IDEAS, good and bad, have a strange way of persisting and penetrating all sorts of barriers geographical, cultural, linguistic, and above all, time. The edicts of a man who died, imprisoned in a mud cell in the citadel of Damascus in the 14th century, continue to impact us in 2025, the era of AI and virtual reality. I am referring to Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya.

However, today, let us explore the influence of a set of Deobandi interpretations, which are simpler compared to the jurisprudence of the Levant`s polymath, yet still equally, if not more, controversial.

Bahishti Zewar, the original Urdu title, has been translated into English and titled Heavenly Ornaments. Compiled as a toolkit to help Muslim women entering marriage, it was first published in 1909.

Banu Mushtaq, who won the 2025 International Booker Prize for her short stories translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi under the title of Heart Lamp, revealed in a recent interview with Arfa Sherwani that even in her home state of Karnataka in south India, some Muslim communities still include Bahishti Zewar in a bride`s dowry. I`m not sure if Ashraf Thanvi`s book has been translated into Kannada or if people are relying on its English version. The book, however, is said to have been translated into Arabic, Bangla, Marathi and Uzbek.

The book`s influence abides. So does the criticism of parts of it for being extra prescriptive for women. But there are other parts that could be seen as permissive of what is generally seen as deviant behaviour. In such instances, all gender identities could be seen as beneficiaries or victims, depending on the circumstances and individual or societal perspectives.

Debates of misogyny and misandry apart, certain parts in this multi-volume work can only be described as the author`s worldview, instead of being rooted in theology. For instance, take the following passage: `It is not permissible to read short stories, novels, novels based on love and beauty which are of a fictitious nature.` The section titled `Miscellaneous Masail` goes on to prescribe `books containing love poems should also be abstained from`.

Though Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt, his successor Syed Qutub and Abul Ala Maududi, founder of Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), were contemporaries, the timelines of their activism and peak periods of authorship make it difficult to assess who influenced whom more. However, it is clear that both Maududi and Qutub, despite belonging to the Sunni-Wahabi school of thought and influenced by IbnTaymiyya, left their imprints on Ayatollah Khomeini`s revolution in Iran.

Though himself beholden to Muhammad Iqbal for approving him to head the seminary at Pathankot, which later gave birth to a movement for establishing an Islamic government and its vanguard, the JI whose headquarters moved between Pathankot and Lahore before and after independence, it was Maududi`s writings that were more accessible to the pan-Arab revivalists. Iqbal`s poetry, both Urdu and Persian, must have been beyond them. His series of lectures, later compiled as Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, can appear dense and disparate, even to deep thinkers like Qutub, alBanna, etc.

Without going into its merits and demerits, Maududi`s treatise Khilaft-o-Mulukipat, translated into many languages including Arabic and English, continues to be influential. It is unfortunate that while the JI has had capable administrators like Mian Tufail and Qazi Hussain Ahmed, alongwith some of their successors, none have been prominent in the realm of ideas or scholarship after Maududi.

Munawar Hasan, one of the more recentleadersofJI, was generally softspoken and mild-mannered. Yet, he often expressed illogical views for example, his remarks about Osama bin Laden`s `martyr` status or his nerve to suggest that a raped woman should keep quiet in the face of such a heinous crime in the absence of witnesses.

Though the Council of Islamic Ideology, the highest authority on Islamic law in Pakistan, after initial hesitation, accepted that DNA evidence was admissible as both supplementary and primary evidence in rape and paternity cases, there is no evidence of the JI leader reconsidering his view till his death in 2020.

Strangely, since mediaeval times, almost everyone who ventured into religious scholarship faced charges ranging from infidelity to blasphemy, including Iqbal, Thanvi and Ibn Taymiyya. We can return to Taymiyya and one Chaudhry Niaz Ali Khan some other time; the latter was not just Maududi`s sponsor at Pathankot but the civil engineer who designed the tunnels at the Khewra salt mines. • The wnter is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled R indana.

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