The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (4 page)

With assurance and finesse she captured, too, the more subtle ways in which the West had sought to undermine far older cultures and societies. In a line of argument that would later become familiar to the readers of Edward Said’s
Orientalism
(1978), in the sixties and seventies she described the implicit racism of this project precisely and instructively: “Orientalism is not a dispassionate, objective study of Islam and its culture by the erudite, faithful to the best traditions of scholarship… but an organized conspiracy […].” Where Said simply saw a secular and imperialist agenda, Maryam also felt these works were motivated by the desire “to incite our youth to revolt against their faith, and scorn the entire legacy of Islamic history and culture as obsolete.” She tasked the
New York Times
and
Time
magazine on their constant inveighing against the medieval mind-set and backwardness of the Arabs. Quoting Malcolm X, she wrote of the shame that compelled young Muslims to affect Western manners and dress, the ways in which they were coached to question the validity and relevance of their traditions and faith. Finally, she offered an ironclad vision of Islam that promised a way to make Muslims whole again, undivided against themselves.

Maryam Jameelah’s works are unsettling as much for the tone in which they are written as for their content. There is, first of all, their hectoring know-it-all voice. Wasn’t it just like an American to go marching off to a foreign country and tell them what was what. Who was Margaret Marcus to tell anyone what being a Muslim was all about, as if it were just one thing? And yet whenever I tried to turn away, something in her letters to her parents from Pakistan kept bringing me back.

For over thirty years, Margaret Marcus corresponded with her parents, Herbert and Myra Marcus, back home. These letters begin in May 1962 with her departure for Pakistan and end in 1996 with her father’s death at age 101 in a Boca Raton nursing home. Her parents’ replies are not among her papers; I presumed they had remained in Lahore while her own letters somehow made their way to the archive of the marble library. Of the letters from “Peggy,” however, there are hundreds of pages, both typed and handwritten in a painstaking grade school hand. The letters describe in great detail the circumstances of her life in Pakistan.

But it was the first twenty-four letters, loose in a folder and filed apart from the two bound volumes of the later years, that riveted me. Beginning with the letters Maryam Jameelah wrote aboard the Greek freighter that took her to Pakistan, this series ends abruptly eighteen months later with her marriage. This denouement was as surprising and impenetrable as nearly every twist and turn of her fate that preceded it.

At a time when the handwritten word on a piece of paper is becoming more and more fleeting, postmarked letters and private journals have acquired the quaintly self-conscious air of relics. Reading rooms have become shrines with rules and esoteric rituals to observe. These letters and journals, as well as first drafts and photographs, remain the raw materials of any work of history or biography. Puzzling out a story from fragmented records, interrogating and adjudicating conflicting accounts, establishing precise chronologies, and teasing the color of emotion from taciturn documents still constitute the daily practice of scholarship.

Yet in the archive of Maryam Jameelah such skills felt almost entirely wasted. Here was a helpful list of every article, review, and book she had ever written, as well as a month-by-month accounting of her every school, summer camp, hospital stay, and illness. The date of her first period is included, as is the date of her last one. Furthermore, her early letters to her parents read nothing like her polemical writing. Her voice is fresh and ingenuous, and even at times unintentionally comical. While Margaret never hesitates to express an opinion, in her letters she is also a careful observer, with an anthropologist’s cool eye. Her lectures on Islam and secular materialism largely make way for the story of plucky Peggy Marcus in Pakistan, complete with dramatic dialogue and vivid description. Each letter reads like a serial installment on the progress of an improbable adventure but with details too real to have been invented. Mailed at nearly weekly intervals, they run pages and pages long with scarcely an interrupting typo. They are wildly chatty. Perusing them, puzzling over them day after day, I soon began to think of Margaret Marcus, with both fondness and slight condescension, as Peggy.

In these letters there was an implicit rebuke of her parents’ lifestyle whenever Margaret describes her encounters with poor and humble Arabs or the heartwarming sight of “fuzzy wuzzies” at midday prayer. Herbert and Myra Marcus were at best indifferent to questions about the meaning of it all; they seemed to live for their Caribbean vacations in Trinidad and Tobago. Yet Margaret is never simply the scold. She is a deeply affectionate daughter. Her bouts of soul searching, her expressions of joy and clear-eyed thinking, blunt her sharp and humorless edges.

