The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (23 page)

It was hard not to wonder if Peggy had once secretly longed for those dresses, those girlish confidences. She must have asked her mother to find and send exactly this issue. Suddenly Maryam snatched the magazine from my lap and returned it to the almirah. She scurried back to the bed.

“I am going to tell you something I have never told anyone,” Maryam said. “Not my parents, not my doctors, not my husband or children.”

At that point, I’d been in Maryam’s bedroom about ten minutes and had scarcely gotten a word in, much less a question. Despite having come all this way, I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear whatever it was Maryam wanted to tell me. It hardly mattered; Maryam was ready to talk.

“When I was eight years old,” she began, “I was approached by a group of older teenage boys. They tricked me into going with them to the woods behind the Larchmont apartment complex.”

She had to find her way home half undressed. It happened again when she was nine with a boy of eleven; he got her down into the basement of the apartment building. Before anything could happen, she said she heard her father calling. She was able to get her clothes back on before he saw anything. Maryam described what had happened as sexual molestation.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked, thinking of her five-times-a-week sessions with Dr. Harper.

“I was ashamed,” she said.

Was Maryam trying to ingratiate herself, involve my sympathies by telling me this dark secret? The fact that it had happened twice, I supposed, increased her credibility. I wondered vaguely if Peggy had taken off her clothes herself, recalling the “foolish mistakes” she’d written Mawdudi about. No sooner did this thought cross my mind than I realized I didn’t really want to know. It was all too easy to imagine she had been chosen by these boys because she was overly trusting in the way that lonely and socially awkward children often are. It would explain her morbid fear of dating. For many, it would explain everything. But I was more surprised by my disinterest. I suddenly became aware of my own impatience, my chilly detachment. Armchair analysis was too easy and, when I got right down to it, explained nothing. What did I want from her? I tried to remember.

“I refused requests to write anti-Semitic tracts for the Jamaat,” Maryam said out of nowhere, clearly sensing that my mind was wandering. “Whenever I receive books to review that traffic in anti-Semitism, or books that deny the Holocaust, I throw them in the garbage. It wouldn’t have mattered if I were a Muslim convert in Germany in 1938. I would have gone to the ovens with the rest of my family. That is what happened to the family of Muhammad Asad, the author of
The Road to Mecca.
He lost everyone.” Until Israel, she said, Islam had never been against the Jews. Anti-Semitism was an import from Europe.

I remembered one thing I wanted her to explain. I wanted to know the real reason the Mawlana had committed her to the Paagal Khanaah. I wanted to get that question answered and then leave. For some reason I couldn’t wait to get out of that room. I interrupted her. What had happened in Pattoki that had so angered Mawdudi? On hearing the question, Maryam was immediately mournful, rocking back and forth in agitation, slapping her head.

“I hit Appa over the head with a frying pan.… She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t harmed, but Appa and Baijan couldn’t forgive me for that.”

I was so completely shocked, I nearly laughed. Peggy’s letters had been so filled with expressions of affection for Appa. Haider Farooq had said Maryam had attacked her in a jealous rage. Had he been right?

Why did you do that? How could you do such a thing?

Maryam couldn’t or wouldn’t remember. She said she was mentally upset.

Khan Sahib had warned her about being too free with her confidences, Maryam told me the next time we met. Khan Sahib was what she called her husband. “You might be an enemy,” she said, shooting me a sideways glance, “ready to use my words against me.”

Was I? I wasn’t sure. For nearly a year I had shifted between fascination and mistrust of this woman, a woman whose core beliefs struck deeply at my own and yet whose critique of the West was both familiar and unerring. Her letters moved and perplexed me. Her books unsettled me, stirred me into another way of looking at the complacent assumptions of my world. In person, however, Maryam seemed less sure of herself than her books had led me to believe. And Khan Sahib was right to be concerned. She was inordinately trusting. Yet her eagerness for company, her obvious loneliness, disarmed me. When I pointed out the inconsistencies or impracticalities of her ideas, when I questioned her about
hudud
and Sharia, Maryam blandly admitted she didn’t have all the answers. “Ask the ulema,” she said before jumping up to dig something new out of her almirah.

“Do you regret anything you have written?” I finally thought to ask.

