The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (28 page)
Read The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism Online
Authors: Deborah Baker
201
Osama bin Laden made… from the Saudis.
Steve Coll,
Ghost Wars
(Penguin Books, New York, 2004), 86. Twenty years later, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the 2001 attacks and the confessed executioner of journalist Daniel Pearl (during the month Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times), was arrested in the house of a Jamaat party official. Gretchen Peters, “Al Qaeda Pakistani Ties Deepen,”
Christian Science Monitor,
March 6, 2003.
201–202
“Freedom fighters” from Egypt… all jihadi organizations.
See pp. 6–9 and 37–51 of the 1993 Congressional Report “The New Islamist International,” detailing the nexus between the ISI and the Jamaat-e-Islami and the role played by the Jamaat in the export of Islamist doctrine and terrorism, particularly to Kashmir, but also to Central Asia, Egypt, Liberia, Lebanon, Algeria, Sudan, India, and Bangladesh.
202
“We are not bigots… calm and logical reason.”
This quote also appears in Jameelah’s
Islam Face to Face with the Current Crisis,
a reworking of her 1969 manifesto, 43.
202
In cheap, simply written… famed mujahidin.
Conversation with Basharat Peer, April 2009.
202
“Make up your mind to participate in… the light of Truth?”
Maryam Jameelah,
Two Mujahidin of the Recent Past and Their Struggle for Freedom against Foreign Rule
(Delhi: Crescent, n.d.), 9 10.
202
“Since we are all destined… destruction and collective suicide.”
Jameelah,
Western Imperialism Menaces Muslims,
39–40.
202
“Everything they stand for [is] EVIL!”
Jameelah,
“
Manifesto of the Islamic Movement,” 44.
203
“the possibility of violent death [lies] the soul of all romance.”
William James,
William James: Writings: 1902–1910,
ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Library of America, 1988), 1284.
203–204
“All the discontent of men… failure to solve them.”
Wilfred Cantwell Smith,
Islam in Modern History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 163–64.
204
Pure slander, Maryam insisted… with a blanket absolution.
Jameelah,
Islam and Orientalism,
65–66.
211
“There is no joy in motherhood for me.”
Maryam Jameelah to Herbert and Myra Marcus, June 27, 1972, NYPL.
211
You had wanted an IUD; Khan Sahib wouldn’t agree to it.
Maryam Jameelah to Herbert and Myra Marcus, July 21, 1972, NYPL.
211
Khan Sahib also refused to vaccinate your children.
Maryam Jameelah to Herbert and Myra Marcus, December 19, 1972, NYPL.
211
“Modern industrialization promotes… man independent of Allah.”
Jameelah,
Islam versus the West,
120–21.
211
In the same letter where you lament… women’s liberation movement.
Maryam Jameelah to Herbert and Myra Marcus, December 19, 1972, NYPL.
211–212
“In Islam… [a woman’s] success… for the preservation of our way of life.”
Jameelah,
Islam in Theory and Practice,
86.
212
“I just can’t cope by myself… I will not be able to do.”
Maryam Jameelah to Herbert and Myra Marcus, July 21, 1972, NYPL.
212
“Too many Pakistani women I know… teach girls cleanliness and orderliness.”
Maryam Jameelah,
Islam and the Muslim Woman Today
(Lahore: Mohammad Yusuf Khan, 1976), 14.
212
“naked atheism and materialism.”
Maryam Jameelah,
Modern Technology and the Dehumanization of Man
(Delhi: Crescent Publishing, n.d.), 59.
212
Or while you were pleading… for polio, smallpox, and diphtheria?
Maryam Jameelah to Herbert and Myra Marcus, December 19, 1972, NYPL.
212
“perverted ‘cultural’ values.”
Jameelah,
Islam in Theory and Practice,
86.
213
“Feminism is an unnatural, artificial… of the entire human race.”
Jameelah,
Islam and the Muslim Woman Today,
40, 51.
213
“[The women’s liberation movement]… MARRIAGE, HOME AND FAMILY.”
Maryam Jameelah to Herbert Marcus, February 1, 1973, NYPL.
213
“According to Islamic teachings, life is not a pleasure trip but an examination.”
Jameelah,
Islam versus the West,
116.
214
“We must always be prepared… must be trained in combat.”
Jameelah,
Resurgence of Islam and Our Liberation from the Colonial Yoke,
31.
214
“The Mujahid… will not merely oppose… of the Holy Prophet Mohammad.”
Ibid., 31.
214
“[A good Muslim mother] should entertain her young children… desire to emulate these virtues.”
Jameelah,
Islam and the Muslim Woman Today,
13.
