The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (25 page)

Dispirited and disillusioned, I had put off reading the two bound volumes of later letters, donated to the library in 1992. Documenting thirty years of marriage, motherhood, and political upheaval, they had never been published. When I finally turned to them it was immediately clear that, like the first twenty-four, they had not been altered or rewritten. Unlike the first twenty-four letters, however, with their evildoers, dramatic dialogue, sudden reversals, and rescues from certain peril, there is little melodrama. The story the later letters tell is no fairy tale. Soon after Maryam posted her twenty-fourth letter, announcing her marriage to Mohammad Yusuf Khan, her Oriental adventure had come to an end and an entirely different story began.

On September 11, 1963, just over a month after her release from the asylum, Maryam Jameelah once again suffered what she called a mental relapse, perhaps brought on by her co-wife’s unceasing hostility, perhaps by the realization that she was already pregnant. Over the course of the subsequent twelve months, Maryam Jameelah would suffer from dysentery, malaria, and flu, all the while in the grip of her special illness. That year Herbert and Myra, in the midst of their world travels, made the first of two visits to her, a visit that nearly coincided with their daughter’s thirtieth birthday.

Her parents didn’t stay long and, according to Maryam, were anxious to leave almost as soon as they arrived. There was little they could do but leave money to pay for a doctor to see her through her pregnancy. Their money also paid for eggs and meat to build up their daughter’s strength in her final weeks. These were considered expensive items that Mohammad Yusuf Khan could not afford to provide. When she came to write her parents of subsequent events, in the first of the bound volume letters, Margaret didn’t say whether these foods were shared with the rest of the family, or with her equally pregnant co-wife. Ayesha Jameelah was born soon after Margaret’s parents left, not long after Shafiqa delivered a baby of her own, her sixth.

Spending large parts of the day in a stupor, Maryam was unable to look after the infant. Instead, she remained in her room, sleeping and rarely emerging. Ayesha Jameelah was left in the care of a teenage niece of Mohammad Yusuf Khan and fed watered-down buffalo milk laced with sugar. The baby would live for four months, lying on a charpoy in the courtyard, sunk in listlessness under a canopy of pink nylon netting to keep off the flies. Her cousins and half siblings gave her intermittent attention before she slipped away.

A nephew awakened Maryam the day her daughter died. “Ayesha is calling for you,” he shouted from the transom of her room. In a daze she rose and went down to the courtyard, her legs trembling from fever or fear. There Ayesha lay blue and still beneath a shabby quilt, her ears stuffed with cotton and her jaw bound with a strip of cloth. When Khan Sahib arrived, he showed no sign of emotion but simply stood next to his wife while his niece filled a big bucket of water from the pump and, after washing the baby over the sewage drain, wrapped the small form in a shroud. Men from the Jamaat waited outside to accompany Khan Sahib to the burial site. Maryam watched from behind her curtain as they disappeared from sight down the dark narrow street.

A month later her illness receded and Maryam once again returned to her writing. She reported Ayesha’s fate to her parents at the close of a thirteen-page letter, noting that the day of her death coincided with a Supreme Court reversal of another government ban on the Jamaat-e-Islami. She wrote of her daughter’s death from malnutrition seemingly without emotion. “I look up at the pink sky,” the letter concludes, “soon the Azan from the mosques will call the sun-set prayer, and with a sudden pang of poignancy, I realize that my youth has gone and I have entered into the full ripeness of mature womanhood.”

I read these two bound volumes of letters in the hope that I would find answers to the last of my questions. How well did Maryam’s pronouncements on the true Islamic way of life serve her as a wife and mother? How well did her frail spirit withstand a life defined not by abstract notions but by whooping cough, typhoid, malaria, smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, polio, malnutrition, unending pregnancies, and the nervous collapses that followed the birth of every baby? I read them to see how Maryam Jameelah explained what had happened to Pakistan over the past forty years. Had she achieved something noteworthy, or had she squandered her life on a dream? If the story didn’t end happily, how did it end?