“Yes,” she said.

In a pamphlet titled “Who Is Maudoodi?” Maryam described her mentor as a “great Mujaddid of the Modern Age,” going so far as to suggest that the mystic who had foretold his birth “might have been an angel in disguise.” She now regretted this bit of hyperbole. Maryam couldn’t think of anything else.

Though Haider Farooq insisted that Maryam’s breach with his father was irrevocable, Mohammad Yusuf Khan never stopped working for Mawdudi’s party. And once things calmed down, Maryam, with Mawdudi’s tacit blessing, made her name as an Islamic pamphleteer and ideologue. They would exchange books and holiday greetings. Maryam would send her prayers whenever the Mawlana suffered a health crisis; he in turn would mark the arrival of her babies with a note. His last handwritten letter was sent the year before his death and addressed to “my dear daughter in Islam.” Though women would never become part of the inner circle of the Jamaat, after Mawdudi’s death Maryam was paid to check the English-language proofs of his works. Jamaat officials would ask Maryam to defend the party when it came under criticism from the Western press.

In 1987 Maryam wrote an article reappraising Mawdudi’s work. She dug this out of her cupboard for me to read, but kept on talking. She was grateful to Mawdudi for saving her from America, for finding her a husband. I tried to read. After his death, however, as Mawdudi’s work was translated into English, she began to realize just how adulterated by modernism, even Orientalism, his idea of Islam was. She cited his description of the Prophet as “the real pioneer of the modern age” with undisguised contempt. She dismissed his desire to harness science and modern technology, which he viewed as “morally neutral,” as a utopian fantasy of an Islamic society. In her view, far from being a return to Islam’s essential traditions, Mawdudi’s vision of Islam was modernism at its very worst.

In fact, Maryam was no longer greatly invested in the dream of a genuine Islamic state in Pakistan or anywhere else.

“I think the best that can be hoped for in the present situation is a liberal government that respects freedom of religion and freedom of expression. Islam needs more saints, not more politicians,” Maryam said. I recognized this last line from recent published interviews.

Maryam had not shared her newfound quietism with the readers of her previous books. After her mother’s death in 1984, the steady stream of book parcels came to an end and with it the research materials she required. Since the publication of
Quest for the Truth
in 1989, Maryam had limited her writing to book reviews. She hadn’t written a word about the war being waged in the name of Islam against America. She hadn’t written about the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl. She hadn’t denounced the Taliban or Osama bin Laden. During the government’s siege of the Red Mosque in Islamabad in the spring of 2007, the leadership of the Jamaat-e-Islami had voiced support for the embattled jihadists who had barricaded themselves with hostages inside. When they were “martyred” by the army, the Jamaat-e-Islami leaped in to make political hay. But Maryam was quiet. Even her critique of Mawdudi was muted in tone. Though it was published in a Jamaati publication, neither her husband nor his party registered the depth of her renunciation.

“Their English isn’t good enough,” Maryam confided sotto voce with a distinct note of triumph. Khan Sahib still believed that she was in ideological lockstep with Mawdudi, she said.

“Don’t tell him,” she said, as if we were now girlfriends in league together.

While I always brought a long list of questions to Maryam’s house, I never seemed to get to them. Maryam would begin talking and explaining some key point and it was difficult to interrupt. There was a rehearsed quality to these speeches. She never repeated herself and she spoke in perfect paragraphs. I always knew exactly what was coming because I had read a nearly word for word version of it elsewhere. I found myself impatiently completing her sentences.

Yet it wasn’t until later, when I transcribed the interview alone in my room in Gulberg, that I grasped how deeply Maryam Jameelah’s affect unsettled me. On the tape I would hear myself acquiesce to Maryam’s new line. The devastation wreaked upon the environment by the West was now a subject of deep concern to her. I noticed that every time I tried to probe more deeply, Maryam managed to divert my line of questions by droning on interminably. No sooner would I arrive in Maryam’s room than I couldn’t wait to leave. And yet as soon as I left, I felt compelled to return, as if I had forgotten something.

I remembered reading a psychiatrist’s account of his growing unease during the long hours he spent treating a patient. He would begin to imagine that his patient was cannibalizing him: “I thought of the amoeba ingesting a particle of food—and ingesting me, actually.” Merely stepping into her room, he said, was “like going inside her.”

