The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (17 page)

I raised my concerns with Dr. Rashid and asked that this man no longer be allowed to see me. When he agreed, I changed my mind. Instead I asked that I never be left alone with him. Subsequently, whenever Mohammad Yusuf Khan arrived, I would accept his gifts but scarcely said a word to him. The more presents he brought me, the more iced drinks and sweets, the more suspicious I became. Sometimes he came twice a day with food. I didn’t feel I had done anything to deserve such attentiveness from a stranger.

Then after several months of uncertainty over my fate, Shaheer Niazi, the journalist from Karachi whom I’d all but forgotten about, suddenly appeared, having tracked me down by traveling to Pattoki and speaking with Baijan and Appa. I was surprised to discover that he was a small wrinkled man dressed in white pyjamas. From his letters I had an entirely different view of him. Niazi brought alarming news; he had it on good authority that the Mawlana had a plan to have his accomplices take me to a remote village and have me put to death. Once again my life was thrown into turmoil.

It gave me absolutely no consolation to learn that my fears had been justified and that my life was in danger. Niazi explained that he could help me only if I renounced Mawdudi’s guardianship in writing. With this letter the hospital would have no choice but to release me. Once freed, I would be a welcome guest at Niazi’s family home in Karachi until he could arrange a place for me to live independently. Without hesitation, I wrote the letter. He took it and told me he would return the next day to finalize the details of my release.

After he left I wrote letters to everybody I knew, warning them that the Mawlana was not who he appeared to be. I put in everything Shaheer Niazi told me and declared my intention to sever all ties with Mawdudi and the Jamaat-e-Islami. I had my ayah smuggle the letters out since I knew Dr. Rashid would just add them to my file. The next morning Shaheer Niazi returned and told me to pack up all my possessions and ready myself to leave. After completion of the paperwork, he promised to return at nightfall so that by early evening we could be on our way to Karachi. By lunchtime I was ready to go and sat down to wait for his return.

But Shaheer Niazi didn’t show up that night or the next. I waited in my room, my bags packed, wide awake and beside myself with fear. Two weeks went by. There was no word from anyone. The Mawlana was silent. Mohammad Yusuf Khan stopped coming with his sweet drinks. I became increasingly distraught. Finally I received Mother’s letter informing me that, according to the American consulate, the journalist I had contacted was notoriously unprincipled and Dr. Rashid would not allow me to be released to his care. Furthermore, since I had renounced Mawlana Mawdudi’s guardianship, I would not be allowed to remain in Pakistan. Instead, I would be flown back to New York at my own expense.

“If you don’t have any American clothes,” Mother wrote, “do ask Janet. I’m sure she will be happy to lend you some of hers. And very soon, darling, we’ll meet you at the airport in New York. From there we will take you directly to Hudson River State Hospital.”

Paagal Khanaah
Jail Road
Lahore
PAKISTAN

Early August 1963

After I received your letter, Mother, I suffered a complete collapse. But then, as is my habit, I approached the question of how I had reached this personal crisis in a methodical and conscientious manner. I applied my mind, heart, and soul to discover whether my fate was to return to America or remain in Pakistan. To do this I had to look more closely at certain unpleasant facts I had previously slighted or overlooked entirely. I will now write you what really happened to me upon my arrival in Lahore.

From the very first, it was clear that the Mawdudi family had been deeply disappointed in me. The feeling was mutual. I didn’t convey this disappointment in my letters, even when you begged me for news of myself, because I didn’t want you to worry. And maybe I also thought that if I didn’t write it down, if I gave it some time, it wouldn’t actually be true. I had invested too much in the idea that I would find a home here, that all my difficulties would be resolved.

First of all, Mawdudi’s daughters, who I had hoped would become my sisters, were
very
critical of me. Asma chided me for talking too much. She accused me of disrupting their studies and monopolizing their father. But I
enjoy
talking. You are much too free with our siblings, she told me. That is why Ayesha and Khalid are so fresh with you. Until you learn to be reserved as a well-bred Pakistani woman should be, no one will respect you.

