The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (6 page)

In 1956, after eight years of impassioned speeches, pamphlets, and protests, as well as several changes of administration, the constitution of Pakistan was eventually complete. The final draft included a toothless provision proclaiming that all laws would be written in accordance with the teachings of the Qur’an. The Jamaat declared itself victorious, but Mawdudi was noticeably restrained. Was this evidence of his essential lack of interest in complex questions of jurisprudence and governance? Or did it signal ambivalence about his ends? Or perhaps the Mawlana Mawdudi was simply willing to settle, temporarily at least, for a symbolic acknowledgment of his power.

However loosely phrased, the provision that all laws must be “Islamic” would nonetheless cast a fatal shadow over the legitimacy of Pakistan’s leaders and the legal code that supported them. Two years later, in 1958, General Ayub Khan seized power in Pakistan, declared a state of emergency, and suspended the newly completed constitution. He banned all opposition parties, among them the Jamaat-e-Islami.

Though his speeches, writings, and travel were now closely monitored, Mawdudi redoubled his efforts. Though its treasury was confiscated, the Jamaat organization remained intact not only in Lahore but also in the countryside. There it was active, distributing Mawdudi’s writings to thousands of reading rooms. The party administered medical clinics and flood relief centers and agitated both for the cause of an Islamic state and for a return to the democratic process. The effort to sustain his party under the ban, combined with his stints in jail on charges of sedition, eventually led Mawdudi to appreciate the necessity of due process and an independent judiciary.

Of course this was the conclusion many Westerners might hope he would draw. “They need to become like us,” purveyors of Western cultural commentary were constantly saying, as if room would be made for them. As if the world would be a richer place if they did. As if the secular West had everything figured. Had the checks and balances woven into our most sacred laws proven any more effective than the threat of damnation in curbing our darkest impulses? If so, the twentieth century bore scant evidence of it.

Yet however many obstacles Ayub Khan placed in Mawdudi’s path, his conviction that an Islamic state was inevitable only grew stronger. “If the expectation that Islam will eventually dominate the world of thought, culture, and politics is genuine,” he wrote in 1963, “then the coming of a Great Leader under whose comprehensive and forceful leadership such Revolution is to come about is also certain.… When leaders of iniquity like Lenin and Hitler can appear on the stage of this world, why should the appearance of a Leader of Goodness be regarded as remote and uncertain?” Should the man who wrote this ever grasp the reins of power, it seemed unlikely he would ever relinquish them.

The Jamaat-e-Islami was originally conceived not simply as a political party but also as the nucleus of a holy community, much like the one that collected around the Prophet during his early years in Mecca. Or that was the conceit. It was actually formed in August 1941 in reaction to the Jinnah-led Muslim League’s call for a division of the subcontinent along religious lines. Once the Jamaat lost the fight against partition and became focused on the struggle over Pakistan’s constitution, Mawdudi’s party began to act more like a shadow government. Hierarchical, tightly knit, and ideologically vetted, his followers were groomed to step into positions of moral leadership in Pakistan and elsewhere. After 1947, branches of the Jamaat-e-Islami sprang up in India, Jammu and Kashmir, East Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Mawdudi’s writings had even wider reach than his political party. In them he expressed his hope that Islam would replace Marxism and capitalism as the new global paradigm. His vision of an Islamic world order that would spread the benefits of Islam to all of mankind was no less high minded and no less sincere, I supposed, than the promises of freedom and democracy hawked by the West. The profession of faith, the daily prayers, fasting, charity, and pilgrimage—the five pillars of Islam—were the means both to train party cadres for their mission and to sustain a sense of holy community across the Muslim world. Mawdudi compared this mandate to the training other nations gave their military and police.

Correspondence was another means Mawdudi used to reach out to the world’s Muslim leadership from the confines of his Lahore home. In December 1960 Margaret Marcus initiated their correspondence with a letter expressing admiration for an essay Mawdudi wrote on the certainty of an afterlife. The essay had appeared in the
Muslim Digest,
an English-language magazine out of South Africa, which had published her own essays. Reading one of them, enclosed with her letter, Mawdudi immediately recognized a kindred spirit. He responded at length to her observations about Muslim students she had come across in New York and on the shameless fashions of Western women’s clothing. As her letters became more personal, he responded with a litany of his illnesses. Though she had yet to convert, he expressed concern for her plight in the land of infidels. “I fully realize the ordeals which a person must endure when he or she embraces Islam in a land of Kufr,” he wrote her. “A woman faces a thousand-fold more trials than a man. Through bitter personal experience, you have come to know how tolerant and broadminded these modern Westerners are!” Despite his long days as the leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, it seemed as though Mawdudi had all the time in the world for Margaret Marcus.

