The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (14 page)

Then the Israelis invaded the Gaza Strip and marched on Suez across the Sinai Peninsula and all hell broke loose. Every afternoon, I listened to the hearings at the UN General Assembly on the radio. The Israeli delegate ranted on and on with his propaganda about how the Palestinians welcomed the Israeli occupation of Gaza. The Israeli army was the harbinger of peace, prosperity, freedom, and enlightenment, he proclaimed. Not even during the 1948 Palestine war had there been such a furor over the Middle East as there was last summer. Only President Eisenhower had refused to buckle, demanding that Israel quit Gaza and the Sinai or face the possibility of the withdrawal of American financial support. Money is the only thing the Zionists understand.

This month the morning headlines brought more of the same. The New York rabbis are in a lather over the forced migration of Jews from Egypt to Israel. From the photos on the front page of the
Times,
it seems to me that these Jews are better dressed and far more prosperous than their fellow Egyptians. If the Suez crisis has now made Jews unwelcome in Egypt, the Zionists have only themselves to blame. More Zionists are protesting King Saud’s state visit to the city. To humiliate him, they staged a slave market in front of the Saudi embassy. A
Times
editorial, meanwhile, lavishes praise on General Moshe Dayan as a brilliant military leader who “has been fighting the Arabs since he was twelve years old.”

Then this morning, hidden away in the back pages of the paper where only I would think to look, I found a different sort of story. United Nations officials had visited Rafah and Khan Younis on the Gaza Strip and found evidence of a massacre by Israeli troops. Over one thousand innocent civilians have been murdered following the Israeli seizure of these villages in Palestine. I tore out of my room and found Mother and Daddy at the breakfast table drinking coffee.

Look at that! I shouted, throwing the paper down and scattering the silverware to the floor. The Israelis are no better than the Nazis. They are doing everything the Nazis did! I hope the Egyptians defeat every last one of them.

Enough! Daddy shouted. You stop that at once! You’re making our lives so intolerable we can’t live here in peace!

I lost complete control of myself, Betty, before retreating to my room to write you this letter. I wonder what will become of me. I can’t bear even thinking about it.

Larchmont Acres Apartments, Apt 223-C
Mamaroneck, NY

December 1956

In the wake of the outburst I wrote you about in my last letter, Daddy arranged for me to see the most famous psychiatrist in New York City, Dr. Lawrence Kubie. Finding him somewhat sympathetic, I asked him if he would take me on as his patient, since things didn’t seem to be improving under Dr. Harper’s care. He shook his head gravely and said he would have no better success. He promised to speak to Mother and Daddy to discuss alternatives.

Not two weeks later, Betty, I intercepted his letter to Daddy and carefully pried it open. What I read nearly made me faint. Dr. Kubie wrote that there was nothing to be done but to admit me to a mental institution as soon as possible. If I remained at home, my condition, schizophrenia—catatonic type—would only worsen, he said.

It is a sinister label, schizophrenia. I went to the medicine cabinet and contemplated Daddy’s bottle of Seconal. Couldn’t I free us all from the prospect of this new misery? But then I remembered what the suras had said about suicide and the hellfire that would surely find me if I went through with it. For the first time ever, I prayed to Allah. Without realizing it, I found myself gluing the envelope shut and putting the letter back on Daddy’s desk under a pile of bills.

Dr. Lawrence Kubie would have approved of Dr. Harper’s curt interrogation of Peggy on the matter of her unyielding virginity. It was Kubie’s belief that, where a physician can afford to have a pacifying bedside manner, the psychoanalyst must be merciless in forcing a patient to face her neurosis. This might involve simply holding up a mirror so that the patient can reflect honestly on her life. Or it might mean the analyst will be obliged to break through a patient’s stubborn resistance through what Dr. Kubie termed “the principle of deprivation.”

As outlined in his book
Practical and Theoretical Aspects of Psychoanalysis,
deprivation is accomplished first by removing those emotional crutches on which a patient’s peace of mind might depend. Then a patient is placed in exactly those situations that will most predictably arouse great fear, anxiety, or anger: “Sometimes, deprivation will be so important to a patient’s progress that an analyst must intervene in his daily life and deny him his traditional sources of satisfaction, so as to force the patient into a state of active need.” Withholding reading material or denying the patient any contact with her family were among his suggestions. Institutionalization was clearly another.

