"The South Asian activist Abul A‘la Mawdudi has been very influential in twentieth-century Islamist circles. Although he was at best sporadically educated in the traditional religious sciences, his influence derives not from any exceptional reputation as a religious scholar, but rather from his forceful, charismatic personality and his uncanny ability to articulate in an emotive Islamic idiom the sociopolitical concerns of his co-religionists in a colonial context."