jihad fi al-Islam, commonly translated as Jihad in Islam, after the 1926 assassination of the Hindu leader Swami Shraddhanand by a Muslim. Maududi completed the work over approximately three years, and its first edition appeared in 1930. He argues that jihad cannot be reduced either to personal spiritual struggle or to conventional defensive warfare. For him it is a comprehensive struggle to remove political systems founded upon human sovereignty and replace them with an Islamic order founded upon the sovereignty of Allah. He denies that Islam seeks territorial conquest or forced conversion, yet his proposed liberation authorizes an organized Islamic power to defeat governments, impose Islamic supremacy and make non-Muslims subordinate to its law. Jihad in Islam is therefore a political defense of revolutionary warfare for an expanding Islamic state, expressed through the anti-colonial and ideological vocabulary of Maududi’s century.
The Method of This Reply
My response is titled The Counter-Jihad of the Free: The Case Against Maulana Maududi’s Jihad in Islam. The counter-jihad proposed here is intellectual, not military. It is the resistance of free minds to claims of unquestionable authority. I use dialectical materialism as my ontology: matter is primary, thought is secondary, and reality consists of processes that continually change. Human consciousness does not descend from a supernatural realm. It develops through material brains, social relations and history. I use logical empiricism as my epistemology: factual claims must connect with publicly examinable evidence. I add Karl Popper’s principle of falsification, which asks what possible observation would show a claim to be false. My ethics is secular humanism. It judges institutions by their effects on human freedom, dignity, equality, welfare and suffering. My social values are free minds and free markets, because no priesthood, scripture, party or centralized state should possess a monopoly on truth or ordinary human exchange.
This synthesis does not grant immunity to Marxism, positivism or capitalism. Marxist-Leninist states also empowered a vanguard party that claimed privileged knowledge of historical necessity and dismissed resistance as false consciousness. The theological vanguard speaks for Allah; the Leninist vanguard speaks for History. Both can protect themselves from correction by redefining contrary evidence as proof of the population’s error. My materialism therefore rejects historical prophecy and party infallibility. My standard is institutional corrigibility: contested elections, independent courts, free inquiry, a free press, voluntary exchange and the ability to remove rulers without bloodshed. A market is not free when state privilege, religious disability or conquest determines who may own and exchange.
This method places the burden of proof where it belongs. Maududi must establish that Allah exists, that Allah communicated the Quran through Gabriel, that Muhammad reported the communication reliably, and that this alleged revelation creates political obligations for every human being. Quoting the Quran cannot independently authenticate the Quran. Appealing to Muhammad cannot prove Muhammad’s divine commission when knowledge of that commission depends upon Muhammad and the tradition built around him. This is circular reasoning. Popper’s method cannot prove that no god exists, but it can show that an invisible being whose purposes explain every result is protected from falsification. Such a being may remain an object of private belief. It cannot become a demonstrated sovereign entitled to command armies or rule unbelievers. Moreover, Allah does not appear in a legislature or courtroom. Human beings select texts, evaluate hadith, translate words and enforce conclusions. The long disagreements among Hanafi, Shafi’i, Maliki, Hanbali, Shia and other jurists demonstrate that revelation has never administered itself. In practice, the sovereignty of Allah becomes the sovereignty of interpreters whose authority is harder to challenge precisely because they attribute it to God.
The book will therefore be examined on two levels. Its theological propositions will be tested for evidence, logical validity and falsifiability. Its historical and political propositions will be tested against observable conduct and consequences. Maududi frequently moves between these levels without admitting the movement. He begins with a divine command that only believers recognize, translates it into a theory of universal justice, and then presents resistance to that theory as oppression. The conclusion appears universal only because the disputed premise has been concealed inside the definition of justice.
Chapter One Facts about Jihad in Islam
Maududi begins from a genuine moral problem. Human life deserves respect, yet societies sometimes permit killing in defense of life and public order. He distinguishes rightful from wrongful killing, treats certain evils as collective rather than merely individual, and argues that war may become a social and moral obligation. Jihad in the way of Allah is, in his account, war for a right cause rather than private gain. Its purpose is to oppose cruelty, mischief and oppression and to establish justice and law. This enables him to present jihad as a civilizing instrument rather than an appetite for blood.
