Tafhim al-Qur'an is a lively and highly readable English Tafsir. This Tafsir answers contemporary questions and makes the Qur'an fully relevant to the concerns of our day, yet it loses none of its timelessness nor sacrifices any of the traditional understanding. Each surah is prefaced by an account of the background and teachings. Maps and indexes add greatly to the work.
Abul A'la Mawdudi (1903-1979) was a leading Muslim intellectual and a chief architect of the Islamic revival in the twentieth century. In 1941 he founded Jama'at-i-Islami, a political party in Pakistan, which he led until 1972. He authored more than a hundred works on Islam, both popular and scholarly, and his writings have been translated into some forty languages.