The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (10 page)

But who is to decide what constitutes a quibble and what a subject for healthy debate? Who is to decide what the fundamental truths of Islam are or aren’t? Is questioning Mawdudi’s authority, in itself, divisive? But Mawdudi did not stop to consider such questions. For those who bring an earnest and open mind, he maintains, all that remains is the choice to adopt the way of life outlined in the Qur’an, or not. In the Mawlana’s mind, the right choice is perfectly clear. Only the most perverse or ungrateful person will spurn it.

So there is, in effect, no choice at all. Mawdudi skillfully peddled the illusion of independent choice, the illusion of debate, the illusion that everyone has been given the gift of understanding. But what he is really saying is that he doesn’t actually trust anyone’s reading but his own, thus the need for an “interpretative exposition” of the Qur’an. In
Towards Understanding Islam,
he is nearly venomous toward those “kufr” who persist in questioning. The person who, after reading the Qur’an, nonetheless rejects Islam will inevitably “spread confusion and disorder. He will, without the least compunction, shed blood, violate other men’s rights and generally act destructively. His perverted thoughts and ambitions, his blurred vision and distorted scale of values, and his evil activities will make life bitter for him and for all around him.”

The animus here, the departure from his signature lofty tone, suggests that Mawdudi was writing from personal experience. Did he have scheming and two-faced British officials in mind? Or was he thinking of those puppets of his enemies, the slavish ulema? They were the ones who presumed to correct his understanding of classical Arabic and tried to hustle him out of the political arena. Or perhaps he was thinking of those cynical and secular adversaries who, year after year, decade after decade, refused to recognize his moral authority? Was Maryam now considered perverse and ungrateful, her vision blurred and distorted? Perhaps the Mawlana had, on closer inspection, discovered that Maryam Jameelah didn’t see the rightful path exactly as he saw it. Was this why he had committed her?

For Mawdudi, it was “a principle of creation” that women be docile and acquiescent. Yet whatever respect Maryam may have had for the Mawlana’s learning, she could be intractable, as her parents well knew. Even before she arrived in his household, Margaret had disobeyed an explicit command from the Mawlana. In one of her letters to him she had mentioned her love of painting and, as she contemplated her departure, raised the question of what she should do with her artwork. Countering her suggestion that perhaps the Islamic prohibition against figurative art was directed solely at portrayals of false gods and idols, the Mawlana was firm. This was no quibble. The Holy Prophet categorically prohibited Muslims from drawing pictures of living beings.

Picture making was the first step toward idolatry, he wrote back to her, striking an uncharacteristically harsh note. Idolatry is not simply worshipping an idol. The proliferation of pictures of leaders and celebrities inevitably led to reverence for them instead of for Allah. This too was a form of idol worship, he said. From earliest times, even in the Arab world, pictures served as the greatest vehicle for spreading immorality and lewdness. Now more than ever, he insisted, indecent literature, music, pictures, and statues are the most potent instigators of adultery and fornication. He insisted that Margaret destroy all her artwork before coming to Pakistan.

In the interviews she gave upon her arrival in Lahore, Margaret spoke about how dutifully she had abandoned painting once she realized it was forbidden. In his editorial excoriating Mawdudi, Ghulam Ahmad Parwez had insisted that this constituted yet another deep psychological blow. Through painting, he said, Maryam expressed her emotions and feelings. “How could it be considered haram when one of the avatars of Allah was a painter? God has said in the
Qur’an
that one of his great prophets, Suleiman, used to ask artists to make paintings.” Even if Mawdudi had believed it wrong, Parwez suggested, he might have brought Maryam to the stage where her creative powers could find some other outlet. For Parwez, this was more evidence of the Jamaat’s inhumanity and their tendency to impose Islam by force.

But though Margaret had renounced her art, she couldn’t bring herself to destroy her youthful paintings and drawings. Instead she donated them to the Oriental Division of the New York Public Library. After consulting with the art department, Mr. Parr had agreed to take possession of them. In her mournful cover note to a bound portfolio of early artwork, was there a measure of ambivalence in Maryam’s decision to give up her art? “Now that I am a Muslim, I hereby stop making pictures and embark instead on a literary career in service of the Faith,” she vowed. Had there been backsliding? Had Maryam disobeyed another of Mawdudi’s strictures while she was a member of his household?

