Abul A'la Maududi in the context of "Kannada"

An Islamic state has a form of government based on sharia. As a term, it has been used to describe various historical polities and theories of governance in the Islamic world. As a translation of the Arabic term dawlah islāmiyyah (Arabic: دولة إسلامية) it refers to a modern notion associated with political Islam (Islamism). Notable historical examples include the first Islamic state in Medina, established by the prophet Muhammad, and the Arab caliphates which continued under his successors, such as the Rashidun and Umayyads.

The concept of the modern Islamic state has been articulated and promoted by ideologues such as Rashid Rida, Mullah Omar, Abul A'la Maududi, Ruhollah Khomeini, Israr Ahmed, Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna. Implementation of Islamic law plays an important role in modern theories of the Islamic state, as it did in classical Islamic political theories. However, most of the modern theories also make use of notions that did not exist before the modern era.

Qutbism is an exonym that refers to the Sunni Islamist beliefs and ideology of Sayyid Qutb, a leading Islamist revolutionary of the Muslim Brotherhood who was executed by the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966. Influenced by the doctrines of earlier Islamists like Hasan al-Banna and Maududi, Qutbism advocates Islamic extremist violence in order to establish an Islamic government, in addition to promoting offensive Jihad. Qutbism has been characterized as an Islamofascist and Islamic terrorist ideology.

Sayyid Qutb's treatises deeply influenced numerous jihadist ideologues and organizations across the Muslim world. Qutbism has gained prominence due to its influence on notable Jihadist figures of contemporary era such as Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Saif al-Adel. Its ideas have also been adopted by the Salafi-jihadist terrorist organization Islamic State (ISIL). It was one inspiration that influenced Ruhollah Khomeini in the development of his own ideology, Khomeinism.

Secularism—that is, the separation of religion from civic affairs and the state—has been a controversial concept in Islamic political thought, owing in part to historical factors and in part to the ambiguity of the concept itself. In the Muslim world, the notion has acquired strong negative connotations due to its association with removal of Islamic influences from the legal and political spheres under foreign colonial domination, as well as attempts to restrict public religious expression by some secularist nation states. Thus, secularism has often been perceived as a foreign ideology imposed by invaders and perpetuated by post-colonial ruling elites, and is frequently misunderstood to be equivalent to irreligion or anti-religion.

Especially in the late 19th to mid-20th century, some Muslim thinkers advocated secularism as a way to strengthen the Islamic world in the face of Russian, British and French colonialism. Some have advocated secularism in the sense of political order that does not impose any single interpretation of sharia (Ali Abdel Raziq, Mohamed Arkoun, and Mahmoud Mohammed Taha); argued that such a political order would not/does not violate Islam (Abdullah Saeed); and that combined with constitutionalism and human rights, is more consistent with Islamic history than modern visions of an Islamic state (Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im). Orthodox Islamic scholars and proponents of Islamism (political Islam) strongly oppose limiting Islam to matters of personal belief, and also strongly advocate for an Islam that encompasses law, politics, economics, culture and every other aspect of the lives of its citizens. Islamist pioneer Abul A'la Maududi claimed that the goal of secularists was not to ameliorate tensions and divisions in multi-religious societies, but to avoid the "restraints of morality and divine guidance",and thus eliminate "all morality, ethics, or human decency from the controlling mechanisms of society".