The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (2 page)

“Allah guides to the Truth whomsoever He pleases,” I answered, and every man in the room nodded in understanding. Wandering the streets of Alexandria, my first experience of a real Muslim country outside of books and
National Geographic,
I never once felt I was in a foreign place. Though I have yet another month at sea before I reach Pakistan, I will post this letter here. I wanted to reassure you that for the first time in my life I feel I have finally arrived at a place I can call home.

Anonymity is my vocation. I inhabit the lives of my subjects until I think like them. Behind the doors of my study, I wear them like a suit of out-of-date clothes, telling their stories, interpreting their dreams, mimicking their voices as I type. I find myself most susceptible to those tuned to an impossible pitch, poets and wild-eyed visionaries who live their lives close to the bone. Haunting archives, reading letters composed in agony and journals thick with unspeakable thoughts, I sound the innermost chambers of unquiet souls; unearth dramas no one would ever think to make up.

The reading room of the Manuscripts and Archives Division is located in the very heart of the marble library, which is itself sited in the heart of the city where I live. There are long tables with elegant brass lamps that take a few minutes to warm up, shining their brightening eyes on the rare volumes and papers of our illustrious forebears. Scholars hunch over them, bathed in their reflected glow, like medieval scribes. You need special permission to enter the reading room where all the manuscript collections are held, but the catalog itself is available online from anywhere, even in the reading room itself.

One morning in the library I was idly clicking through the listing of the papers on deposit. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I was on the prowl. The Henry Kittredge Norton Papers (b. 1884; 4 boxes) first snagged my attention. From the archivist’s cover note, I learned that Norton had spent his entire life dedicated to the proposition that the future of urban mass transportation lay in aerial transit. This man, I imagined, was haunted by dreams of flying. I once wrote a book about a woman who spent fifty years trying to provide a single meaning for every word in the dictionary. She dreamed of words as numbers. Once her book was completed, she expected that it would make lying impossible and humankind would finally learn to speak the truth. Another subject of mine dreamed of heaven. He traveled to Mexican jungles and the farthest reaches of the Himalayas, convinced he would eventually find a teacher who would show him the way there.

In a vast, exquisitely maintained law library in a former colonial outpost, I once stumbled upon a casebook. Inside this casebook, like a small pulsing heart, lay a warm knot of baby mice nesting in a hollow of shredded legal citations. The fragility of the lives represented by the rarely opened boxes in special collections and archives held for me a similarly subversive and hidden promise. In these boxes I searched for secret or alternate histories, an overlooked rebel whose life work might overturn commonplace understandings.

Many of the less familiar names in the library’s archives are bygone titans of the social register, well-heeled library patrons whose achievements in finance, real estate, and charitable works are entombed in thousands of anonymous gray boxes like the bones of obscure saints. But that morning it was the dissonance of a lone Muslim name, among the commonplace Jewish and Christian ones, that waylaid me. That name, wedged between a nineteenth-century nun and a twenty-first-century animal rights activist, was Maryam Jameelah. From the finding aid’s descriptive overview of her life and work, it was evident Maryam Jameelah was a well-known figure in the Islamic world.

The boxes arrived just before lunch, retrieved from the locked cages of the library’s deepest recesses. According to the index, the first two boxes of the Jameelah archive contained correspondence, newspaper interviews, and a few of her many books. There were also reviews, a bibliography, and a detailed timeline of her life. The next four boxes contained the handwritten manuscript of a novel and a selection of artwork. There were childhood crayon drawings on yellowing paper by “Peggy” and vivid pastel works depicting the daily lives of Arab peasants—juvenilia from Maryam Jameelah’s beginnings as Margaret Marcus. Predominantly, however, the archive represented Maryam Jameelah’s life and work after she had left America for Pakistan. The last of the boxes included innumerable family photographs of heavily made up Pakistani bridal parties.