The weakness lies in the identity of the judge. Words such as justice, oppression, mischief and truth do not interpret themselves. Maududi assigns their final meaning to Allah and then relies upon Islamic revelation to tell us what Allah means. The argument becomes: Allah defines justice; the Quran records Allah’s definition; therefore warfare commanded by the Quran is just. The conclusion repeats the premise. A Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, atheist or dissenting Muslim receives no independent reason to accept it.
Maududi also treats purity of intention as evidence of moral legitimacy. Fighters seeking Allah’s approval rather than booty supposedly differ from imperial conquerors. Intention matters, but sincere conviction does not establish truth. Crusaders, revolutionaries and totalitarian movements have also sacrificed wealth and life for causes they regarded as righteous. An empirical investigation must examine what an army does, whom it attacks, what government it installs, what property it takes and what status it assigns to the defeated. Early Muslim expansion also occurred after prolonged Byzantine-Sasanian warfare had weakened both empires, and it offered land, tribute and booty within an existing world of tribal and imperial competition. These material conditions do not prove that belief was insincere. They show why religious purpose cannot serve as a complete historical explanation.
Popper’s question is decisive: what evidence would persuade Maududi that a war called jihad was unjust? If victory proves divine favor, defeat becomes a test of faith, criticism becomes hostility to truth, and every outcome preserves the doctrine. A theory immunized in this way cannot guide impartial moral judgment. Secular humanism begins instead with persons who can suffer. Lethal force requires an imminent and demonstrable necessity, a proportionate response, protection of noncombatants and public accountability. No army acquires a special moral exemption by placing God’s name above its command.
Chapter Two Defensive Warfare
Chapter Two expands defense far beyond repelling an armed invasion. Maududi includes response to aggression, defense of truth, punishment of broken agreements, suppression of internal enemies, defense of peace and assistance to the oppressed. Some of these categories appear in modern just-war reasoning. A population may defend itself, allies may respond to attack, and persecuted people may require protection. Yet Maududi’s categories become elastic because obstruction of the path of Allah can include preventing acceptance of Islam, pressuring converts to leave it, or making Islamic life difficult. Force may remove such obstacles.
This converts a limited right of defense into a license for ideological intervention. A government that attacks Muslims is an aggressor in the ordinary meaning of the word. A government that permits Islam but refuses Islamic sovereignty is not thereby committing aggression. Maududi equivocates on the word defense: he moves from defending persons against attack to defending an alleged divine entitlement to rule. Almost any non-Islamic state may then be described as structurally hostile, even when it has not crossed a border or raised an army. Under that definition an Islamic invasion can scarcely count as aggression, because aggression has been defined out of existence before the facts are examined.
The category of the covert internal enemy presents a similar danger. Every state may act against espionage and planned violence, but an open society requires evidence of a specific offense. It does not criminalize dissent, unbelief or peaceful organization by calling these hidden threats. Maududi’s framework begins with the religious identity of the correct order and may therefore interpret opposition to Islamization as opposition to justice itself. The accused is condemned by definition before his conduct is examined.
A falsifiable doctrine of defensive war requires observable thresholds: an attack has occurred or is imminent; the party accused can answer public evidence; force is necessary; and the response is proportionate. Maududi’s theological defense has no stable boundary because the supreme injury is resistance to Allah’s order. Once divine sovereignty becomes the object being defended, defense can occur anywhere that divine sovereignty has not yet been established. The language remains defensive while the geographical and political possibilities become offensive.
Chapter Three War of Reforms
Chapter Three contains the political center of the book. Maududi argues that humanity has a collective duty to establish virtue and prohibit evil. Private preaching is insufficient because entrenched institutions reproduce corruption. Fitnah and fasad, commonly translated as strife, persecution, disorder or corruption, must be suppressed. Since government possesses the power to enforce social conditions, a government founded on divine injunctions is necessary. Armed resistance may therefore remove regimes that obstruct the establishment of virtue. Conquest is redescribed as reform.
Maududi is correct that institutions shape conduct. Poverty, bribery, predatory lending, arbitrary government and organized violence cannot always be corrected through private advice. The materialist agrees that morality is embedded in social relations. The disagreement concerns how reform is discovered and authorized. In Maududi’s system, the content of virtue is settled by revelation before public inquiry begins. In an empirical system, proposals remain hypotheses. We compare institutions, measure consequences, correct errors and allow citizens to remove governments without bloodshed.
