Read The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism Online
Authors: Deborah Baker
The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism
THE CONVERT
ALSO BY DEBORAH BAKER
Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly
In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding
A Blue Hand: The Beats in India
THE CONVERT
A TALE OF EXILE AND EXTREMISM
Deborah Baker
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2011 by Deborah Baker
This publication is made possible by funding provided in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders. Significant support has also been provided by Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-55597-582-1
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-028-4
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2011
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011920617
Cover design: Kimberly Glyder Design
Cover photos: Maryam Jameelah, 1962: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (top) / George Marks, Retrofile RF, Getty Images (bottom)
Interior photos: Margaret Marcus, self-portrait, 1956: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; Herbert and Myra Marcus, undated, from
Quest for the Truth;
Maryam Jameelah, 1962: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
FOR MY PARENTS
“If a man passes a door which has no curtain and is not shut
and looks in, he has committed no sin.”
Mishkat al-Masabih
“Whoever undertakes to write a biography binds himself to lying,
to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flummery.”
Sigmund Freud
Maryam Jameelah Papers, 2.5 linear feet (9 boxes). Gift of Maryam Jameelah, April 1962, with subsequent additions. The Maryam Jameelah Papers include the correspondence, fiction, art and writings of Maryam Jameelah, née Margaret Marcus, an American Jew who converted to Islam. Her papers tell of her troubled youth, her sympathy for displaced Palestinians after the formation of modern Israel, her relationship with Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maudoodi, and the decision to leave America and spend the rest of her life in Pakistan.
Finding aid, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
CHAPTER 1
al-Hijrah
—The Escape
5-A Zaildar Park
Icchra
PAKISTAN
April 18, 1962
Dear Maryam Jameelah,
Asalaam-o-aleikum wa Rahmatullah!
I am glad to know you have accepted my counsel and are ready to come to Pakistan. I pray to Allah that He may guide you to what is right and in your best interest.
I think it is advisable to mention a few things. As you must already know, our way of life and social conditions are vastly different from those in America. We lack many facilities and amenities that Americans take for granted. Therefore, the first months here will certainly prove fatiguing and taxing upon your nerves. Unless you have patience and are resolutely determined to mold your life according to ours, to live Lahore spanand die among your Muslim brethren, you might find it extremely difficult to reconcile yourself to our ways. Although I will try my best to look after your needs and make things easier, your steadfast cooperation is essential.
Two of my daughters are near to you in age. One is studying for an MA in English and the other a BA in economics. I hope they will make friends with you, teach you Urdu, and, in exchange, learn from you the enthusiasm of a new convert. My wife does not know English. Initially, this may hinder your intimacy with her but I hope you will pick up enough Urdu within two or three months to enable you to communicate. After you have learned Urdu, it will be relatively easy for you to learn Arabic, because these languages share vocabularies. In due course, I will also try to arrange for an Arabic teacher.
As regards marriage, I will not pressure you, but should you decide to marry, I will try to help you choose a suitable life partner. Naturally you will want to be married to a youth who lives as a good Pakistani Muslim. If you choose not to marry, I am prepared to welcome you forever as a member of my family. I am inviting you to share my hospitality in the spirit with which the early Muslim inhabitants of Medina extended their invitation to their forlorn brethren outside of Medina and I wish you to respond with a similar spirit of migration, thinking that bonds of faith are firmer and stronger than relationships of flesh and blood.
There is still another reason why you should postpone any decision about marriage. When you arrive, my wife will train you in how a Pakistani Muslim wife runs her home and manages her household affairs. This knowledge will stand you in good stead when you are facing married life. For such a marital relationship to achieve success, it is essential to learn the social etiquette of Muslim families.
When you reach Lahore, daytime temperatures will average well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Our houses are not air-conditioned but we do use electric fans. Eventually you will become accustomed to our tropical seasons but you must be prepared to bear the first onslaught of this extreme climate.
I am writing a separate letter to your parents. I advise you to introduce me to them yourself and show them some of my letters so they may be able to grasp fully the background of my present letter to them.