Margaret’s remedies for the political challenges facing the Muslim world were uncannily similar to those proposed in Mawdudi’s writings and speeches of the thirties and forties, and often equally vague. In her very first letter to him, Margaret described her mission “to devote my life to the struggle against materialistic philosophic-secularism and nationalism which are still so rampant in the world today and threaten not only the survival of Islam but the whole human race.”

Like Mawdudi, Margaret focused her energies more on disputing the work of others than on presenting concrete proposals for what was now required to embed specific Islamic values in newly sovereign Muslim countries. In the essays that would make up her first book, she refuted “point by point” the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the director of the Islamic Institute at McGill University; Asaf A. Fyzee, the vice chancellor of Kashmir University; the Turkish sociologist Ziya Gokalp; Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, “who took for his god, nineteenth century European science and philosophy”; and Taha Hussain, the blind Egyptian intellectual writer and eventual minister of education. “All these so-called Muslim intellectuals,” Margaret explained to Mawdudi, “are far more dangerous than any external enemies for they are attacking the very foundations of Islam from within. In writing my articles, my goal is to open the eyes of my Muslim readers to this fact.”

For Margaret, too, Sharia was somehow central and Sharia largely equaled
hudud.
Her argument in support of the punishments for adultery or drinking or theft involved no interpretation, no higher legal principle than “the law is the law.” As for the idea that the punishments were medieval, cruel, or inhuman, she asked, “Does not an evil remain an evil regardless of time or place? Is the merit of a law to be judged according to its leniency? Does the criminal deserve more sympathy than society?” Suppose the American government, she wrote, threatened by the Soviet Union, decided to abandon its Constitution and the Bill of Rights and put in their place a police state so as to better defend itself and its sovereignty: “Would this [sovereignty] not be meaningless after losing its very
raison d’etre
?” Maryam assumed America’s founding documents were as transparent, simplistic, and nonnegotiable as her notions of Sharia.

By the time Mawdudi described his threefold political strategy to Margaret in December 1961, however, the plan to extract an array of criminal and civil laws from the complex traditions of Sharia was no longer a priority. Instead, he seemed more focused on explaining the continuing grip of the West on his compatriots. His first priority, he now wrote, was to undermine the ideological foundations of Western culture. Second, he would elucidate as clearly as possible the Islamic way of life and mark the ways in which it is superior to that of the West. Finally, he would provide practical Islamic solutions to all of “life’s main problems,” so as to show those who might feel they have no choice but to follow the West that there is another way. This read more like the outline for a long sermon than the template for a lawbound, constitutionally inscribed state embodying the highest ideals of Islam.

The Mawlana allowed himself a moment of satisfaction at all he had achieved. It was no exaggeration to say, he told his young American admirer, that as a result of his efforts millions of Muslims in Pakistan and India had come to share his yearning for an Islamic order. Further, they nurtured a strong wave of resentment against the Westernized and educated political elites who stood in their way. Once the ban on the Jamaat-e-Islami was lifted, Mawdudi suggested, the voice of the masses would be heard.

Margaret was not Mawdudi’s only correspondent abroad. He also exchanged letters with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom he would meet for the first time in 1963. Khomeini would later become Mawdudi’s Farsi translator. Sayyid Qutb, in his Cairo prison, was also among his correspondents. That an American Jew, an Iranian Shiite cleric, and an Egyptian man of letters could find common ground with a man who traced his ancestry to a twelfth-century Sufi master from Afghanistan suggests that at the heart of their shared worldview there was something more than a traditional religious sensibility in play.

Like a figure from ancient history, the Mawlana was a difficult man to see clearly.