The phrase “prohibiting evil” contains a fatal political ambiguity. An observable injury such as assault can be prohibited under a law applying equally to everyone. A theological offense such as rejecting Islamic authority injures no demonstrable victim. When both are placed in the same moral category, government obtains power over conscience. Maududi gives the believer’s classification of good and evil the force of public law while describing that transfer of power as universal liberation.
His treatment of jizya exposes the hierarchy beneath the language of reform. Maududi presents the tax as a contribution to protection and as evidence that conversion is not compelled. Yet he also states that the conquered accept Muslim sovereignty. The absence of forced conversion does not create political equality. A person may retain his religion while living under a constitution he did not choose, paying a status-specific levy and lacking equal authority to determine the state. Historically, rules governing protected non-Muslims varied across dynasties and periods, but could include political disabilities, unequal evidentiary standing and restrictions on public religious life. This was sometimes preferable to expulsion or massacre. It was still protection conditioned upon subordination, not equal citizenship.
Maududi denies that Islamic conquest is imperialism because, in his account, Muslims fight for a moral system rather than nation, race, territory or wealth. This definition excuses empire whenever conquerors announce an elevated purpose. Imperialism concerns relations of power as well as motives. If an external movement defeats a population, replaces its laws, collects revenue and subordinates the conquered to its political doctrine, the material structure is imperial even when its agents believe themselves benevolent. British imperialists also claimed to bring law and civilization. Their self-description cannot decide the issue, and neither can Maududi’s.
The Popperian defect is again clear. If people prosper under Islamic rule, the success confirms divine law. If they resist, their resistance demonstrates ignorance, corruption or attachment to privilege. If the system fails, believers may blame imperfect implementation rather than the doctrine. Nothing is permitted to count against the core claim. A genuinely reforming order must specify measurable aims, permit comparison with alternatives and provide peaceful procedures for reversal. Reform imposed by an army and protected from rejection is domination, regardless of the holiness of its vocabulary.
Chapter Four Sword and the Spread of Islam
Maududi argues that Islam rejects coercion in matters of personal belief. Faith produced by compulsion would not be genuine faith. Yet he refuses the apologetic claim that the sword had no part in Islam’s expansion. Preaching plants the seed, he says in a revealing metaphor, while the sword softens the ground so that the seed can grow. Force removes political and social obstacles; individuals may then accept or reject Islam within an Islamic order.
This is indirect coercion. Imagine a movement defeating a country, abolishing its political order, privileging its own law, collecting taxes from the defeated community and then declaring every individual free to choose. The absence of a sword at the instant of conversion does not erase the coercive environment produced by the sword. People respond to incentives, disabilities, security, employment, marriage, education and access to power. Conversion under unequal conditions cannot automatically be called free merely because a soldier did not dictate the creed word by word.
Maududi’s distinction also destroys reciprocity. Would he accept a Hindu, Buddhist or secular army invading a Muslim country, dismantling its institutions and establishing a new order on the ground that Muslims remained privately free to pray? His reasoning gives no neutral rule by which Islamic intervention is permissible but identical intervention against an Islamic state is wrong. The difference is simply his prior certainty that Islam is true. That is confessional privilege, not universal ethics.
The empirical question is not whether every conversion was forced. Clearly historical conversion had many causes and unfolded differently across regions and centuries. The proper questions are whether military conquest altered religious incentives, whether subjects enjoyed equal rights, whether dissent carried penalties and whether conquered peoples could restore their former political order by peaceful choice. Maududi’s admission concerning the sword makes the central issue unavoidable: his freedom of conscience exists inside a political structure that conscience was never free to reject.
Chapter Five Islamic Laws of War and Peace
Chapter Five is the longest and most historically ambitious part of the work. Maududi contrasts pre-Islamic Arabian warfare, along with Roman and Persian practices, with reforms attributed to Islam. He condemns vengeance, mutilation, treachery, mistreatment of envoys, indiscriminate destruction and abuse of prisoners. He discusses allegiance to commanders, observance of treaties, neutral parties, declarations of war, prisoners, slavery, spoils, truces, asylum and the status of conquered populations. These subjects cannot be dismissed. Rules restraining combatants are morally preferable to unlimited violence, and some Islamic rules of war did impose meaningful restraints in their historical setting.