Not long before his death Mawlana Mawdudi received a letter from an old Jamaati colleague. Wasi Mazhar Nadwi had been with him when he founded the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941 but had been expelled from the party in 1976. Mawdudi himself had resigned from active involvement in 1972 for health reasons but also because he had been shattered by his party’s failure to capture many seats in the long-awaited 1971 parliamentary elections.

Wasi Mazhar Nadwi wrote: When we created this party, these were our objectives. He proceeded to outline the original mission of Jamaat-e-Islami before concluding: We did not achieve any of them. What exactly did we achieve?

I am aware not only of the failures you have listed in your letter, Mawdudi replied, but also of failures you cannot begin to conceive of. But now that I am an old man, with failing faculties, there is nothing further I can do.

In the 1970s the Mawlana had watched the movement he founded be compromised by Saudi oil money. The student wing of the Jamaat, the Islami Jamiat Talaba, had turned to violence, taking over the student union of Quaid-e-Azam University, policing secular-minded professors, and beating up Western-clad students like a nascent Taliban. Many of these hooligans would go on to take positions of party leadership. According to Ahmad Farooq, his second-oldest son, during this time Mawdudi had watched his closest deputies compromise their Islamic principles out of political expediency. He knew some of them reported on his activities to the government.

Once he fell ill, Mawdudi was at the mercy of ambitious men in the Jamaat he imagined he had trained in selfless submission to Allah. After the 1977 coup brought General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq to power, the government began to actively court the party. Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had initially appointed the general, a member of the Jamaat, to the post of army chief to keep the Jamaat happy, but Zia would be Bhutto’s undoing. With Zia’s coup, the relationship between the Jamaat-e-Islami and the central government became something more insidious and symbiotic. Zia so admired Mawdudi that he distributed copies of the multivolume
Towards Understanding the Qur’an
to his prize soldiers and proposed to include it in the army curriculum. Yet he, too, used the Jamaat for his own ends.

By 1979, the year of Mawdudi’s death, the long-simmering ambitions of the Jamaat-e-Islami seemed to gain purchase. In February, to Mawdudi’s great pleasure, Zia introduced the most extreme forms of the Islamic penal code. Six months later, at the urging of both Mawdudi and the new amir of the Jamaat, Mian Tufail Muhammad, Bhutto was executed on a trumped-up murder charge. Perhaps this accounted for the chastened tone of Mawdudi’s letter to Mazhar Nadwi.

At the end of his life, there was no sign of the moral awakening Mawdudi had once prayed for. There was no sign of the Islamic renaissance he had called for so passionately in his speeches. The political leadership of Pakistan, though now adept at exploiting his party, was no less corrupt, the West no less powerful. At best, Mawdudi concluded in his letter, he would be remembered as yet another in a long line of men who had tried and failed to revitalize Islam. Yet he could not accept that his paradigm might be at fault. He prayed that at least the shell of the Jamaat-e-Islami would remain intact until he was no longer around to worry about it.

Though Mawdudi imagined he had failed, for many he remains the purest embodiment of the most noble and heroic aims of the Muslim faith. His godly voice, his incorruptible dream of an Islamic state, are now in everyone’s head, haunting even the most secular-minded citizens of Muslim countries. Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American who parked an explosives-filled Nissan Pathfinder in Times Square in 2010, cited Mawdudi’s books in
e-mails to friends. There will doubtless be more like him, converts and native-born, who will find in Mawdudi and his ideological heirs a justification for their hatred of the West. But even ordinary law-abiding Muslims can see for themselves how America has colluded with corrupt governments to serve its own ends. In this way their countries are kept weak, their people deprived of a more hopeful future. In short, none of us can escape Mawdudi, even long after his death.

The revolution Mawdudi envisioned finally did take place. By popular referendum, on April 1, 1979, Iran officially became an Islamic republic; the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini its supreme leader. By then the Mawlana had moved to Buffalo, New York, where his son Farooq had settled, for medical treatment. According to Ahmad Farooq, though his father was in pain, both his parents enjoyed their brief time in America. Mawdudi passed away on September 22, 1979, missing the news of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan just over three months later.