Syed Abul A'la Maududi Chishti was a Pakistani Muslim philosopher, jurist, journalist and imam. His numerous works, which "covered a range of disciplines such as Qur’anic exegesis, hadith, law, philosophy and history", were written in Urdu, but then translated into English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Burmese and many other languages.[He sought to revive Islam, and to propagate what he understood to be "true Islam". He believed that Islam was essential for politics, and that it was necessary to institute sharia and preserve Islamic culture from what he viewed as the evils of secularism, nationalism and socialism, which he understood to be the influence of Western imperialism.