Your brother in Islam,
ABUL ALA
Larchmont Acres Apartments, Apt 223-C
Mamaroneck, NY
USA
May 2, 1962
Dear Mr. Mawdoodi,
I am grateful for your kind letter of April 18th, extending to my daughter, Margaret, an invitation to live in your home. My wife and I are deeply moved by your gracious offer of hospitality.
Since embracing Islam, particularly as an ardent convert, it seems that living in our society presents practical difficulties. Margaret is anxious to accept your invitation, and as her parents, we are amenable, although it means going to live in a distant land. Particularly in view of the enthusiasm she has evinced, we are hopeful it would give her the opportunity for a happy and meaningful existence.
[Going to] a country with a very different culture will surely require a degree of forbearance during a period of adjustment. With the sympathy and understanding indicated in your letters, combined with Margaret’s ardor, I am confident that her entrance into your family life will be successful.
I was pleased to note in your letter to Margaret the advice regarding change of citizenship and marriage. It is my paternal wish that she take irrevocable steps only after a reasonable period of residence.
She goes to your country with our full consent and especially as [she is] a person of fine character we shall maintain a continuous interest in her welfare. Therefore, please feel at liberty to write me at any time.
Mrs. Marcus joins me in conveying to you, your wife and children our heartfelt gratitude.
Very sincerely,
Herbert S. Marcus
The Hellenic Torch
Alexandria
EGYPT
May 1962
After all our good-byes, after you, Mother, Betty, and Walter walked down the gangplank and drove off, I was overcome by a profound sense of dread. I stood at the deck rail for a long time completely stricken, the excitement of the weeks leading up to my departure gone. When the ship finally pulled away from the Brooklyn pier, the lights of the city began to dim and the engines seemed to echo the pounding of my heart. A black and fathomless ocean was slowly swallowing everything I had ever known. It took some time and many prayers before my fears began to subside.
The crossing thus far has not been without incident. At first, my fellow shipmates distracted me from my panic. There is an Indian boy on board named Jehangir Govind. He is returning home to Bombay after his studies in America. He snootily insists on being called Jack because he says I mispronounce his name. There was also a young man named Sherman accompanied by an older, alcoholic wife named Thelma. The Greek captain and his crew, along with several Greek deportees, completed the passenger list. After ten days at sea in close quarters with all of them, I ended up taking a number of meals alone in my room to spare myself their comments about my clothes.
Mother, you imagined that I was going to need my nice silk dress for dining and dancing on board, as if my passage had been booked on a cruise ship instead of a cheap Greek freighter! I was happy to leave that dress behind with Betty (along with my girdle and corset). And my high heels I gave to the colored lady who lived in the room next to mine at the Martha Washington Women’s Residence. Dressed now in my hand-sewn, ankle-length dirndl skirt and high-necked long-sleeve blouse, I certainly can see that I cut an unlikely figure. Anyone might well ask: why would an otherwise attractive Western woman insist on dressing in such a manner? Honestly? I don’t blame them.
The captain tells me that he has just returned from Turkey. Despite Mustapha Kemal Ataturk’s best efforts to persecute Muslims by outlawing polygamy, the hajj, and the Arabic script, it seems that the captain found no dearth of religious fanatics. I asked him what he meant by religious fanatic.
Muslims who refuse to eat pork for fear of hell, he informed me. Muslims who avoid non-Muslims like the plague. He would be perfectly happy to see the Muslim religion eradicated, he said, because everyone knows Western civilization is superior. While Istanbul and Ankara are fairly Westernized and home to many Europeans, he assured us that the rest of Turkey is as backward and reactionary as ever. A young Greek sailor chimed in: You will see for yourself the filth and poverty of the Arabs when you get there.
This is the tenor of the nightly commentary on board.
My first thought was that I was sorry Turkey was not on the
Hellenic Torch
’s itinerary. I am frankly surprised to learn that there are that many Turks who have resisted Ataturk’s effort to turn them into modern Europeans. The secular and nationalist leaders of Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, Tunisia, and Morocco have all been desperately eager to put development before everything else, to Westernize and modernize away every last evidence of their traditional Islamic cultures in frantic pursuit of Western standards of urban living and dress. It’s been a constant worry that the world I am looking for will be gone by the time I arrive. Would I arrive at my destination forty years, seventy years, a century too late?