214
“The Jamaat-e-Islami has become too… faith and spiritual purity.”
Interview with Maryam Jameelah, December 2007.
Chapter 9: The Lifted Veil
217 Epigraph from
The Secret Rose Garden of Sa’d ud din Mahmud Shabistari,
Lederer, trans., 65.
219
“Is it their minds… filled with overweening arrogance?”
Asad
, Message of the Qur’an,
249-50 (52:32). I think Asad’s translation reads better in this instance. The paraphrases in this section reflect my own reading.
219–220
Men will continue to pose… was also recommended.
Khatῑb al-Tibrῑzῑ, Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh.
Mishkat al-Masabih
(Calcutta: T. Hubbard, 1809), 20–23.
220
“If they incline towards peace, incline thou to it as well.”
Asad,
Message of the Qur’an,
249.
Acknowledgments
To write a book is to incur a stack of debts, many of which won’t ever be repaid or even properly acknowledged, no matter how many endnotes one appends or perfunctory lists one makes. This book is no different. The sturdy patron at the center of this narrative is undoubtedly The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. It is to that grand institution and the many, many remarkable individuals that hold it aloft that I owe not just this book but also a large part of my education and livelihood. In the course of my research for
The Convert
I benefited greatly from the expertise, both bibliographic and linguistic, of those librarians in Shoichi Noma Reading Room of the Asian and Middle Eastern Division (formerly the Oriental Division and now defunct entirely). I would particularly like to thank John M. Lundquist, Gamil Youssef, and Sunita Vaze, but also the long departed “Mr. Parr” who first welcomed Margaret Marcus and, eventually, her archive. The Manuscripts and Archives Division and the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room where I first encountered the Maryam Jameelah Collection, is also under the library’s capacious roof. There I found Assistant Curator Thomas G. Lannon unfailingly cordial, helpful, and enthusiastic. Finally, in 2008–2009 I was the beneficiary of a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. This enabled me to research and write this book full-time, providing me not just an office in the library but a remarkable group of fellow writers, each of whom provided constant inspiration from a variety of directions. I would particularly like to thank my fellow Cullman scholar Deborah Cohen for her close reads of an early draft of the manuscript and Akeel Bilgrami for suggesting ways the debate between Islam and the West might be reframed. I will never forget, too, Jean Strouse’s comic reflections on the mysterious byways, both psychic and narrative, of the biographical art. I salute all my Cullman brethren, and most particularly, the late Dorothy Cullman, who made this dream of refuge and reflection real.
Now for the breathless, far from complete list of those without whom I could never have managed: Durre S. Ahmed, Negar Azimi, Jonathan and Julie Baker, Katie Dublinski, Jennifer Elliott, John Esposito, Gregory Gibson, Judith Ginsberg, Richard Grinker, Susan Hobson, Adina Hoffman, Mahnaz Ispahani, Lynn Marasco, Mandy McClure, Albert Mobilio, Mira Nair, Geoffrey O’Brien, Ahmad Rashid, Katherine Russell Rich, Elizabeth Rubin, Ranjana Sengupta, Michele Stevenson, Melanie Thernstrom, Salman Toor, and Eliot Weinberger either gave my manuscript honest and close reads, or provided me a comfortable bed, or a pointed conversation at vulnerable points on this expedition. In Lahore I was a houseguest of Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin. In their late night banter, living room discussions over tea, and their patient answers to my all too innocent questions, they and their friends provided a necessary historical context for the events that were then consuming (and continue to consume) their city and country. I am also grateful to Abul Ala Mawdudi’s two sons, Ahmad Farooq and Haider Farooq, and his grandson Ali Farooq, as well as to Asma Jehangir for bringing us together. Ali Sethi was my guide to the secret palaces and sacred places of Lahore; I couldn’t have had a better one. I would also like to thank my literary agent, David McCormick, and to acknowledge his formidable doggedness on behalf of this book and the roundabout path it took to find a publisher. My editor Ethan Nosowsky helped the manuscript arrive at its final form; I am frankly wary of reckoning the extent of
that
debt. Fiona McCrae, director of Graywolf Press, played the part of benevolent fairy godmother.
Finally and essentially: thank you, Lila, Nayan, and Amitav.
DEBORAH BAKER
was born in Charlottesville and is a graduate of the University of Virginia. She is the author of
In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding,
which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2008 Penguin published her book
A Blue Hand: The Beats in India,
a narrative account of Allen Ginsberg’s travels in India. While a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she researched and wrote
The Convert.
She is married to Amitav Ghosh, with whom she has two children, and together they divide their time between Goa, Kolkata, and Brooklyn, New York.
Book design by Rachel Holscher.
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