Maryam Jameelah’s bibliography listed a number of books and pamphlets all first published out of Lahore, the state capital of Pakistan’s Punjab province, near the Indian border. They bore bristling and grandiose titles:
Modern Technology and the Dehumanization of Man, Islam Face to Face with the Current Crisis, Western Materialism Menaces Muslims, The Resurgence of Islam and Our Liberation from the Colonial Yoke.
For her portrayal of Western culture and social mores Jameelah drew on an array of magazines and books sent to her by her mother back in New York. There are citations of popular social critics like Oscar Lewis and Lance Packard as well as racier fare like “I Was an Alcoholic Housewife” from
Reader’s Digest.
In her two-volume work
Western Civilization Condemned by Itself,
a pirated chapter from
Catcher in the Rye
is used to illustrate the misery of the typical American adolescent. Selections from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” evoke the psychic toll of godless living. Each excerpted work was pitched as a cautionary tale intended to stiffen the spine of those who might be tempted to stray from Islam and be drawn into the clutches of the West.

But the true source of Maryam Jameelah’s authority arose not from her readings and argument, but from the circumstances of her life, haphazardly documented by her nine boxes. By any measure, hers was an unusual story. Every book she wrote is framed by an account of how as a young girl growing up in Mamaroneck, New York, the daughter of secular Jewish parents, she came to reject America and embrace Islam. Self-taught, untraveled, and unlearned in any foreign language, Margaret Marcus had sacrificed the supposed freedoms and privileges of a Western lifestyle to live in upright exile in Pakistan. The choice she lays out for her readers is stark and familiar: a life lived by the sacred laws laid out in the Holy Qur’an or one blackened by hell-bent secular materialism.

Jameelah’s output trailed off in the mid-1980s. But her books, translated and distributed through Islamic centers, reading libraries, and bookshops all over the world, continue to influence the way the Islamic world thinks of the West—America in particular. “Maryam Jameelah’s significance [lies] in the manner with which she articulates an internally consistent paradigm for [Islamic] revivalism’s rejection of the West,” her entry in
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World
reads. “In this regard, her influence far exceeds [that of] the Jamaat [e-Islami] and has been important in the development of revivalist thought across the Muslim world.”

The Jamaat-e-Islami was the brainchild of the man who had first invited Margaret Marcus to live in Pakistan as his adopted daughter. His name was Abul Ala Mawdudi and he was known throughout the Islamic world both for his writings on Islam and for his tireless advocacy of an Islamic political order. In 1941 Mawdudi founded the Jamaat-e-Islami in pre-Partition India. Like the Islamic Brotherhood of Egypt (founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna), the Jamaat was initially a movement dedicated to advancing the cause of an Islamic rebirth and the establishment of a pan-Islamic state. Margaret Marcus’s earliest writings entailed a similar vision.

Vali Nasr, Mawdudi’s biographer and an authority on political Islam (also referred to as Islamic revivalism), describes Maryam Jameelah as broadly responsible for cementing the global cultural divide between Islam and the West. His father, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one of the preeminent scholars of traditional Islam living
in the West, is more precise: “Maryam Jameelah began to write at a time when few in the Islamic world were criticizing western culture in any depth. While there were mullahs who made superficial critiques, say of western women’s scandalous clothing, for someone from within the West to criticize modernism, in an articulate and logical way, was revolutionary.”

But I knew none of this that first morning. I had never heard of Maryam Jameelah or Abul Ala Mawdudi. I only thought to wonder how such an archive ended up at the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. That day I merely glanced at her books and letters before turning to a series of photographs I found in one of her books. A family portrait taken in 1938 showed the future revolutionary as a four-year-old in a smocked dress, gazing at a distant point with large brown eyes while her older sister, Betty, mugged coyly for the camera.

I noticed that as Margaret Marcus grew older, the photographs became less forgiving. Awkwardness radiated from her. Trussed in fancy dresses, she stood apart from her respectable-looking parents and lipsticked sister, gamely smiling and looking as if she wanted to disappear. By her midtwenties, she began wearing a scarf to cover her hair. Finally, a news photo taken soon after her arrival in Pakistan showed her in a burqa posed standing in front of a sunlit door, only her hands and feet visible. By then she was living in the home of Mawlana Mawdudi and her first book,
Islam versus the West,
was a best-seller, soon be translated into a dozen languages. This image of her would appear in nearly every book that followed.