Jehangir tells me that if I want to pray five times a day that is my own business, but he just doesn’t see what possible difference it makes. He can’t tell one religion from another. And it is a complete fairy tale, he insists, that God is everywhere watching to see whether I behave. Once he became a man he found he could dispense with such fantasies; he is now in the habit of being good. Jehangir reminded me of those young men at the Columbia University Muslim Students Association whose mission in life is to modernize Islam to death, gutting it of its essentials.
Thelma and Sherman disembarked at Crete with the Greeks. By the time they left, their conversation had become increasingly unpleasant. Thelma persisted in her drunken insistence that the Arabs live in filth and squalor. I wasn’t surprised to find that when she invited me to her room to help her pack there was a surfeit of empty liquor bottles under the bed, cigarette stubs stuck in every dish and glass, and a carpet covered with stains. I held my tongue.
Five days later the sun rose on Alexandria. Watching from the captain’s deck after my early-morning salat, I saw the coast come into focus. Dozens of feluccas manned by men in skullcaps and flowing white jellabiya skirted across the harbor out of the morning mist. It was a most incredible sight. Clearly recognizing me as a fellow Muslim, they called out “asalaam aleikum” and my heart practically lifted me off my feet. I was no longer traveling in the West. I had finally crossed over.
Soon after we docked, a dragoman arrived and offered to show me the sights of the city, pulling an official permit out of his pocket to alleviate my concern that I might be taken advantage of. Once I made it clear that I was a convert and only wanted to attend a prayer service, his distant manner gave way to warmth and he immediately hailed a taxi to take us both to the Old City.
All my life I have heard about the backwardness of the Arabs. I have read the accounts of Christian missionaries, Orientalists, and Zionists. You, Mother, and the Greek sailor gave me the same refrain, though after the war the polite word became
underdeveloped.
Indeed, in Egypt I saw poverty everywhere I looked. Horse-drawn carts plied cratered roads and the buildings looked on the verge of collapse. Some of the men I saw were indeed indescribably filthy. Children in rags played in the street with toys engineered from bits of wire and rubbish; hawkers sang out their wares in a sweet singsong fashion. The vast majority of men, women, and children wore traditional native dress, including one woman fully clad in a burqa carrying a crate of live chickens on her head.
In your eyes, this scene would look like something out of the Middle Ages. You would withdraw in disgust at the unsanitary conditions, cluck at the crude dwellings in which they live, quote me child mortality statistics. You couldn’t get out of here fast enough. But I see something else. I see their dignity and gentleness, their exquisite manners and open-arm hospitality, their unquestioning faith. I envy them their lives, beyond the reach of “technical assistance” and the poisoned fruit of modernization. Pure sentiment, you would insist.
Before taking me to the mosque, the dragoman invited me to
his home to meet his family. We found his wife preparing the noon meal in a soot-covered kitchen over a kerosene stove, chickens and roosters quick-stepping around her, as if impatient to be fed. His older daughter held a severely malnourished baby. His fourteen-year-old son looked more like a ten-year-old, but read from the Qur’an fluently. After lunch my guide took me on a tour of saints’ tombs in his neighborhood. We entered a schoolroom filled with boys studying the Qur’an. When I was introduced, they were all astonished to meet an American woman who chose to be a Muslim and live in a Muslim country. Under their reverent gaze, I felt something like a saint myself.
Our last stop was for the midday prayer. At the mosque, I was the only woman among fifteen men, kneeling on reed mats under rafters filled with sparrows. The prayer service was exactly the same in Alexandria as it had been in my little storefront mosque in Brooklyn. Afterward the imam invited me back to his office and offered to answer any questions I had about Islam. I told him I was traveling to Pakistan at the invitation of Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi. I was going to live with his family as his adopted daughter. He said that Mawlana Mawdudi was the holiest man in Pakistan.
One of the men from the mosque asked me how it was I came to embrace Islam. Daddy, whenever your friends asked me this, I always knew they were secretly looking for a complicated psychological explanation. While there is no use crying over spilt milk, I deeply regret all my lost years in America, struggling to find my way. Like your friends, you believed there
had
to be something wrong with a person who chose to live according to her most deeply held beliefs. Such a thought would never occur to the men who had prayed with me.