Historical improvement, however, is not eternal perfection. A seventh-century rule may be better than an earlier practice and still fail a universal human standard. Maududi repeatedly compares an idealized Islamic law with the worst conduct of its opponents and then treats relative improvement as proof of divine origin. That method is invalid. Ideals must be compared with ideals and conduct with conduct. Human societies often discover partial restraints through experience. To prove revelation, Maududi would need evidence that cannot be explained by human moral development, borrowing, political necessity or retrospective idealization.
Slavery is the clearest test. Maududi acknowledges the permissibility of enslaving prisoners of war and retaining women from conquered peoples, then argues that Islam regulated an existing institution, encouraged emancipation and provided humane treatment. Regulation may reduce cruelty, but ownership of a human being remains incompatible with equal dignity. A universal and final moral revelation could have prohibited enslavement explicitly. The claim that immediate abolition was historically difficult may explain gradual policy; it cannot transform permission into moral perfection. If slavery is wrong because no person may own another, it was wrong when practiced by Muslims as well as by everyone else.
Spoils create another conflict between declared intention and material structure. Maududi insists that jihad is not fought for booty, but a legal system for distributing captured property gives combatants and the state a material interest in victory. One need not claim that every fighter acted from greed. The empirical point is that conquest transferred wealth, land and persons. A theory that examines only professed motives while minimizing these transfers is incomplete. Dialectical materialism directs attention to the relation between ideas and interests: sacred language may sincerely motivate action while also legitimizing the acquisition of power and resources.
The status of conquered peoples further qualifies Maududi’s claim of liberation. Protection, limited communal autonomy and security may compare favorably with massacre or expulsion. They do not amount to equal citizenship when Muslims possess the sovereign role and non-Muslims occupy protected but subordinate categories. Rules concerning distinctive dress, tribute or political disability mark hierarchy in public life. A secular state improves upon both persecution and protected inferiority by making citizenship independent of creed.
Maududi also defends controversial episodes associated with Muhammad, including Banu Qurayza, Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, Khaybar and Najran. The historical sources for the prophetic period are not all equally early or independent, so responsible criticism must distinguish the Quran from later biography and hadith and admit uncertainty where it exists. Yet Maududi himself accepts the tradition as morally authoritative. He cannot use these events as precedents and simultaneously avoid examination of their moral content.
The reported execution of the adult males of Banu Qurayza after surrender, the enslavement of women and children, and the distribution of captives present a severe problem for any claim of timeless moral perfection. Invoking treason or wartime judgment may supply historical context, but collective punishment and enslavement still require moral defense. The killing of Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf likewise raises questions about assassination, political criticism and due process. A secular standard asks for evidence of an actual violent offense, an impartial tribunal and individual responsibility. It does not treat hostility toward a prophet as a category beyond ordinary law.
Maududi’s rules should therefore be separated into two groups. Prohibitions against treachery, mutilation and attacks upon noncombatants can be defended through reciprocal human interests without revelation. Slavery, religious hierarchy and conquest cannot be rescued by their location inside a sacred legal system. Where Islamic law protects persons, secular humanism can affirm the protection. Where it subordinates them, secular humanism must reject the rule. This is examination, not prejudice: the same test applies to Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, nationalist and atheist states.
There is also a difference between describing a legal ideal and demonstrating historical compliance. Maududi often moves from a reported command to a conclusion about Islamic civilization. An empirical history must examine state records, chronicles, taxation, demographic change, revolts and the testimony of conquered communities. Muslim rulers differed across dynasties and regions, as did the treatment of their subjects. Evidence of tolerance in one period cannot excuse persecution in another; evidence of brutality by rival empires cannot establish Islamic innocence. The relevant comparison is not between a sacred ideal and an opponent’s worst conduct. It is between conduct and conduct, institution and institution, under the same standard.
Chapter Six The Status of War in Other Religions
Maududi compares Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity in order to position Islam as the balanced alternative. He places Hinduism and Judaism among traditions that permit war, while describing Buddhism and Christianity as tending toward nonviolence or withdrawal. He then argues that absolute pacifism cannot confront oppression, whereas traditions that permit war may lack Islam’s supposedly complete moral regulation.
