"By 1941, in Lahore, he had founded Jamaat-e Islami, the vanguard of the Islamic revolution of his dreams. His followers would deny he had ever written such heathen verses. Mawdudi had opposed the creation of Pakistan. But once it came into existence, he worked relentlessly to turn it into his utopian Islamic state. From philosopher and ideologue, he became a strategist, a politician with a program. The Jamaat organized a highly structured network of activists to spread the message, pushing to institutionalize Islamic values at every level of society and public life, including politics. According to Mawdudi, no ruler, no system had ever been truly Islamic, because Muslims had become estranged from the true precepts of their religion, and governments that did not strictly apply the shari’a, Islamic law, were apostates. The jahiliyya, the pre-Islam age of ignorance, therefore continued, and Mawdudi’s response was the hukm, sovereign rule, of God over earth through the rule of shari’a. In its Arabic root declination, the word hukm led to the word and concept of hakimiyya: an Islamic state that was the result of the Islamization of society and state through education, the Islamization of private and public life, a totalitarian model in which God’s law was supreme and elected officials governed only under the guidance of clerics."