"In the 1960s, military dictators used religion as a rallying cry against India, feeding further intolerance against Hindus and appeasing Islamists. Social and cultural life continued unperturbed, but some now brandished Pakistan as a citadel of Islam. The architect of that citadel would be Abu A’la al-Mawdudi, the man who had inspired Qutb in Egypt and Khomeini in Iran. Mawdudi had not always been a religious fundamentalist. Born in 1903 in British India, he was a journalist, a poet, and newspaper editor whose intellectual, mystical, theological journey made him the twentieth century’s greatest revivalist Islamic thinker. He transformed from a young man in a suit with a round face and a mustache to a preacher with a traditional karakul (curly lambskin) hat and a beard. Mawdudi dabbled in Marxism and Western philosophy, and was inspired to become a writer by a poet friend. He admired Mahatma Gandhi and was even briefly an Indian nationalist. But like his contemporary Egypt’s Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mawdudi was dismayed by the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1924 and the secularism of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Mawdudi’s ideas about Islam and Muslim identity reflected his own existential questioning and evolved at a time of deep flux for Muslims in India. In a landscape littered with the vestiges of a collapsed Muslim power, the Mughal Empire, Muslims were caught between the uncertainty caused by a departing colonial power and growing Hindu nationalism. Mawdudi believed that the rise of the Western concept of nationalism among Muslims had led to the downfall of the Ottomans, allowing European powers to enter the region. He believed the answer lay not in more nationalism, or in a new country for Muslims, but in reviving Islam and implementing true Islamic rule."