Troubled Life of a Jewish-Muslim Woman
By Dr Syed Amir
Bethesda, MD
She remained an enigma to those who knew her and only a few did. Born in a Jewish family, steeped in Jewish traditions and cultural norms, Margaret Marcus converted to Islam at an early age and took the name of Maryam Jameelah, adopting a very stringent and strict form of the faith. Her grandparents had arrived from Eastern Europe as economic immigrants and settled in the small town of Mamaroneck, New York. The troubled life story of this unusual woman has been researched and related by Deborah Baker, a noted author, in her book entitled The Convert (Graywolf Press, 2011)
Margaret was brought up in a liberal, non-orthodox, secular environment and had a normal happy, suburban childhood. However, she felt uneasy about her faith at an early age, and raised troubling questions about the meaning of life and death that her parents could not answer. She was distressed by the photographs of the atrocities and bloodshed perpetrated during the Second World War and found it difficult to understand why God would permit it. She developed sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians and an affinity with Arab culture. In her preteen years, she was a misfit among her friends, and was tormented by school bullies. As she grew up, Margaret, like many in her generation, became disillusioned with the values of Western society, and the injustices and discriminations she witnessed.
What attracted her to Islam, according to her own account, was the book Road to Mecca by the famous Jewish-Muslim scholar, Mohammad Asad, which greatly influenced her thinking. She had already invested some time in delving into Arab and Islamic history. She was a gifted writer and started to write about Islam and her interest in it.
Deborah Baker came upon the topic of her book serendipitously. In the Archives Division of The New York public library, a lone Muslim name nestling among numerous Christian and Jewish names caught her attention. The name was Maryam Jameelah and there were several boxes bearing her name, filled with her papers, letters, hand-written manuscripts, drawings, newspaper cuttings and even a few of the books she had authored. She was a prolific writer and among the documents, many were letters written by her to her parents from Lahore, where she had relocated after leaving the US. Clearly, Baker was pleased as the material provided her enough information to write a book on an exotic topic, a young Jewish woman converting to Islam and moving permanently to Pakistan. The cover page of the book shows an eerie picture of a woman shrouded in full burqa, with only her feet and hands visible. She is presumably Jameelah, photographed sometime after her arrival in Lahore.
Baker has built a story that stretches from Jameelah's childhood to her migration to Pakistan and ends with a letter addressed to the author by her in March 2009; the correspondence had been initiated following a visit she paid to Jameelah at Lahore a few years earlier. In the book, Baker has reproduced some of the letters written by Jameelah to her parents -- she wrote one regularly every week -- but admits that she has rewritten and condensed them. However, we are not informed where the changes were made, although Baker assures us that she was faithful in following the spirit and views of the writer. The writer has a confusing writing style, as the letters from Maryam Jameelah and the author's own lengthy critiques of Mawlana Mawdudi, his religious philosophy and Jamaat- e-Islami politics are all juxtaposed and the two are often hard to sort out.
The story of how Margaret Marcus left the US to settle in Pakistan permanently is captivating. Apparently, Syyid Qutb leader of Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt was acquainted with her writings and advised her to contact Mawlana Mawdudi in Lahore. Margaret enthusiastically sent copies of some of her article and specimens of her writings about Islam to the Mawlana, expressing great disillusionment with Western culture and civilization. Mawlana Mawdudi was suitably impressed by her fervor and advised her that she might formally convert to Islam, which she did in 1961 at the Islamic Mission of Brooklyn, New York.
Mawlana Mawdudi did not stop with that recommendation, however. He invited her to visit him and his family for a month to celebrate the month of Ramadan with them. The book opens with the Mawdudi letter assuring her that she would become part of his family indefinitely and would be treated as one of his daughters, two of whom were about the same age as she. Furthermore, if she wanted to get married, he promised, he would find a suitable Muslim- Pakistani husband for her.
She arrived at Lahore in late July 1962, as Jamaat-e-Islami was in the midst of its agitation against the reformation of Muslim family laws launched by Ayub Khan's government. Everything seemed to have gone well initially, as she with wide eyes attempted to absorb the new environment. Meanwhile, she resumed her writing for various magazines and papers in Pakistan, soon becoming a familiar and popular author.
Her great passion for her new religion and affinity for the Middle Eastern culture notwithstanding, Jameelah apparently was not fully prepared for what she experienced at the home of her host. Mawdudi, she noted, looked much older than his sixty-one years and had a habit of chewing betel all the time which had tinted his mouth with an unnatural red color. Unfortunately, she found it hard to fully adapt to or integrate into the life of her hosts. The house was rather crowded, with nine children, besides Mawlana and his wife, living there -- all observing strict purdah. Simmering tensions between her and members of the Mawdudi household started to surface.
At some time, the situation must have become untenable, since Jameelah was sent away to live with another family in a village, some miles out of Lahore. She was lodged in a modest household with a husband and wife. Then, we find that by some strange twist of events, she was committed to Lahore's mental hospital. Her letters don't provide insights into this period of her life or reasons for her commitment to the asylum. Also, she had become a little paranoid, and thought Mawdudi and his family had turned against her. Mawdudi in a press conference described her ailment as hysteria. She had had a history of psychiatric disorders, and Baker mentions that she had been admitted once to a mental clinic in her early life in America.
Jameelah, as far as we know, never left Pakistan. She was finally married to one of Mawdudi's followers as his second wife, to the great resentment of his first wife. The person was not affluent, had a number of children already with the previous wife and was opposed to both birth control and vaccination. He fathered four more children with Jameelah, who was too sick to take care of them. The two sons now live in the US. Baker describes the visit she paid to her in Lahore a few years following 9/11 attack when she found an "old woman, filled with fears, living in one bedroom" which she rarely left. Her present whereabouts are unknown.
Jameelah appears never to have found the peace that had eluded her all her life and which she sought in vain in two different cultures and religions.
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