There was reason to be skeptical of Ghulam Ahmad Parwez’s account of Maryam’s state of mind. Mawdudi hadn’t tried to force Maryam into marriage with a groom of his choosing. Similarly, Parwez’s description of Maryam’s romance with Islam coming up against a brutal reality was not in the least borne out by her letters home, though admittedly it was now clear that she had not been altogether forthcoming. And Margaret rarely let ten days go by between letters, yet there was that inexplicable gap of five months between the last letter from Pattoki and the one from the madhouse. If letters were missing, what else was?

Maryam was well aware of the symbolic weight of her decision to leave America. Her journey to Lahore was self-consciously styled to echo the journey of those early Muslims who followed the Prophet from Mecca to Medina to escape persecution. In Arabic this was known as the
al-hijrah.
In leaving Mecca, they abandoned the only home they had ever known, sacrificed family ties, and suffered terrible hardships. Yet it was also an action that bestowed upon them great merit. So it stood to reason that the details of Maryam Jameelah’s fate were destined to become political fodder, for both Mawdudi and Parwez.

But Parwez levels a more serious accusation. Reading between the lines of Mawdudi’s newspaper interview, and perhaps listening to the gossip in political quarters, he concludes that Maryam Jameelah had suffered a crisis of faith. According to the Islam of the Jamaat-e-Islami, should an avowed Muslim renounce his faith, such a person would be accused of apostasy, otherwise known as
murtad.
The sentence for apostasy is death. Mawdudi had pronounced the entire community of Ahmadiyya Muslims, a reform movement launched toward the end of the nineteenth century and dedicated to the peaceful propagation and revival of Islam, non-Muslims. To identify them as apostates would require a death sentence. Parwez trotted out his final diagnosis: fear for her life as an apostate had precipitated Maryam’s mental collapse.

But how could this be? Maryam Jameelah organized her entire existence around the fact that she had embraced Islam and Islamic society in a way that precluded her return to the life she had known as Margaret Marcus. No matter what she had suffered in Lahore or Pattoki, no matter how homesick or hungry or lonely or difficult her existence had become, such sufferings were more likely to have strengthened than weakened her beliefs. Also, I knew that Maryam had never returned to America; all her books were published out of Lahore. Whatever his argument with her, Mawdudi still considered Maryam a Muslim, however misguided.

Yet even if Parwez was wrong as to the reason, even if his concerned and paternal tone was a cover for scoring political points, Maryam was indeed in fear for her life.

The Paagal Khanaah on Jail Road is a huge asylum located in central Lahore. In 1962 it encompassed two main hospital buildings housing fifteen hundred inmates, among them five hundred women. One building was off-limits to all but the hospital staff. This housed the chronically and criminally insane. There, patients with shaved heads were kept in locked cells. They were served food that consisted of little more than stale rotis and watery dal, slopped on the bare floor outside their doors. Most weighed no more than ninety pounds and many weighed less than that, their bodies wasted by dysentery. If they wore any clothes at all, it was often no better than a burlap sack. They were rarely bathed. Sanitary conditions were unspeakable.

Though she found the chronic ward frightening, Margaret couldn’t seem to keep away, sneaking in from her accommodations in the private ward to take stock of the patients and their living conditions. She compared their appearance to that of Jewish concentration camp victims whose photographs she’d pored over as a young girl. Few ever made it out of this building alive, she reported to Herbert and Myra.

Patients with better prognoses slept in dormitories in the public wards of the second building, a multistory brick edifice organized around a large central courtyard lined with walkways and trees. There disturbed and mentally deficient children, small skeletons covered in filth, ran wild. The patients of the public wards paid little or nothing for their beds and treatment. This part of the hospital also housed the private women’s ward to which Margaret was assigned. The cost of a bed in the private ward was such that only the very rich could afford one, but even by the standards of the private ward Margaret’s accommodation was lavish. Because she was an American citizen, she was assigned a large sunny room to herself with three ayahs to attend to her needs.