Kubie saw the analyst’s job as strengthening a patient to the point where she will face and accept the whole truth about her illness. Yet reading his book, I felt Kubie’s method had less to do with strengthening the patient than with weakening her, much as a warden will force a captive’s dependency. Armed with the “whole truth,” the analyst conveniently becomes its unquestioned and sole arbiter, the final judge of what might be considered normal. In Dr. Harper’s view for Margaret to be a virgin at nineteen was abnormal. Faced with a patient who insisted that whatever was wrong or different about her was the result of her refusal to be co-opted by Western cultural mores, he threw up his hands.

Nor did the impact of larger historical events on the individual psyche carry much weight in Dr. Kubie’s or Dr. Harper’s worldview. Margaret’s daily scouring of the back pages of the
New York Times,
where the rumors of Jewish concentration camps had first appeared, signaled a permanent state of unease and vigilance. The massacres on the Gaza Strip simply confirmed her fears of the new crime under way in the world, hushed up or disbelieved much as the previous one had been. In all these ways, Dr. Kubie’s final diagnosis of schizophrenia perhaps conveyed more about the failure of his analytic imagination than about Margaret Marcus’s true condition.

In her 1969 work “A Manifesto of the Islamic Movement,” Maryam Jameelah took on the broken promise of Western civilization, from the Greeks to Sigmund Freud. The Greeks initiated man’s fatal rift with God, she wrote, by insisting that a man’s honor depended not on his beliefs but on his actions: morality and theology bore no relation to one another. The humanist philosophers of the Renaissance put their faith in the unfettered expression of human creativity to deliver earthly paradise. In the sixteenth century Francis Bacon was convinced that science held the key to human happiness and would eventually reign supreme over superstition and religious dogma. Once religion was abolished, the apostles of the French Enlightenment foresaw not only heavenly bliss but also the disappearance of bigotry, fanaticism, and tyranny. Once the workers of the world united, Marx held, social injustice would be replaced by a workers’ paradise. When his turn came, Freud argued that it was sexual repression that led to conflict and that complete freedom from inhibition was the panacea for all that ailed mankind.

Margaret viewed all these utopian dreams with a skepticism born of personal experience. “All that was good, true, and beautiful” she found in Islam alone: “If anyone chooses to ask me how I came to know this, I can only reply that my personal life experience was sufficient to convince me.” Other religions might be partially true, but Islam contained the whole truth, providing its adherents “with a complete, comprehensive way of life in which the relation of the individual to the social and the material to the spiritual were balanced into a perfect harmony.” If her embrace of Islam came at the expense of turning away from her own history, away from the social conventions of suburban America and the many contributions of Western science to human welfare, so be it. She wanted out. Like those sixties revolutionaries who followed her, she saw her refusal to compromise as evidence of the purity of her intentions, the power of her raging dissent. “My quest was always for absolutes,” she wrote.

Thus Margaret’s radical views alone did not constitute evidence of insanity. In the 1952 edition of
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
published by the American Psychiatric Association Mental Health Service, schizophrenia was divided into several subcategories or “reactions.” These terms replaced what was formerly known simply as dementia praecox, providing a diagnostic umbrella under which a variety of behavioral and intellectual quirks might be classified. The list of schizophrenic behaviors included the tendency to retreat from reality, bizarre behavior, disturbances in stream of thought, delusions and hallucinations, and regressive behavior. Patients were classified according to the behaviors they manifested.

Sigmund Freud had lumped the schizophrenic with the psychotic, placing both beyond the pale of his analytic arts. While Carl Jung had worked with schizophrenics, hoping to discover universal truths from them, he concluded sadly that they existed in a waking dream, but a dream that could not be analyzed. According to S. P. Fullinwider’s
Technicians of the Finite,
an account of the treatment of schizophrenia in postwar America, a number of prominent analysts on these shores promptly stepped into the breach.