Several days into my stay, when I realized that Begum Mawdudi and Asma and Humaira were avoiding me, I braved confronting the Mawlana to find out what was wrong. Without a word, he beckoned me into his study. His family found my behavior so odd they were completely terrified, he told me. I couldn’t begin to imagine what made them so fearful. What did they say I had done? I asked in all innocence.

It seemed that when I was still sharing a room with Humaira I had talked in my sleep all night long. And when I was moved to the book-lined hallway outside the Mawlana’s study, they could still hear me holding long conversations with myself, interrupted by weeping.

I had no memory of any of this, Daddy, but when I faced the dread prospect of being returned to America, the Mawlana’s words came back to me. From the day of my arrival, he had never tried to hide his disappointment. Rather than finding the charming and brilliant personality of my letters, he was faced with a young woman whose nerves had been shattered by a long ship journey and her treatment at the hands of a hostile captain and crew. The Mawlana was not terribly patient or understanding. He was cold and authoritarian and frightening. He wasn’t interested in talking with me about Islam.

Sitting at his desk, the Mawlana went on to lecture me about my bad behavior at the home of his wife’s brother. Do you remember those tea parties I told you about? At one I got into an argument with a young Canadian convert who had called Mawdudi a reactionary fanatic. When another man entered the fray with equally anti-Islamic ideas, I grew so incensed I nearly hit him, not even wondering who he was. The Mawlana informed me that the young man was his nephew.

Mawdudi told me in no uncertain terms that I had absolutely disgraced him and his family. Formerly he had had many productive exchanges of views with his nephew and this Canadian convert, but my behavior had put an end to that. Both now refused to come to the house because of my presence here. Well, from that moment on I realized that Mawdudi family unity and solidarity were valued above the teachings of the Prophet and that NO CRITICISM FROM AN OUTSIDER WOULD BE TOLERATED.

It seemed that the harder I worked to please the Mawlana, the more he upbraided me. He would send me notes, drawing attention to my continuing misbehavior. My overfamiliarity with the servants was inappropriate, he said. I wasted the time of my Urdu teacher by talking about my personal problems.

When I discovered those photos of Hindu temple dancers, sexy Indian movie stars, and, to my utter shock and consternation, a painting of Jesus Christ in Muhammad Farooq’s room, I thought that the Mawlana should certainly know what his son was up to. But instead of expressing gratitude when I brought these publications to his study, the Mawlana told me I was meddling. He conceded only that none of this trash belonged in a good Muslim home, but he could not entirely prevent the outside world from intruding. “I am doing my best to reform my sons gradually. If I bend the stick too quickly, it will break,” he said. When Muhammad Farooq emerged from the Mawlana’s study, he angrily accused me of spying on him for his father. And he wasn’t the only one who accused me of this.

I was so lonely I began to unburden myself to occasional visitors. When I ventured to complain about how severe Mawdudi was with me, the Mawlana could barely contain his outrage.

I wrote you that it was the suspension of martial law that had occasioned my move to Pattoki. With the four-year-old ban on Jamaat-e-Islami suspended, I explained, Mawdudi was able to return to his political activities, planning trips to Africa and Saudi Arabia to make common cause with the Muslim Brothers in exile and to collect funding from his patron, King Saud. But this wasn’t the whole truth. My stay in Pattoki was arranged because no one in Mawdudi’s family could bear me any longer.

In the end, Maryam must have felt, what purpose did it serve for her to revisit her past, to determine where, exactly, everything had gone wrong. There were no answers to her present predicament there, however hard she searched for them. If her home was no longer with her father and mother, with her guardian the Mawlana Mawdudi or the evil Shaheer Niazi, where did she belong? In the Paagal Khanaah? In Hudson River State Hospital? These were the questions that now haunted her. Her father had washed his hands of her. Mawdudi had betrayed his promises. All that remained was her faith. The Mawlana had once assured her that she had found the right and only path to God. And each time she traced the logic that led her to convert, it always seemed like the sanest and most hopeful decision she had ever made. Even in her most desperate days.

And what of Mawdudi? What were his thoughts about the fate of his protégée and ward? Why had he invited her to Pakistan? Why was he prepared to let her go?