When I finished reading the last letter, I sat down and wrote once again to Maryam Jameelah.

“There is no joy in motherhood for me.”

These are your words, Maryam. You wrote them in a moment of weakness at the prospect of bearing your fifth child. You had wanted an IUD; Khan Sahib wouldn’t agree to it. Despite ten children with Shafiqa and five with you, the decision to have another child was Allah’s to make. How could you argue? Like Mawdudi, you believed that birth control was an invitation to indulge in illicit sex.

Khan Sahib also refused to vaccinate your children.
“Modern industrialization promotes the philosophy that man can banish poverty, disease and ignorance without divine aid.”
These are your words.
“Science has made man independent of Allah.”
Is your faith that tenuous?

In the same letter where you lament Khan Sahib’s stubbornness over birth control and inoculations, you describe a plan to write a book denouncing the women’s liberation movement.
“In Islam… [a woman’s] success as a person is judged according to her fidelity to her husband and the rearing of worthy children. . . . While men are the actors on the stage of history, the function of women is to be their helpers concealed from public gaze… a less exciting and more humble role perhaps, [but] essential for the preservation of our way of life.”

Why were you intent on preserving a way of life you never managed to live yourself? You stood on the stage of history and let Shafiqa raise your babies.

“I just can’t cope by myself with a new baby: I’ll be just as incompetent with my fifth as I was with my first. I don’t need to talk anything out: I just need somebody else to take over the care of the baby and do what I will not be able to do.”

In your books you extolled an Islamic ideal that proved of no practical use in your own life. Shafiqa made that possible, yet you were consistently critical of her.

“Too many Pakistani women I know have the dirty habit of continuously littering the floors of their homes… with garbage and rubbish. Islamic education should teach girls cleanliness and orderliness.”

While you complained about the filth and the constant food shortages, Shafiqa endured, not out of the strength of her faith (in this too she was grossly delinquent) but because she did not have the choice.

It is one thing to espouse these views as a sheltered and single American woman. But how could you continue to denounce science, with its “naked atheism and materialism,” while you were asking your mother to send you books on infant nutrition? Or while you were pleading with your father to intervene with your husband on the subject of your children’s vaccinations for polio, smallpox, and diphtheria?

To whom should your sisters in faith direct their appeals?

Your books on the “perverted ‘cultural’ values” of the West, you boasted, brought in more income than Khan Sahib’s work for the Jamaat-e-Islami. Did you write them for money?

“Feminism is an unnatural, artificial and abnormal product of contemporary social disintegration which in turn is the inevitable result of the rejection of all transcendental, absolute moral and spiritual values.… The result will be suicide, not only of a single nation as in the past, but of the entire human race.”

“[The women’s liberation movement]
… AIMS TO DESTROY THE ENTIRE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE, HOME AND FAMILY.”

Tell me, how many people did these American women kill?

How many wars did they start?

How many young men did they flog?

“According to Islamic teachings, life is not a pleasure trip but an examination.”

How carefully have you weighed what you have written against how you have lived your life?

Can we talk, as you once did to your parents, about more immediate things than abstract questions of transcendental values? Can we begin with the health, education, and future happiness of our children, the histories we share, the struggles all of us face in trying to live a meaningful life? Can we reach some kind of respectful accommodation?

The past will always be there. It will be pieced together from old books and photographs, taken from gray boxes, locked almirahs, and unreliable memories. But the long walk of history has never been stopped. This walk leaves some behind brokenhearted while others pass them by triumphant, anticipating the next bend in the road. Their stories, like your own, will never be as simple as you would like them to be. They will be complicated.

But this is not complicated. Muslim youth are killing their sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers. This is social disintegration. Young men and women are killing themselves to better kill others. This is perversion. In Lahore, saints’ shrines have been locked, pilgrims turned away, out of fears of suicide bombers intent on poisoning the very wellspring of your faith.