His treatment of Hinduism begins with a valid observation: Hinduism is internally diverse and difficult to reduce to one creed. He nevertheless builds his analysis mainly from the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita and the Manusmriti. He reads the Gita chiefly as an incitement of Arjuna to war and treats its teaching on the enduring self as a means of overcoming reluctance to kill. He criticizes caste hierarchy and the treatment of Shudras, although he also recognizes restraints on warfare in the Manusmriti. The selection is too narrow to support conclusions about a civilization containing competing schools, devotional traditions, renunciant movements, regional practices and centuries of reinterpretation. His racial account of Aryans and non-Aryans also reflects historical theories current in his period rather than an uncontested finding.
The Gita does address a warrior facing battle, and caste injustice deserves direct criticism. Neither fact proves Islamic superiority. The question is comparative and consistent: Does a text make political authority answerable to evidence? Does it permit equal citizenship? Can its norms be revised? Maududi condemns inherited Hindu hierarchy while defending a religious hierarchy in which Muslims govern and non-Muslims accept Muslim sovereignty. Different justifications do not erase the structural comparison.
Maududi grants Buddhism a serious commitment to avoiding harm but portrays it as world-denying, politically passive and unable to resist cruel government. This confuses an ethical restraint with a single inevitable political program. Buddhist societies have displayed pacifism, statecraft, warfare and imperial patronage in different combinations. More importantly, rejection of violence does not logically require surrender to injustice. Nonviolent organization, civil disobedience, institution building and defensive restraint are empirical strategies whose effectiveness varies with conditions. Maududi selects the failures of pacifism while treating the failures of holy war as failures of implementation.
His discussions of Judaism and Christianity likewise compress diverse histories into types useful to his conclusion. Christianity’s teachings of love and renunciation did not prevent Christian states from developing laws, armies and theories of just war. Judaism cannot be understood solely through ancient warfare without considering later rabbinic life under changing political conditions. A fair comparison would apply the same historical method to all traditions, distinguish scripture from later practice and refuse to let any community define its violence as justice in advance. Maududi instead arranges the comparison so that Islam occupies the desired midpoint: strong enough to fight and moral enough to govern. The conclusion is built into the classification.
Chapter Seven Warfare in Modern Times
The final chapter turns to modern warfare and international law. Maududi criticizes European powers for separating legality from moral purpose while practicing colonial conquest and industrialized destruction. His indictment has force. European empires often preached civilization while exploiting subject peoples, and modern war greatly enlarged the ability of states to kill civilians. International rules can restrain conduct without settling every moral question about why a war began.
But Western hypocrisy does not verify Islamic revelation. This is the fallacy of answering one wrong with another. If colonial powers violated their own principles, the proper conclusion is that those powers should be judged and restrained. It does not follow that an Islamic state acquires authority to wage wars of reform. Maududi’s criticism of nationalism and material interest may identify real causes of war, yet religious certainty can also mobilize armies, suppress negotiation and turn political conflict into an absolute contest between truth and falsehood.
Modern public reason offers a more reliable standard because it does not require agreement about God. Aggression can be identified through borders, armed attacks and threats. War crimes can be examined through evidence concerning targets, orders and consequences. Treaties can be negotiated among peoples who hold incompatible metaphysical beliefs. The system remains imperfect and powerful states often evade it, but its rules are in principle revisable and reciprocal. Maududi’s standard is not reciprocal because its legitimacy depends upon accepting Islam’s truth before the dispute begins.
His argument ultimately contains a revealing inversion. He condemns imperial powers for presenting domination as civilization, but presents Islamic domination as liberation. He condemns war for national interest, but permits war for a religious order. He rejects forced conversion, but accepts force to create the political conditions most favorable to Islam. The name and motive change; the conquered population still loses sovereignty.
Muhammad and the Claim of Final Moral Authority
Maududi’s entire argument depends upon Muhammad being a reliable messenger and exemplary moral guide. Historical importance cannot prove either proposition. A person may found a durable community, win wars and transform civilization without receiving a message from beyond nature. The title “final prophet” is especially resistant to evidence. It closes the category by doctrinal decree. No observation available to an investigator can establish that no future claimant could ever possess a revelation, and no failed prediction appears capable of falsifying Muhammad’s finality.
