UNDERSTANDING THE ISSUE

UNDERSTANDING THE ISSUE hundreds of works on a single discipline, but only a few dedicated books have been written on Hikmat al-Deen. Among these, the most prominent and renowned is Hujjatullah al-Baligha by Shah Waliullah Dehlawi. This describes one aspect of Hikmat al-Deen. When the matter is viewed from another angle, it becomes evident that systematic, focused scholarly work on this subject is even more limited. One understanding of Hikmat al-Deen is to explore the specific rationale of various parts of religion, such as the wisdom behind Salah (prayer), fasting, and Jihad. So far, most scholarly work on the wisdom of religion has focused on this aspect, examining different elements of religion under separate headings and explaining the particular wisdom behind each of them. Another aspect of Hikmat al-Deen, however, is to discern the collective wisdom of all religious elements, presenting a unified explanation that connects different facets of Islam and reveals the overarching wisdom through which Allah has integrated various elements of the faith. In my view, the best description of Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi’s work is that he attempted to address this second aspect of Hikmat al-Deen. He sought an interpretation in which Islam appears as an interrelated whole, and to his ability, he was able to discover an interpretation in which the deen appeared