Yet now you are quiet.

Now you say, “Ask the ulema.”

You drew a savage and titillating portrait of America and of those who didn’t practice their Muslim faith exactly the way you wanted them to, yet you disclaim all responsibility for the crimes these youth commit and still conspire to commit every day in Pakistan or New Jersey or Somalia or Malaysia.
“We must always be prepared to wage Jihad… [Mujahidin] must be trained in combat.”
“The Mujahid… will not merely oppose
Kufr
but be inwardly and outwardly equipped to establish a true Islamic society according to that of the Holy Prophet Mohammad.”

Your words. The Jamaat-e-Islami no longer needs your books to sell Muslim youth on martyrdom. They have others to do that now.

You told me you had had no opinion one way or another about your sons’ decision to go to Afghanistan. Their decision, like that of their brothers today, was entirely their own.

Do not all young people desire proof that they are good in the eyes of God? Don’t sons want to make their parents proud?
“[A good Muslim mother] should entertain her young children with the thrilling deeds of the great Muslims past and present and try to inspire them with the desire to emulate these virtues.”
Why were all these great Muslims jihadis? Where are the poets and painters and singers?

Did your sons realize that the war they were sent to fight was not the one you and the Jamaat-e-Islami sold them on? Is that why they left Pakistan?

Would you have preferred that they had been martyred in a proxy war of the Americans?

“The Jamaat-e-Islami has become too concerned with politics. Party leaders should reflect more on matters of faith and spiritual purity.”

These are your words now.

And these are mine: What is this spiritual purity? When the jihadis come to the door of your house in Sant Nagar, will they find the family living there sufficiently pure? Don’t you have an American passport? Don’t your children and grandchildren? Will it matter to these men that you have been a Muslim for fifty years, or will someone remind them you were born a Jew?

When will you speak up?

If not now, I asked Maryam Jameelah, when?

c/o Mohammad Yusuf Khan
15/49 Sant Nagar
Lahore
PAKISTAN

November 20, 2008

This is to acknowledge safe receipt of your last letter of November 6. As a nonbeliever and non-Muslim, you have the right to express your own views in your forthcoming book. However, at this late stage at the end of my life, I stand by everything I have written and spoken and have no intention of making any change in my views on Mawlana Mawdudi, Islam, or the West. All I ask of you is to send me copies of your book or articles as soon as published. I will preserve them carefully in my files. With regards.

Sincerely,

Maryam Jameelah

CHAPTER 9

The Lifted Veil

“I” and “you” are the veil

Between heaven and earth;

Lift this veil and you will see

No sect and no religion.

When “I” and “You” do not exist

What is mosque? What is synagogue?

What is fire temple?

Mahmud Shabistari

The trap of history, it turns out, cannot easily be unsprung.

When Maryam was not trying to sugarcoat things or concoct some kind of Oriental romance, she was a more unforgiving inquisitor than I would ever be. She would never lose sight of the fact that she might die at any moment and would have to answer for the life she had lived. Her most earnest conversation would never be with me, or with those impressionable youths who had once devoured her books, or even with the Mawlana Mawdudi. This conversation would always be with Herbert and Myra, with her past, and with a (hopefully) compassionate God. It is all too easy to revert to the certainties and judgments life in a powerful state affords us. Maryam was neither oracular or mad, but simply an old woman, filled with fears, living alone in a room with little more than her faith, her library, and letters from her grandchildren for comfort. It was as if a veil had been removed and I could now see her face clearly.

When Margaret Marcus was a young woman, her questions were an endless source of anxiety. Her search for happiness and fulfillment had brought her to Islam. But where had the answers the Qur’an provided gotten her? Not to a perfect society, certainly. Not to an end of questions. Mawdudi, too, was denied a peaceful end. According to his son, Ahmad Farooq, it was a hospital visit from a member of the Jamaat-e-Islami that provoked the heart attack that ended his life. Yet Maryam’s faith had consoled her in the acute loneliness of her life in New York and Lahore, in the darkness of her mental breakdowns, in the sorrows and failures of motherhood. Her faith granted her the assurance that evils she had witnessed and injustices she had suffered would not go unpunished. And her community of faith had provided her a loyal husband and a family that accepted her place in it, whatever her afflictions.