In typical psychoanalytic encounters, patients project their primal emotions onto their analysts. There these emotions can be considered and coolly analyzed. American analysts began noting that something about the schizophrenic patient seemed to reverse this dynamic. Psychiatrists who had described the schizophrenic as entirely lacking in empathy, capable of savage cunning, began to wonder if it was their own cunning or savagery they were describing. The best-trained analysts noted how schizophrenic patients were able to zero in on their emotional weak points and summon at will the furies of anxiety, fear, rage, lust, and conflict that lurked within their professional breasts. Another psychiatrist told of having seen himself as a monster in the eyes of his patient. To his dismay, he promptly began behaving like one.

Was Maryam Jameelah a schizophrenic? I couldn’t say. But I couldn’t help reading into this description of doctors and their patients an uncanny portrayal of the relationship between America and the Muslim world: a catastrophic folie à deux in which both sides brought out the monster in each other. There was a rote quality to some of Maryam’s writing that suggested to me a closed thought process much like that of her classically trained analyst. Perhaps if Dr. Harper had been more established in his practice, he wouldn’t have let himself get so rattled. Perhaps, too, if Dr. Kubie had been able to bear the challenge to his own paradigm, some accommodation short of a mental institution could have been reached. Still, it seems odd that neither her doctors nor her parents had any language to address what appears to have been as much a spiritual crisis as a family one.

Muhammad Asad, the author of Peggy’s beloved memoir
The Road to Mecca,
once made reference to the work of an early Qur’anic scholar who interpreted the word
ruh,
commonly translated from the Arabic as the word for “soul,” to mean the divine spark, the shock that gives life to dead hearts. No one around Margaret Marcus seemed able to accommodate the idea of a soul. No one credited her unfashionable need to believe in God or an afterlife. They all expected that a conventional, productive life, filled with those pleasures and comforts a wealthy country might provide, was sufficient cure for what ailed her. At times, her parents and doctors behaved as if the mere notion of a life lived by a strict religious code was a personal affront. It was hard not to feel that each of them, in different ways, had attacked Margaret with the same pitilessness with which she had taken on Dr. Harper’s glass-fronted bookshelves.

Nichols Cottage
New York Psychiatric Institute
White Plains, NY

August 1957

Neither Daddy nor Mother said anything about Dr. Kubie’s letter. From then on, Betty, I stopped going out, even to the library. I wanted only to sleep, to read Arabic poetry and Marmaduke Pickthall’s translation of the Qur’an. I neither wanted to see Mother and Daddy nor wanted them to see me. Sometimes, in the evenings, I overheard them talking with Aunt Helen in the drawing room. I would go to the door and listen.

Dr. Harper warned us to expect this, Daddy said.

She has become a human vegetable, Mother said quietly.

Coming out of my daily session with Dr. Harper not long after this, Betty, I was astonished to see Daddy and Mother waiting for me by the reception desk. My surprise was cut short by apprehension. What are you doing here? I asked suspiciously. Why aren’t you both at work?

Wouldn’t you like to take a drive in the country? Daddy had said in a sugary voice, doing his best to ignore my agitation.
I didn’t
in the least
want to take a drive. I wanted to go home. I wanted to return to my bedroom and lock the door.

There was nothing to worry about, Daddy told me.

I wasn’t taken in for one minute; I knew exactly what they were up to. Yet however much I wanted Daddy to know he wasn’t fooling me, I couldn’t actually bear to tell him that. I was afraid that if I said it out loud, it would cause my most dreaded fear to come true. In the time that had passed since that day when Dr. Kubie’s letter had arrived, I had allowed myself to hope that nothing would come of it. But the drive in the country had lasted no more than ten minutes before the car pulled up in front of the mental hospital. It was my absolute worst fear.

I would be staying for just a few weeks, Daddy promised in a futile effort to calm me, to undergo some tests and treatments. There was nothing to be ashamed of, he said.

I turned on him wildly. There was no point in keeping quiet. I no longer believed anything he told me but I wanted him to admit it would be years, if ever, before I was released. All he could say was that it was the best place for me. The best place!