What Iran's foreign minister's PhD reveals about global Islamism and Jamaat's ideology

Diplomats are judged by the statements they make, the crises they manage, and the dossiers they carry into closed-door rooms. Far less attention is paid to the ideas that shaped them before they entered office. That is why one quietly consequential fact about Iran’s current foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, deserves more notice than it has received: in his doctoral work at the University of Kent — 'The Evolution of the Concept of Political Participation in Twentieth-Century Islamic Political Thought' — he devoted substantial space to South Asian Islamism, particularly Abul A’la Maududi and Jamaat-e-Islami, and placed them in the same comparative conversation as the Muslim Brotherhood and other defining currents of twentieth-century political Islam.

This is not gossip about a politician’s campus years. It is a reminder that the Islamist imagination — its arguments about sovereignty, law, the state, and political participation — has never respected national borders. When an Iranian scholar-diplomat treats Jamaat not as an eccentric local movement but as an intellectual peer of the Brotherhood, it tells us something about how influential Islamist thinkers and careful observers have understood the flow in ideas between Cairo, Lahore, and Tehran. For India, which often approaches political Islam primarily through the lens of militancy, that older, deeper map matters—because ideas typically outlive organisations and social influence often outlasts electoral cycles.

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Araghchi’s reading of Maududi — most clearly in the thesis’s discussion of “Islamic theo-democracy” and Jamaat-e-Islami — cuts against lazy categorisation. Jamaat, in this telling, is not merely a party that sometimes wins and often loses. It is a disciplined cadre project aimed at producing a particular kind of society that will, in time, demand a particular kind of state. That strategic patience is precisely what makes comparisons with the Muslim Brotherhood unavoidable. The Brotherhood, too, built itself less as a conventional mass party and more as an ideological movement: a social base, an educational programme, an organisational culture, and a moral vocabulary that could slowly colonise public life.

It is tempting to treat such movements as “political” only when they contest elections or turn confrontational. Araghchi’s thesis nudges the reader toward a different diagnosis: the durable power lies in the long game — what Maududi framed as the “Islamisation of society” preceding the creation of the Islamic state. If you accept that premise, then ballots are not the main battlefield; social reproduction is. Schools, literature, training circles, community institutions, and the steady disciplining of language become the real instruments of influence.

The intellectual core Maududi supplies to this project is, in many ways, starkly modern in form even as it claims divine authority in content. Maududi’s political starting point, as Araghchi recounts, is a sweeping moral claim: the "root cause of all devilry and mischief” is the domination of man over man. Modern politics, he argues, merely replaces nature worship with man worship —parties, rulers, money-magnates, and dictators. Different idols, same impulse. The solution is not merely better governance but a fundamental relocation of sovereignty: repudiation of all masters and explicit recognition of God alone as sovereign.

From this follows a theory of the state that is both simple and politically disruptive. Maududi’s pillars of Islamic political theory —God as the real sovereign, God as the absolute legislator, and a state founded upon divine law — are not abstract theology. They are constitutional propositions. They set hard limits on what any legislature can do, what any public consensus can revise, and what any leader can claim. Even unanimous public desire, in Maududi’s formulation, cannot modify divine law. Obedience to the government is conditional: it is owed only insofar as the government enforces God’s law.

And yet Maududi does something politically astute. He rejects the European idea of a priestly theocracy — rule by a clergy class —but also refuses the Western premise that sovereignty rests in the people. To bridge that gap, he coins a term designed to sound familiar and thus usable: "theo-democracy". In Araghchi’s account, Maududi describes it as a “divine democratic government” in which Muslims possess a limited popular sovereignty “under the suzerainty of God". The executive is constituted by the general will of Muslims and can be deposed; administrative matters not explicitly defined can be decided by consensus; interpretation is not monopolised by a priesthood. It is "democratic", but only within boundaries set by revelation.