Muhammad’s morality must therefore be examined by the same standards applied to other leaders. Did the conduct attributed to him protect freedom of belief? Did it recognize equal standing across religions? Did it reject slavery and sexual access conditioned by ownership? Did it distinguish criticism from violence? Did it require individual responsibility and impartial judgment? Did it limit power by rules independent of the ruler’s own revelation? These questions do not demand that a seventh-century Arabian leader behave like a twenty-first-century citizen. They arise because Maududi presents Muhammad’s example as final, universal and permanently binding.
Some reports about Muhammad are historically uncertain, and criticism must not pretend otherwise. The strongest argument relies on norms and episodes that Maududi himself affirms. If Maududi defends enslavement, unequal political status and coercive conquest through the prophetic model, then the model fails secular humanist scrutiny on Maududi’s own evidence. Historical context can explain a practice without making it eternally right. A final moral authority should transcend the central injustices of his time, not regulate them for continued use.
The problem is institutional as much as personal. Maududi recasts a seventh-century religious and political leader as the permanent model of a modern revolutionary state. This is anachronistic as history and dangerous as government. A ruler who claims revelation merges political command with an authority that subjects cannot independently examine. Disobedience becomes more than disagreement with government; it becomes rebellion against God. Popper’s open society depends upon the opposite principle: every ruler may be mistaken, every law may be criticized, and governments must be removable without declaring their opponents enemies of ultimate truth.
The Strongest Objections
A serious criticism must answer Maududi’s best defenses. First, logical empiricism and secular humanism do not produce ethics from laboratory observations alone. Equal dignity and human welfare are moral commitments, and a theological believer may reject them. My answer is not that secular ethics fell from the sky. It is that public coercion requires reasons accessible to those coerced, while suffering, disability and exclusion can be observed without accepting one community’s revelation.
Second, colonial and secular states committed enormous violence. Maududi wrote under an empire that preached liberty while denying self-government. This exposes Western hypocrisy but does not establish Allah’s sovereignty. The same rule must judge British conquest, Islamic conquest and revolutionary dictatorship: compare institutions with institutions and conduct with conduct, never one side’s ideal with the other’s crimes.
Third, Jamaat-e-Islami later participated in electoral politics, showing that Maududi could employ persuasion and constitutional activity. That history deserves recognition, but it does not dissolve the argument of Jihad in Islam. Electoral participation is corrigible only when citizens may reject the Islamic program and retain equal rights. If votes remain legitimate only when they conform to a prior divine law, sovereignty still belongs to its interpreters rather than the electorate.
The Alternative of the Free
Maududi sees a real world of exploitation, tyranny and war, but he offers an imaginary certainty as its cure. He cannot demonstrate Allah’s political sovereignty, authenticate revelation through evidence independent of revelation, or provide a falsifiable test of Islam’s exclusive truth. He calls conquest reform, subordination protection and an imposed religious order liberation. The vocabulary changes the appearance of power without changing its material operation.
The alternative begins with epistemic modesty. Human beings possess no infallible book, prophet, class or party. Knowledge advances through observation, criticism, conjecture and correction. Dialectical change means that no historical arrangement is final. Secular humanism places the living person before sacred abstractions. Free minds permit every doctrine to be questioned; free markets permit voluntary exchange while law prevents force, fraud and monopoly. Equal citizenship removes religious identity from the distribution of political rights.
Under this order, Muslims remain free to believe, worship, preach, organize and criticize, exactly as others do. What no community possesses is the right to convert its private revelation into sovereignty over everyone. A doctrine may persuade; it may not conquer. A believer may offer reasons; he may not end discussion by announcing God’s command. Political authority must arise from the revocable consent of equal citizens and remain answerable to evidence concerning its results.
The counter-jihad of the free is therefore a method of permanent examination. Its weapon is criticism, its protection is open inquiry, and its objective is a society in which nobody rules by supernatural title. Maududi asks humanity to submit to an authority he assumes but cannot demonstrate. I answer that freedom begins where such assumptions lose their power to command. When blood may be spilled, empiricism is required.
References
Maududi, Abul A’la. Al Jihad Fil Islam. English translation by Syed Rafatullah Shah, edited by Syed Firasat Shah. Digital edition, 2017. First Urdu edition published in 1930.
Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. English edition, 1959.
Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 1945.
Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and Refutations. 1963.