In her letters home Margaret reported the Mawlana’s teachings to her parents without gloss, as if his authority had supplanted her own. Like the subcontinent he came from, the Mawlana’s world was divided into two camps: observant Muslims and everyone else. The former represents the epitome of good, Peggy wrote gravely from her rope bed in Icchra, and the latter the apogee of evil, Herbert and Myra Marcus presumably included. She seemed to relish the prospect of being at the center of the Mawlana’s struggle, confident that her own role in the looming contest would be significant. Indeed, within a month of her arrival in Lahore, the fortunes of the Jamaat-e-Islami seemed to shift.

In the late afternoon of July 16, 1962, the Mawdudi household was startled to learn that General Ayub Khan had signed legislation that lifted the ban on political parties. Mawdudi immediately drew up a list of charges and demands addressed to Ayub Khan’s government. In between her accounts of Haider Farooq’s new family of kittens, the doings of the Sufi neighbors she’d seen from the upstairs bathroom window, and the servant boy’s attack of malaria, Margaret wrote her parents of the air of anticipation in the back of the house, where Mawdudi was holding an emergency meeting with his party workers.

What part would Maryam Jameelah be given to play in the political drama the Mawlana mapped out that afternoon? Mawdudi had already made space for her in his party as he had in his family. Before she arrived, he had published translated extracts of her letters in his party publication, introducing them as an “eye-opener for Muslim youth.” Clearly her arrival had been greatly anticipated and, given the success of her first book and the visibility of her writings in the popular press, she had proven something of a sensation. But beyond her serving as an example to his daughters, had Mawdudi envisioned her as his helpmeet, a translator to help his writings reach a broader audience? Or something else? Perhaps he calculated that an American might not suffer the same kind of surveillance and political restraints that he was subject to. Perhaps he hoped Maryam Jameelah might act as his proxy.

What exactly were his thoughts when he heard the constant tapping of the Smith Corona just beyond his study door? Did he read Margaret’s letters before he posted them? If the Mawlana’s entourage considered her at all, were they inclined to view Maryam Jameelah not as a propaganda tool but as an interloper, even an American spy? Pakistan had long been a willing U.S. partner in the new Great Game of the cold war. There was no shortage of CIA agents about. The Mawlana had already spent several years in jail. He was not a well man. They needed to look out for him.

Despite her volubility, Margaret’s letters from the Mawlana’s house conveyed little on these matters. She seemed oblivious to the anomalousness of her position: an innocent abroad. Margaret may have assumed the Mawlana had invited her to Pakistan and taken up guardianship of her simply because he was as invested in her writings on Islam as she was. She often betrayed a sense of entitlement, styling herself as Mawdudi did, as the last word on what it meant to be a faithful Muslim and what a proper Islamic state required of its citizens.

And the Begum? What were her thoughts regarding the arrival of a young woman in her already crowded household? As part of the requirements of purdah, the women of the Mawdudi household were allowed to use only the front lawn and front portion of the house. The back garden and the Mawlana’s study, with the pile of books and papers spilling over his desk, constituted the inviolate men’s realm. Begum Mawdudi never acknowledged her husband’s associates or ventured into his study, Peggy boasted to her parents; she didn’t even know Mian Tufail Muhammad. Margaret did. She was proud of her space in the narrow corridor opposite the Mawlana’s library, intimating to Herbert and Myra that she was privy to the men’s world as well as that world of beautifully appointed teas and suckling babies. Herbert Marcus had always held that women in Muslim societies were treated no better than slaves, but here she was, their dear Peggy, not simply respected but lionized.

Meanwhile, purdah meant that the Mawlana made phone calls on her behalf. Her watch, broken on the journey over, required repair. He or some underling filled her prescriptions for vitamins and acne cream. The American consulate needed a photograph of her face; she required a chaperone if she was to be unveiled in front of a strange man. On any particular day there might be a letter to her editor at the
Voice of Islam
to be posted or a thank-you note to Dr. Said Ramadan. Ramadan was the son-in-law of Hassan
al-Banna, living in exile in Switzerland to escape an Egyptian death sentence. She also corresponded with Sayyid Qutb’s sister Amina in Cairo and Muhammad al-Bahy, the director of cultural affairs at al-Azhar University, not to mention her parents, Betty, cousins, and aunts. Furthermore, upon the publication of “How I Became Interested in Islam,” magazine editors, newspaper interviewers, and prospective suitors deluged Mawlana Mawdudi with requests for interviews with Maryam Jameelah just as the prospects for the Jamaat-e-Islami were looking up.