Herbert and Myra’s love had also sustained her. In the anxious weeks before she left for Pakistan, Margaret Marcus had asked the Mawlana a simple question: how was it that though her parents were unbelievers, they were still good and kind people? This went to the heart not only of the supposed divide between the West and the Muslim world, but also of the divide between believers and nonbelievers. Whatever one’s private beliefs, whatever one’s particular culture, politics, or set of values, what is more transcendent than the love and concern of a parent for a child?

All that was good in Herbert and Myra was due to the trace of belief that still clung to their hearts, Mawdudi answered. After a generation or so, this trace would inevitably disappear, leaving their children or their children’s children open to the worst depravities. I didn’t entirely discount this argument. Still, for the umpteenth time I wondered: how did he know this?

“Nay, but they are sure of nothing!” (52:36). The fifty-second sura of the Qur’an was an exasperated debate between Allah and Muhammad over what to do with those unruly mortals who, after hearing the Prophet recite the suras, decided that without more certain proof of divine inspiration, they couldn’t be sure that Muhammad hadn’t made them up. He might be a poet or mad. They would take a wait-and-see attitude.

In reply, Allah commanded his Prophet to remind his doubters that he was “neither a soothsayer nor a madman” (52:29). But if these doubters truly suspected Muhammad was crazy, for Muhammad to simply insist that he wasn’t would never be a promising line of defense.

Mystified by the Prophet’s difficulties getting the Meccan tribes to follow him, Allah was driven to ask His Prophet what he supposed the problem was. “Is it their minds that bid them take this attitude or are they simply people filled with overweening arrogance?” Perhaps they imagine they created themselves out of thin air? Or maybe they had a different “stairway to heaven” (52:33, 35–38)?

Was there a hint of sarcasm here?

Or, Allah continued, did they think that given enough time they would eventually puzzle out the mystery of creation and write down their own illuminating verses (52:41)? Let them try their hand at it! (52:34) Definitely sarcasm. Allah posed His questions as if men were as much a riddle to Him as He was to them.

There was a story in the
Mishkat al-Masabih
that touched on souls undone by questions such as I had been asking. Baghawi’s collection of ahadith drew from a number of esteemed traditions, but also included material not found elsewhere, all arranged thematically. In a chapter titled “Evil Promptings,” the Prophet got straight to the point. Weary and exasperated with his doubting Thomases, Muhammad had finally settled on an answer that pleased him. Men will continue to pose one question after another, he said. Inevitably someone will ask, “God created all things, but who created God?” This was indeed just the kind of big question that always defeated me. But the Prophet had an answer. He advised that one must simply reply “I believe in God and in His messengers” and be done with it.

There was not a little wisdom in that. Spitting three times on your left side for good measure was also recommended. The devil was behind this last question, the Prophet seemed to suggest, threatening to undo the hard-won understandings that came before it. Not all questions, I hoped, just this last one. That sounded about right.

So, putting aside the problematic notion of an existential rift between Islam and the West, how did I begin to repair the impasse between Maryam and me? In the eighty-sixth verse of the fourth sura, and the sixty-first of the eighth, I found instruction. This was how I understood what I read. When, in the course of battle, the believer hears a greeting of peace, even from someone who might possibly belong to the enemy camp but who, in outward appearance, has peaceful intentions, the believer is required to accept it.

“If they incline towards peace, incline thou to it as well.”

And Lo! Allah, the knower, hearer, and seer, takes into account all things.