But dark notes remain. In a letter written at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, en route to Karachi, Margaret found that no matter how insistently she dropped the Mawlana Mawdudi’s name, she was not allowed off the boat. “The border officials have seen far too many pilgrims take up permanent residence in the Holy Land,” she explained to Herbert and Myra. Yet she airily pronounced on the entire country, having gleaned what she could from a shipping agent and close observation of the activity on the pier. “The visitor to Saudi Arabia is never for a single instant allowed to forget that he or she is in a Muslim country,” she wrote from her high perch on the captain’s deck, the whiff of her approval unmistakable. “In Saudi Arabia, they don’t stand for any nonsense; the thief gets his right hand chopped off and the stump dipped in boiling oil.” Even such sentiments failed to convey just how far from home her tale would take her. Still, from the very beginning, it seemed certain that Peggy’s grand adventure would not end well.

Margaret’s critique of America’s tawdry social mores, its blatant civil and racial injustices, was scarcely original; it marked her as part of the troublesome generation that came of age during the postwar period. Many of her generation questioned the 1950s cold war consensus in similarly spectacular ways. But Margaret’s contrariness was unusually precocious. In 1945, on her first and only trip to the Deep South for a cousin’s wedding, Peggy found an empty seat at the back of a Savannah bus. The imposing black woman she sat next to burst into laughter while the white passengers all looked back at her, their faces contorted in silent fury.

Margaret was ten years old. The memory haunted her for years and found its way into her writings. She blamed her parents; they had neglected to explain the rules of the Jim Crow South. The encounter would provide Margaret with yet another example of the inadequacy of her parents’ view of the world. In their anxious bid to assimilate, they had failed to notice and question the evils and hypocrisies that surrounded them.

Yet at the heart of all her letters and books lay another question; how and why did Islam become the remedy? Not long after I started combing the archive, I began to suspect that Peggy’s correspondence had all along been directed not simply at Herbert and Myra, but past them, to posterity. In a cover note written some years after those first twenty-four letters had been sent, Maryam promised future readers that, considered on their own, these letters would provide “ample response” to the following question: why would a modern American girl seek her happiness and fulfillment in a “poverty-stricken, so-called backward, Third World country”?

Yet for every question the letters promised to answer, many more arose to take their place. Some of these questions were small and niggling; others seemed so vast I could only dimly fathom their scale. Was the enmity between Islam and the West metaphysical or historical? Was it ironic or inevitable that the age of liberal democracy had also been the age of imperialism? What was the relationship between the principles enshrined in a constitution and a country’s culture and politics? How, exactly, had the American Cold War found its sequel in the war against Islamic terror?

There were days when, on leaving the library, I could barely account for what I had been doing. Standing on the street waiting for the light to change after another day in the archive, I was gripped by the effort to grasp the precise logic of these events. Inevitably my questions drew me further and further into the archive and into the writings and life of Maryam Jameelah and Margaret Marcus. Whenever I felt I was getting in over my head, I returned to Peggy’s story as it unfolded in these twenty-four letters to her parents.

And it was here that I began to catch glimpses of another, more intractable and human tale. Unlike the triumphant account of Margaret Marcus’s journey to Islam, which prefaced every single one of her books, between the lines of her letters to Herbert and Myra Marcus the war of ideas between Islam and the West seemed neither so stark nor so immutable. In these two dozen letters the answers to small questions promised to unlock larger ones. By tracing the thread of how a woman like Margaret Marcus became Maryam Jameelah and following it to Pakistan, I felt sure that I could find a way out of the trap history had set.

Or so I thought at the time.