Treatment at the Paagal Khanaah included electric shock, sedatives, and any other medication required to stave off malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, dysentery, and malaria. During the hottest summer season, patients bathed only once or twice weekly. Still, on the first of the month, every single patient was given a physical and mental examination. Two weeks later a committee of doctors would meet with Dr. Rashid to determine who was ready to be released. Only private inmates could be released on Dr. Rashid’s say-so alone.

As there was no wall between the private quarters and the public wards, the public patients were constantly stealing. As a result, most of the private rooms were sparsely furnished with perhaps a transistor radio kept under lock and key. Even though Margaret had ayahs to watch her things, she soon lost a blue silk shalwar kameez trimmed with Appa’s handworked lace. She suspected one of the ayahs but there was nothing to be done. Margaret told her parents she tried to cultivate a philosophical attitude toward those things she didn’t feel she could change. Yet this hadn’t stopped her from trying to smuggle letters out.

Where other patients lolled about on their beds all day, or spent their time praying, Margaret continued to write articles for various Islamic periodicals using—with his permission—the Mawlana’s address on the return envelope. She also spent a great deal of time socializing with her fellow patients, the handful of nurses, and Dr. Rashid. Among the high society of the private ward, there was a very pretty young girl of seventeen who had been committed by her parents when they found her collection of beautiful little bottles filled with poison. She couldn’t resist tasting them.

In the room next door was a drug addict. Not yet twenty, she was the daughter of one of the richest zamindars in the Punjab.
*
Married off at twelve and already the mother of three, she described the battalions of servants at her command. Her father had ten thousand buffalo, she boasted, an equal number of sheep, and enough orchards and fields on her family’s vast estate to feed everyone in their district. She crowed that one of her uncles had been educated in America and now kept thirty wives.

This Maryam found hard to credit, a story out of
A Thousand and One Nights.
How was that possible? she asked. The Holy Qur’an allows only
four.

My uncle is a king, the girl replied with a toss of her bony head, covered with sores. Who will stop him?

And finally there was the exquisitely beautiful woman with whom Maryam spent most of her time. This woman, a Pakistani Christian, had become obsessed with the thought that a man named Ali Rizi was attempting to blackmail her. So vivid was her description of this man and his wicked clan that Maryam began to believe her. Dr. Rashid, however, assured her that the allegations had been thoroughly investigated. Despite this one delusion, Peggy wrote her parents, she considered her friend quite sensible on other subjects.

Did Maryam, sounding so sensible on other subjects, also suffer from paranoia? Was she at the mercy of a similar idée fixe? It didn’t seem so. In her letter from the madhouse Margaret mentioned that before she left for Pattoki, Begum Mawdudi had promised her she would accompany the family on their pilgrimage to Mecca. Within days of her commitment, however, she learned that Mawlana Mawdudi and his family had left without her.

Hearing this news from Dr. Rashid, Maryam was filled with a sense of desolation so all-encompassing that she had to remind herself to breathe. “If circumstances had only been different!” she wrote. Rather than holding firm to the conviction that she was being unjustly persecuted or that her life was in danger, she wrote as if she secretly agreed that she had been committed for her own good. Nonetheless, she tried to smuggle out a second letter to the journalist Shaheer Niazi, her possible savior. Once again Dr. Rashid intercepted it.

The line that divides sickness from sanity, real danger from imaginary persecution, is not always clearly drawn. I decided to reread Peggy’s voluminous eight months of correspondence from Pattoki more carefully. Perhaps I had overlooked something. Pattoki was no more than a tiny provincial town, one step up from a village. There were no telephones and few cars. The narrow lanes between houses were largely reserved for donkeys, water buffalo, and the odd pony cart. Residents walked from one end to the other via rooftops. Maryam herself rarely set foot outside the house. Despite these conditions, Margaret’s letters from Pattoki were not entirely uneventful.

The house had two bedrooms on either side of a central courtyard, each with whitewashed walls and decorated with calligraphic inscriptions from the Qur’an. One of these was set aside for Maryam, with two stuffed chairs, a sofa, and a dressing table for a desk where she worked on her Urdu. At the back of the courtyard was a hole in the wall where the neighborhood women could be summoned, saving them from the effort of putting on burqas.