I wrote Maryam again to say that if I failed to understand her, it was because I lacked sufficient imagination and detachment, not because I was a nonbeliever or kufr. If it was that simple I might have dismissed her out of hand, as she now hoped to dismiss me. Instead, part of the difficulty of the task I had set myself stemmed from the effort required to set aside the many beliefs I did have. I then asked Maryam if I could write her story as if she were writing once again to her family. Having her voice pass through my own, perhaps I might understand her better. I wanted her blessing to use the correspondence in her archive, the doctored and make-believe letters as well as the real ones, to quote and paraphrase and arrange as I saw fit. It was a great deal to ask. She would have to trust me.

For years I had been writing this story as if it were mine alone to tell. Yet only now did I see that the story of how Margaret Marcus became Maryam Jameelah was only half of what there was to tell, and the easy half at that. In a postscript I mentioned that I had tracked down Barbara Kenny and Julia Bustin. I thought she would be pleased to know that they remembered her fondly.

c/o Mohammad Yusuf Khan

15/49 Sant Nagar

Lahore

PAKISTAN

March 15, 2009

Thank you for your letter of February 23. Mujahidin must never be confused with “terrorists.” All the Mujahidin I have written about were genuine freedom fighters struggling on their native soil against foreign occupation and oppressive imperialism. All of them strictly observed the dictates of lawful jihad to distinguish between combatants and innocent women and children. If I have praised them it is because they deserve it in their thoroughly legitimate struggle.…

My most recent article, submitted to an Indian Muslim weekly in Delhi under the title “Muslim Savages,” deplores the wholesale destruction of girls’ schools and even hospitals, and the banning of female education so far as threatening to throw acid on any woman or girl who ventures outside of her home.… Radical extremism is even worse than modernism. I feel quite dismayed that most Pakistanis I know, including my husband, dispute even the existence of al-Qaeda or Taliban and blame all of Pakistan’s troubles on a grand conspiracy of America, Israel, and India to destroy Islam/Muslims. Incredible as it may seem to you, most people here think 9/11 was a Zionist plot to give America the pretext it needed to attack Afghanistan and Iraq and control the Muslim world.

I am so happy that you found my childhood playmates alive and well, still remembering me after these many years. Before my parents died, I wrote to them that I was now convinced they loved me and did their best. I no longer held them responsible for any of my mental/emotional difficulties. I felt the need to apologize for all the suffering I inflicted upon them while [I was] growing up. Did you ever find that letter in the library?

Yes, you have my permission to use my letters as you see fit. I think you will be as fair as it is possible for a nonbeliever to be. When [your book is] published, please arrange to have three copies […] sent direct to my address by REGISTERED post if you can possibly afford the expense. It will become a part of my library.

A few weeks later I found her article on the Internet.

“Muslim Savages”

Under the false pretext of Islam, in the northeast territories of Pakistan, female education has been totally banned, more than 170 girls’ schools have been destroyed, and numerous CD and barber shops blown up. There have been dire threats to throw acid upon any woman or girl who dares emerge outside her home. All forms of entertainment and cultural activities are now prohibited, a death-sentence invoked for anyone opposing them. Public exhibits of the corpses of offenders are hung from street lampposts. So unbearable is Taliban rule in these areas, everyone who can is leaving. There are now thousands of displaced and destitute people. Under the rule of Taliban, too, terrorism thrives. Youthful suicide bombers, both male and female, prowl everywhere in Pakistan, sowing death and destruction. Among these are those guilty of destroying the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad together with all its many casualties. Without doubt they are responsible for the recent atrocities in Mumbai. Taliban is notorious for kidnappings and beheading captives, especially foreigners.

Bearing in mind the terrible times in which we live, a genuine Islamic order must express compassion and mercy as it did during our greatest days in the past.

Maryam Jameelah, March 2009

Sometime later the article was removed.

In her most recent letter to me, Maryam asked that I send her two copies of a
National Geographic
book of photographs.

I’m still trying to decide what books I will send instead.