5-A Zaildar Park
Icchra
Lahore
PAKISTAN

Late July 1962

Your exhaustive description of Mother’s birthday dinner at that fancy Westchester restaurant was well nigh unbearable to read. I am still unaccustomed to the Pakistani diet and to hear of the rich menu of foods you are enjoying is a torment. When I am most hungry I have visions of steak and pot roast and meat loaf and mashed potatoes, finished off with a thick slice of Sara Lee cheesecake and ice cream. The Mawlana confided to me that he experienced similar visions of Begum Mawdudi’s dishes when he was being feted as an honored guest of King Saud in the tents of Saudi Arabia. On his yearly visit he is expected to relish the sight of an entire roast camel. The hump is served as appetizer. As the honored guest, he is presented the platter of testicles and eyeballs. I expect I will soon grow used to the chilies and will find food tasteless without them. Until then I dream of Sara Lee.

Mian Tufail Muhammad is both the secretary general of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Mawlana’s publisher. In his flowing, immaculately white shalwar kameez, he was the picture of elegance when he arrived to collect me at the airport. He has a gray beard and, like the Mawlana, wears a lambskin cap. In one of the Mawlana’s last letters to me he wrote that Mian Tufail Muhammad had not had an opportunity to read my novel for possible publication. The reason was that he had been arrested and thrown in jail without trial for having written a pamphlet against the anti-Islamic Family Laws Ordinance recently passed by the government. Thinking he was still in prison, I was astonished when he introduced himself. And before I knew it I heard myself asking him if he had been tortured.

It is good to suffer for the cause of Allah, he said in a most solemn voice.

The Mawlana Mawdudi is not long out of prison himself. On first meeting him, I could scarcely believe that he was only sixty-one years old. His white beard, lined face, and stiff movements made him seem ancient. Jail took such a toll on his health that he has enough medicines to stock an entire dispensary! I was told by one of his associates that in an effort to make him “confess,” he was beaten and tortured. Even the threat of execution did not budge him from his principles.

I was disconcerted to learn, however, that he chews betel nut throughout the day so that his mouth is an unnatural shade of red. It is a very expensive habit. Begum Mawdudi restricts herself to a mouthful after every meal but the Mawlana is never far from the family’s heirloom silver spittoon. I’ve noticed that one betel leaf, prepared with tobacco and red betel sap, lasts about three hours.

Yet despite his ill health, the Mawlana is a tireless political leader. He is a bitter enemy of President Ayub Khan and the Western “intelligentsia,” precisely because he is one of the most important Muslim thinkers in the entire world and the message of his teachings is the exact opposite of what they represent. I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone more widely read in so many languages. I’d be surprised if there was anything he didn’t know about Islam. And like me he acquired his knowledge largely by his own efforts, with little formal education. On a recent visit to Saudi Arabia he conferred with King Saud about his plan for a new Islamic university at Medina. As a gesture of solicitude and respect, King Saud sent him a large piece of the black covering of the Holy Kaaba at Mecca, with verses of the Qur’an embroidered on it. The entire household was awestruck when it was spread out on the bed.
*

From five o’clock in the morning until nearly midnight about two dozen bearded brown men in white pyjamas visit the Mawlana’s study. There they carry on grave conversations about the work of his political party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, which has been banned by the government. Just like the Society of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, they are seeking to make Pakistan a fully-fledged Islamic state with the Qur’an as the law of the land. In fact, Sayyid Qutb has been greatly influenced by Mawlana Mawdudi’s writings on this. During the day the Jamaati leaders sit in the back garden enrapt in the Mawlana’s discourses, Mian Tufail Muhammad among them. When the muezzin calls they form their own congregation with the Mawlana as imam leading them in prayer. “My father’s family!” as my dear Haider Farooq once joked.

It is only now, after I’ve been at the Mawdudi household for several weeks, that I have met the last of the nine Mawdudi children. Seventeen-year-old Hussain Farooq had been spending part of his summer holiday with his uncle in Karachi. He returned home with suitcases bursting with up-to-the-minute Western fashions, including pointy shoes, cartons of American cigarettes, and girlie magazines. Apparently this uncle, one more of Begum Mawdudi’s numerous brothers, was a Muslim in name only. In America Hussain would be immediately recognized as a juvenile delinquent. In Pakistan such youths are known by the British terms: teddy boys and teddy girls. Naturally, I am concerned about the poor example he is setting for the younger boys, Muhammad, Khalid, and, most particularly, Haider.