• Maulana Maudoodi (r) in his work, The Four Basic Qur’anic Terms, set out to examine the way four set Qur’anic terms have been used over the ages and more particularly how their usage changed from their original Qur’anic intent.
  • What Maulana Maudoodi came to determine was that terms change in meaning with time and this change can take us away from understanding the Qur’an if the terms are grounded in the Qur’an. Consequently when terms change with time they loose their original intent.

  • Imam Ibn Taymiyah (r), likewise, (particularly, in Risalatu Hamawiyyah) employed the principle that terms change with time. The whole of Risalatu Hamiwiyyah is a methodological demonstration of this principle.What characterizes Imam Ibn Taymiyah’s (r) approach and thereby making it different than Maulana Maudoodi’s in the Four Basic Qur’anic Terms is that Imam Ibn Taymiyah (r) historically traces the origin of change a term suffers in addition to the change itself that a term suffers. In this manner he presents us with the term, the change and who initiated the change and the rationale for the change. He does not stop at “source criticism” and “historical research” he goes further to measure how a term or an idea fits into the meaningful context of the Qur’an and the Sunnah literally and or in principle. Then he places the term or idea and its origin on a scale of integrity judging it to be from the Shar’iah or a deviation from the Shar’iah. For this reason he was a big critic of logic.
  • His critique of logic was based in the position that because logic was utilized to generate terms. Secondly, these terms would then take on a world of their own and conceptual schemes would be built upon a series of terms grouped together terms that were developed by the logical syllogism. These conceptual schemes in effect gave birth ideas removed from the meaning network and context of the Qur’an and the Sunnah -in principle, spirit and content.
  • Maulana Maudoodi (r) attempted this same type of scholarly activity as Ibn Taymiyah (r) in The Four Basic Qur’anic Terms. Albeit it is fair to say that the same exacting rigor found in the Hamawiyyah is absent. But The Four Basic Qur’anic Terms addressed a wider audience, one more expansive than the scholarly type. In this sense Maulana  Maudoodi (r) combined the basics of scholarship with a pedagogy for the masses that was aimed at clarification of understanding for action. This was a major contribution to Islamic scholarship in the late 20th century.
  • On the other hand, Maudoodi’s work can be said to be illustrative of the decline of learning among Muslims in the 20th century.In any event, both Maudoodi and Ibn Taymiyah de-construct terms with the intent to return back to the term something lost -a sense or intent. Then they reconstruct the term by restoring the original lost sense or they provide a context which allows the original sense or meaning to manifest.
  • It would be interesting to get feed back on this post given that feedback may open up new trajectories of understanding.
  • Allahu Al’am, Abul-Hussein