The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (5 page)

Though there are aspects of my life in Mawdudi’s household that give me pause, my one real complaint is that the Mawlana has no time to spare for me. Even when he does make the time, his English isn’t nearly as fluent as his letters had led me to believe. He had written them in Urdu and his secretary translated them. Left on my own, I have no choice but to return to my writing and study of Urdu. I am also writing a weekly column for the Friday Islamic supplement of the
Pakistan Daily Times.
One new book I am planning is to be titled
Islam and Modernism,
and another
Islam in Theory and Practice.
I also have ideas for a revised edition of my first book,
Islam versus the West.
Naturally, I wish to discuss all my thoughts with the Mawlana and when his duties do not permit this, it is frustrating.

In the meantime, I decided to introduce myself to my new country by writing an autobiographical essay for the
Pakistan Times,
revisiting my journey from America to Pakistan. No sooner was this published than I began receiving an avalanche of letters proposing marriage. The Mawlana had predicted this in one of his letters to me. He wrote that all those qualities that would make me a good Muslim wife would be considered faults in America, and that if I stayed in New York I couldn’t possibly hope to find a husband to be my true life-companion. He said he knew a great number of virtuous young Muslims and imagined a match that would prove to be of great help in his movement. Once I arrived in Pakistan, he promised, I would have no cause to worry about my future.

By far most of these marriage proposals were addressed to the Mawlana, as he is my guardian, but once in a while there would be a letter addressed to me. “I am a lonely tree parched in the wilderness of the desert!” one suitor proclaimed. “A fire for you is burning in the furnace of my chest!” He went on to reassure me that he had nearly eight thousand rupees in his savings account. I read these letters aloud to Asma and Humaira, and we fell over laughing. After we received fifty such proposals, the Mawlana informed me that I was now the most sought after spinster in all of Pakistan. It was hard for me to take any of these letters as seriously as the Mawlana Mawdudi did.

One night over dinner the Mawlana returned from taking a call in his study to inform me that I had been offered a full-time job teaching English at a local madrasa. I had neither interest in nor qualifications for such work, having long ago decided that I would be incapable of disciplining a class of ill-behaved children, much less inspire in them a love of learning. This was not what he wanted to hear. “You must think of what kind of work you would like to do so that you can earn enough to live decently,” he admonished me. “I am old now and in poor health and I am very much worried about your future.”

When I pointed out that this was exactly the dilemma you both had been faced with, he interrupted me to say that my welfare was now his concern. I would not be able to make a living from my writing because Pakistan was a poor and illiterate country. Nor can I make a living as a typist or a secretary as Betty once did because here only men fill these jobs.

“If you do not want to work,” he concluded, “then the only alternative is marriage. I am convinced that marriage is the best thing for you, no matter how much you insist that you do not want it. Believe me, Maryam, the woman in you is not absent, she is only sleeping.”

*
Translated from the Arabic word for “master,” on the subcontinent
mawlana
is used as a title to refer to learned religious men.

**
Sayyid (or Seyyed in Persian, Syed in Urdu) is an honorific indicating a person who is a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. In the case of Qutb, however, Sayyid is also his first name.

*
Begum
is an honorific title given to high-ranking Muslim women of South Asia.

*
Holy Kaaba—the black granite cube marking the most sacred site of Islam and around which pilgrims to Mecca circumambulate. The covering cloth is called a
kiswah.
This cloth is embroidered with Islamic inscription of the
shahada,
the profession of faith. The cloth is replaced every year.

CHAPTER 2

The Mawlana

Remind them, for you are but an admonisher,
You are not at all a warden over them.
But who is averse and disbelieves,
Allah will punish him with direst punishment.
Qur’an
, 88:21–24

This was the family story.

When Abul Ala Mawdudi’s grandfather heard that his son, in his first year at the brand-new university at Aligarh, had been seen playing cricket in infidel clothing, he immediately withdrew him. The great modernizer and reformer Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, a relation of his wife’s family, had founded the experimental “Anglo-Oriental” college. Like many former members of Mughal court society, he had felt obliged to send Ahmad Hasan there. But the spectacle of his son kitted out in white trousers and jacket was too much for a man who had witnessed the Mutiny of 1857 and the subsequent brutal dismemberment of the Mughal Empire by the British. He transferred Ahmad Hasan to Allahabad to study law, abruptly suspending the experiment with English education. Yet the legacy of Ahmad Hasan’s engagement with the West, however glancing, would be passed along to his youngest son. Abul Ala Mawdudi was born twenty-five years later, on September 25, 1903, in Aurangabad, India, the last of Ahmad Hasan’s children.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Lord Curzon was viceroy of India and the British Empire was at the zenith of its rule over the Indian subcontinent. By then the disgraced cricketer was a practicing solicitor, husband, and father. Soon after Abul Ala’s birth, however, Ahmad Hasan abandoned the law to devote himself, like his own saintly forefathers, to Sufi thought. Yet when he left the messy world of human strife for the realm of prayer and ascetic practices, he took along his family. He raised his youngest son in similar seclusion, shielding him from foreign influence and the rough manners of less lettered schoolboys. Until Abul Ala turned eight, he was his sole teacher. Thereupon he consigned the boy to the local madrasa, intent on securing his son’s future among the learned and devout.