This is where Maududi becomes essential reading for any strategic understanding of political Islam: he borrows the machinery of modern governance — an executive, an advisory council or parliament and procedures resembling elections —while redefining the purpose of those institutions. Even his defence of a legislature is not law-making but "law-finding". The label remains modern; the sovereignty principle is inverted. In practice, that inversion is not a minor detail. It means ordinary political disagreement can be recast as a moral absolute, because the source of authority is placed outside the people. That is how political theology becomes political power.

Araghchi also traces the tension that such universal claims generate when they collide with the modern nation-state. Before the Partition of the subcontinent, Maududi’s writings rejected nationalism outright, arguing that Islam’s ultimate goal is a world community dissolving distinctions of race, language, and territory. Nationalism, he says, is a contrived division of humankind. Yet after Pakistan’s creation, the argument begins to bend toward political reality: Jamaat commits to shaping Pakistan as a model Islamic state, and Maududi speaks of wishing his nation would have “the proud privilege” of leading an Islamic revolution.

This is not mere inconsistency; it is a structural dilemma for Islamism. The ideology is universal; the theatre is national. The result is a peculiar duality — movements operate inside nation-states while circulating an intellectual vocabulary that is, by design, transnational. That is precisely what makes Araghchi’s comparative approach geopolitically significant. By placing Jamaat in the same analytical lane as the Muslim Brotherhood — and by implication, within the wider Islamist canon associated with figures such as Sayyid Qutb — he underlines that these movements were never meant to be read as sealed national stories. They were, and remain, episodes in a larger argument about the rightful source of law, the moral purpose of the state, and the boundaries of political participation.

For India’s national security discourse, this matters in a way that is easy to miss if we only look for operational footprints. The most consequential challenges do not always announce themselves as violence. They can arrive as sustained arguments about legitimacy— over years and decades — pressing on constitutional premises, reshaping public expectations, and constructing a moral language that makes certain political outcomes feel inevitable. A movement can lose elections and still shift the political centre of gravity.

This is also where South Asia’s most sensitive questions, including Kashmir, enter the frame — carefully, without reckless allegations. Kashmir has long been a contest not only of territory but also of narratives: who holds rightful authority, what law is legitimate, and whether the state is merely an administrative unit or a moral project. In such spaces, ideological mobilisation and political theology matter because they offer a vocabulary that can sanctify politics, harden identities, and narrow the room for pluralism —not necessarily overnight, but steadily. One need not claim a direct line from a thesis chapter to an incident on the ground to recognise the strategic point: when sovereignty is framed as divine rather than popular, compromise can be delegitimised as surrender.

Araghchi’s thesis, read from New Delhi, offers a useful corrective. Counterterror tools remain essential, but they are not the whole story. If ideological influence is built through education, organisation, and the patient disciplining of public language, then an exclusively kinetic or policing lens will always be late to the problem. The earlier contest is intellectual and institutional.

None of this requires hysteria, and it certainly must not collapse into communal shorthand. The argument is about political ideas and the organisational forms that carry them across generations—not about faith as such. Indeed, the most serious warning embedded in Araghchi’s comparative reading is almost banal in its simplicity: movements come and go, but ideas travel. They travel across borders, across languages, across regimes. They travel from Cairo to Lahore, and they do not stop at the frontier because the frontier is not where their legitimacy is anchored.

That is the sharper strategic lesson India should take from an Iranian foreign minister’s forgotten doctoral preoccupation. When Jamaat-e-Islami is treated as part of the same intellectual world as the Muslim Brotherhood, we are being told — implicitly, but unmistakably — that political Islam’s most durable instruments are not always militants or parties. There are arguments about sovereignty, law, and the moral purpose of the state. Those arguments do not age quickly. And if India wants to think seriously about long-term internal security and regional stability, it will have to watch the ideas as closely as it watches the organisations.

(Abhinav Pandya is a policy analyst specialising in counterterrorism, Indian foreign policy and Afghanistan-Pakistan geopolitics. Umar Iqbal is an intern in security and counterterrorism studies programme at Usanas Foundation. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)