After the Prophet, a retiring and contemplative man, received the first of his divine revelations, a community gathered around him in Mecca. Many of them were destitute. As the rich and powerful members of his former tribe, the Quraish, watched Muhammad move among these lowly men, they could not believe that God would put those from a poor station above them. The Quraish saw their wealth as a mark of God’s favor. When Muhammad, following Abraham, denounced the false gods the Quraish worshipped, directing all to submit to one God alone, this too unnerved them. Abraham was their patriarch; they were his proud descendants. As more and more people joined Muhammad, the Quraish grew defensive, lashing out at Muhammad and his followers. Eventually the Prophet and his companions were forced to flee to Medina to escape the persecution that grew out of the Quraish fears that they were on the wrong path.

Settled in Medina, the Prophet made room for the stream of benighted refugees from Mecca who followed him there. In Medina, too, the Prophet continued to receive divine revelations. In Mecca the suras had defined core beliefs; in Medina the suras began to address the challenge of just and compassionate rule. As the Muslim community at Medina grew larger and more powerful, the Prophet began to actively defend his community from Quraish incursions. To those who surrendered, he was merciful. Those who fought on he killed outright, enslaving their women and children.

In the shadow cast by the story of Muhammad’s persecution, exile, and redemption, Mawdudi had imagined he saw not only the lineaments of a true Islamic state, but also the model for his own life and actions. In one of his last letters to Maryam in New York, Mawdudi explained his invitation in this way. In asking her to join his family, he followed the example of the Prophet, who had welcomed refugees from persecution. He welcomed Maryam’s hunger to join him in building a new world of liberty and equality, justice and peace, on the template provided by the life of the Prophet and the Holy Qur’an. He imagined that she and the man he would find for her to marry would be part of his journey.

Perhaps out of a sense of delicacy or courtliness, Mawdudi left unsaid certain things. Maybe he couldn’t imagine what kind of father would refuse to support a daughter until she was married. Or maybe he simply couldn’t conceive of a society in which a husband and wife might leave their home to travel the world like vagabonds without providing for the daughter they left behind. It was certainly beyond his imagining that Herbert and Myra Marcus would let their daughter venture unaccompanied on a freighter halfway around the world, easy prey for the depraved appetites of men. I supposed, too, that it hadn’t surprised him that Maryam had been traumatized by the journey, by the threats of the captain and crew. It simply confirmed his conviction that family ties and responsibilities meant little in the West; individual freedom and the pursuit of private pleasure trumped all else. Perhaps Mawlana Mawdudi’s sole concern was simply to provide for Maryam Jameelah the protection and guidance and support her own father refused her.

For the Mawlana Mawdudi was also a parent. During the years of his imprisonment, without a father to give them the firm hand they required, his three youngest boys, among them Maryam’s favorite, Haider Farooq, had fallen under the influence of his wife’s wealthy and Westernized brothers. Not only could Mawdudi not free Pakistan from the spell of the West, his own family seemed resistant to his strictures. Had the Mawlana also thought to himself: Who better to enlighten my children and other Pakistani youth than a convert? Who better to dispel the enchantment with the West than a Westerner? “I hope they learn a lesson from your example,” he had written Margaret, on receiving news of her formal conversion.

Despite America’s many shortcomings, the Mawlana was not insensible to its glamour and exoticism. Like India, America had once been an English colony. Mawdudi would have admired the vigor with which the American revolutionaries had cast out the English and, in a short time, had made their country a force to be reckoned with. The many examples of American ingenuity simply astonished him: cars, airplanes, the Westinghouse refrigerator that graced his living room, the flush toilet, telephone, air conditioner, and gas stove he would soon acquire. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in the summer of 1969, the Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi would send him a personal telegram of congratulations.

Though this would come as an unwelcome surprise to a protégée who couldn’t leave modernity and scientific technology far enough behind, there was nothing Mawdudi wanted more than to bring the Muslim community into this shiny and sparkling world. It never ceased to amaze him that the American government did not see in his project of Islamic revival a natural ally in its fight against the godless communists.