Only when the family found itself on the brink of destitution was Mawdudi’s father persuaded to resume his legal practice. Ahmad Hasan did so on one condition: he would only represent the innocent. The rest of his life was spent living out this seeming paradox: a Sufi ascetic immersed in the affairs of men. He died after a long illness when Mawdudi was seventeen, a learned man, gently devout, but stubbornly at odds with the world as it was.

I was reminded of Ahmad Hasan after reading two speeches Mawdudi gave at Lahore Law College soon after the founding of Pakistan on August 14, 1947. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the “Father of the Nation,” had labored to forge a national creed out of another seeming paradox: even as its borders were drawn along the lines of faith, Jinnah insisted that Pakistan would be a secular democracy. Mawdudi’s speeches in January and February 1948 were a last-ditch effort to forestall this outcome and the beginnings of his long struggle to write Islam into both the constitution and the consciousness of the new nation.

For Mawdudi, secularism, nationalism, and multiparty democracy were emblematic of the false philosophies of the West to which Muslims had for too long been enslaved. They had nothing to do with Islam. Jinnah and the Westernized political elite poised to consolidate their power represented neither the voice of the masses nor the future of Pakistan; Mawdudi did. In 1948 he warned the students of Lahore Law College that these men would hijack Pakistan for their own ends.

Long before the idea of Pakistan had taken hold, in editorials and books published in the 1920s and 1930s in India, the Mawlana Mawdudi had argued that there was no need to partition the subcontinent once the English had left. Mawdudi never wanted a separate homeland for Muslims. He did not foresee a democratic state that would give voice to a formerly abused minority. Instead he wanted to pick up where the Mughal Empire had left off, resume a moment in history when Islam was glorious and powerful and sure of itself, impervious to Hindu influence. Islam alone could replace British rule.

There would of course be critical improvements, none designed to appease the Hindu majority of the subcontinent. In the Qur’an and the Hadith, the record of the Prophet’s sayings and doings, Mawdudi had discovered the makings of a blueprint for an entirely new social contract: “a revolutionary ideology and program which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals.” He accused Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian National Congress of plotting to impose a Hindu raj in India, yet in these early years his proposed Islamic state often sounded like a Muslim one. The longer he thought about it, the more perfect and inevitable such a state became.

But who would lead it? The British had sent the last Mughal emperor into exile in 1858, ending three centuries of Muslim rule over the subcontinent. The Turkish Caliphate disappeared with the Ottoman Empire in 1924. As the outlines of his dream took shape in the years before the 1947 Partition, Mawdudi found allies in the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, also locked in opposition to British rule. But even after the British Empire was dismantled, the Brotherhood found itself under siege, its leaders arrested or executed, its members exiled. Perhaps Mawdudi entertained the hope that Lahore—once the sixteenth century seat of the Mughal emperors Akbar the Great and his son Jahangir—might replace Cairo as the center of an Islamic renaissance. Lahore would once again become a great capital city, the throne of an Islamic empire overseen by a reconstituted caliph.

In classical and medieval Islam, the caliph represented the Prophet’s successor, the supreme political leader of the world Muslim community. A caliph’s life was a grimly titanic labor, Mawdudi held, a life that sacrificed wealth, pleasure, and carnal desires in service to Islam. Such a leader could not live in a palace or indulge in the pomp of a powerful head of state as he would be constrained by fears of judgment day. Should this caliph take a single rupee, a single patch of land, betray even a hint of arrogance or indulge a careless moment of lust, he would know that Allah would be unsparing in the hereafter. There seemed to be something inescapably innocent in Mawdudi’s belief that the threat of hell was the only check required on a man’s pursuit of power. Not surprisingly, Maryam Jameelah’s description of the unsmiling leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami bore some resemblance to Mawdudi’s model caliph.

After Pakistan became a reality, Mawdudi set out to define more precisely what he envisioned. In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, he promised, men would be enslaved only to God and God’s laws, not to infidels and their man-made ones. That meant the reestablishment of Sharia law. Drawn from the Qur’an and the Hadith as well as a host of traditional works on Islamic jurisprudence, the imposition of Sharia would ensure that Islamic moral values replaced Western ones. The Muslims of India had been the first to abandon Sharia, Mawdudi told the students at Lahore Law College. Then Egypt embraced the Napoleonic code. Turkey and Albania appropriated various European constitutions. Though Sharia was still in force in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, the spirit of it was gone, and enforcement was erratic. Among the many challenges Pakistan now faced, he said, was the need to extract a clear set of criminal and civil laws from the complex and contradictory custom-based traditions of Sharia. He bemoaned how his peers among the ulema were unequal to the task of translating the rich heritage of Islamic law into contemporary constitutional frameworks.
*