I looked at that photograph for a long time.

It was a photograph of a woman who, after a lifetime of hiding, now wanted to be seen. It was a photograph of someone who could only be herself beneath a pitch-black burqa. Twenty-eight years into her life, Margaret Marcus had been transformed. Through this veil Maryam Jameelah saw the world and her place in it with absolute clarity.

“These shall be the clothes I shall wear from now on,” she wrote her parents happily. “I wish you could see me now! I wonder if you would recognize me as the same old Peggy!”

So Margaret, too, had managed to slip out of one life and into the clothes of another. Only for her it was a real life, not an imagined one. For her there was no going back. However unknown to me, in this unlikely firmament and under this impenetrable habit, Maryam Jameelah was a star. I put the photograph aside and returned to the first thick folder of letters.

By the time the closing bell rang I was surprised to find I was not on the prow of a Greek freighter gliding through the Suez Canal, but in the cool marble hold of the manuscript reading room. Putting the boxes on reserve, I packed up my notes and made plans to return and read further.

5-A Zaildar Park
Icchra
Lahore
PAKISTAN

Early July 1962

Now that I have settled myself here, I would like to explain how I came to be a part of the Mawlana Mawdudi’s family. It seems I have spent my entire life trying to get to this moment, to explain myself in terms that make sense to you. I’m not sure I ever will. But if I don’t try then we will never be able to put the difficulties of the last ten years behind us.

According to the Mawlana, among every people in every period of history there have been the good and the righteous and, whatever creed they professed, they are the true Muslims.
*
He saw these qualities in me. There were even true Muslims before the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him), a period traditionally held to be a time of total pagan ignorance, or
jahiliyya.
The Mawlana believes that Western values exported to the Muslim world by colonialism created only the most recent manifestation of this sorry state, and, like me, he went through a period of ignorance and upheaval before alighting on the Right Path. In Arabic they call this path the Sunnah, meaning the Way of the Prophet.

On the advice of the jailed Islamic leader Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, over a year ago I sent the Mawlana Mawdudi some of my writings on Islam as a way of introducing myself.
**
He responded with an invitation to share the coming Ramadan holiday with his family in Pakistan. “When I was reading your articles,” Mawdudi wrote me, “I felt as if I were reading my own mind.” He was certain I’d feel the same when I read his work and of course I did. He was impressed but only mildly surprised that a girl born and brought up in America could come to hold the
exact same
views he had been preaching for the past thirty years of his life. Naturally, Mawlana Mawdudi wanted to know how a young American girl, from a Jewish family, no less, could arrive at a clear and genuine conception of Islam all by herself. He asked if I might find the time to write a brief story of my mental evolution and send it to him.

So I wrote him of my typical American girlhood, my secular education, and my abortive religious one. Though my interest in Arab culture predated the founding of the state of Israel, you will remember that 1948 was also the year I began reading deeply in Arab history, poetry, and writings. It was a book by a Jewish convert to Islam who eventually showed me my path, I told him. That was the book you and Mother would not let me check out of the Larchmont Public Library,
The Road to Mecca
by Muhammad Asad. I read it dozens of times.

With the Mawlana’s encouragement I marked the end of Ramadan in the spring of 1961 by taking my vows at the Islamic Mission of America in Brooklyn. It was the day after my twenty-seventh birthday. Whenever you tried to talk me out of converting, Daddy, it never had anything to do with giving up Judaism, it had to do with my finding a place in American society. You warned me that I would become a stranger in the family and the community. As you well knew, by then I already was a stranger. I had been for a long time. Yet I found converting to Islam was not the end of my difficulties.

In late March, after you left for Trinidad and Tobago, I made up my mind. As soon as you returned from your holiday, I handed you Mawlana Mawdudi’s letter. There was no time to argue; I had six weeks to prepare for my journey. I emptied my bank account, bought a portable Smith Corona, shipped ahead my library of Islamic books, applied for a passport, and secured the recommended immunizations.