Mawdudi called his envisioned state a theo-democracy, suggesting that the people of Pakistan would have some undefined role to play in the new body politic. At the same time Mawdudi tried to allay the misgivings of those who were wary of introducing Islamic law into the legal code of the new nation. Some feared that Sharia, however one codified it, would hobble Pakistan’s effort to find its feet in the modern secular world. What about the non-Muslim minorities within the borders? Wouldn’t they resist the imposition of Muslim religious law? Would Islamic rule actually mean chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning adulterers? For the Oxbridge-educated political elite, like Mawdudi’s hated rival Jinnah (who would be dead before the end of the year), Sharia was tantamount to institutionalized barbarism.

All these questions, Mawdudi held, were prompted by ignorance. The humiliations we have suffered, the battles we have waged, he said, would be redeemed only if Islamic law was enshrined. If British civil and criminal codes were instituted instead, what sense was there in the fight for independence? Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood echoed Mawdudi’s argument in Egypt. For those who held that establishing a state on the basis of religion and religious law was backward and reactionary, he raised the inexorable question: was not Israel founded on this basis?

Mawdudi addressed the first concern with sweeping promises. Once the fundamental principles of Sharia were grasped, he said, and a study was done of the ways in which it had evolved over time, there would be no doubt that Sharia would be as responsive to the demands of contemporary society as it once had been in the past. Naturally, religious minorities would be entitled to demand safeguards for their rights and interests and beliefs, he exclaimed. Historically, the magnanimity of Islam was unparalleled. They would absolutely be allowed their rituals and customs, even their practice of eating pork and drinking wine. Such safeguards are written in the laws of Sharia, and would be diligently enforced during times of peace and prosperity. There was a note of imperial officiousness in the way Mawdudi flipped through these points.

However, non-Muslims, like women, would not be allowed to hold public office or weigh in on matters of policy. And gambling parlors and houses of prostitution would be closed. And cinemas. And women of minority communities would have to cover themselves. The Islamic state could not be expected to accept evil practices that violate Islamic principles simply for the sake of appeasing minorities. Indeed it would be the duty of the state to enforce observance of these laws. But there would be no need for opposition parties because the Islamic state, by definition, would be just.

If the Mawdudi imagined he had quieted everyone’s concerns with these broad assurances, he was mistaken. Subsequent speeches and editorials would gradually refine his argument and address “liberal” objections. But it was when he came to address the more savage aspects of the penal code that his cavalier manner seemed most jarring. The classic Orientalist argument against the imposition of the Sharia, he pointed out, involved ignoring an entire body of law to focus on “minor” points of
hudud,
the most merciless of the four categories of punishment in the Islamic penal code.

Mawdudi didn’t hesitate. The Sharia dictates a hundred lashes for the unmarried fornicator and the stoning to death of the married adulterer. Such punishments could only seem outrageous in a society where risqué pictures and vulgar music were commonplace, he argued; where men and women mingled promiscuously. Similarly, it is only unjust to cut off the hand of a thief in a society where many go without. Once a truly Islamic state was achieved, such sins would become inconceivable. Virtue, piety, and the unrelenting awareness of God and the hereafter would keep all citizens chaste and honest. This would be in stark contrast to the depraved and thieving state of affairs one found in the West. The political mechanism for achieving such an upright state remained mysterious, but Mawdudi conceded that it would involve a gradual spiritual evolution of the populace. Such a transformation could not be achieved by fiat.

Anyone who has ever been subject to fierce catechisms might easily imagine the heavy hand of such a penal code. Under these laws, the inner hagglings of conscience might worry and blacken even the most blameless of hearts. And what of those Muslim youth already divided by the powerful pull of the freewheeling West? Their moral confusion might easily become handmaiden to cruelty. And who would stone the adulterer, whip the unmarried fornicator, who would brandish the swords? What minority would want to be subject to such punishments? What kind of authority would want to inflict them? Would Mawdudi be willing to lift the lash against his sons and daughters?

But these were my questions, not Mawdudi’s. The machinery of governance and jurisprudence, the institutions that would be required to exert the will of the state, did not interest him quite so much as his arguments against adopting Western values in adjudicating these issues. He also glossed over the question of how the state’s political leadership would be chosen. Candidates for office had to be put forward by others; they could not volunteer themselves. Mawdudi seemed to think that the choice of leader would be obvious to all. Qualifications included political and military sagacity, worldliness, statesmanship, and “unusually deep insight into all the current branches of knowledge and all the major problems of life.” Should the fear of hell prove insufficient to curb the carnal desires of the individual selected, by what mechanism might he be removed? Mawdudi didn’t say. But if the Mawlana was short on the specifics of a workable Islamic state, he was long on ambition.