The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (11 page)

Maryam’s respectful affection for Baijan and Appa is a constant theme of the letters (though neither spoke any English). There was also the colorful but inconsequential village gossip; the brother of her Urdu teacher dressed as a woman to dance at wedding parties. Their water buffalo gave birth to the most beautiful calf. The calf died despite Baijan’s best efforts to save it. The weather is an inevitable topic; they slept on the roof when it was hot, and plagues of insects invaded her room once the monsoon rains arrived. And food is a staple: Margaret announced to her parents that she had acquired a taste for a dish of goat’s brains and eggs. There are the occasional visitors: the water seller’s wives, two backpacking Western college girls wearing obscenely tight sweaters, the ubiquitous neighborhood ladies. And inevitably, there is illness: Appa suffered from headaches and sciatica, one neighbor dropped dead from malaria, another of typhoid. A child fell off a roof. Each letter is pages and pages long. Reading them is like trying to scry a pattern in the arrangement of rabbit entrails.

Then, sometime in the fall, before the nights became too cool to sleep outside, Peggy told her parents she had abandoned any hope of becoming a wife and mother. On reflection, she had decided that she was temperamentally, emotionally, and mentally unsuited. Unlike in America, where single women languished when their friends abandoned them for marriage, she reasoned, purdah provided even single women the companionship of other women and an endless number of children to care for and look after. Margaret had an appealing habit of finding the bright side of whatever it was that troubled her.

Margaret had always lacked social graces; she was clumsy and bereft of those feminine charms that are the currency of an open marriage market. “Nobody who knows me or has seen me has ever or can truthfully ever describe me as ‘charming,’” she once commented. In this she couldn’t help but compare herself to her older sister. Where Betty Marcus had once worshipped Shirley Temple and fretted about her weight, Margaret spent her childhood playacting adventures in the Syrian Desert. After graduating from the University of Michigan, Betty had found a great match in Walter Herz, a Harvard graduate and soon-to-be-successful businessman. She was living quite happily as a housewife and mother to two little girls in Plainfield, New Jersey. If, as Mawdudi claimed, the woman in Maryam was asleep, in Pattoki she had resigned herself to letting that sleeping woman lie.

Margaret’s desire to get married never seemed entirely serious. She had suggested to Mawdudi that her difficulty in finding a spiritual partner played a role in her decision to emigrate, but perhaps she said that because she thought Mawdudi might find it odd if she expressed no desire whatsoever for a husband. Margaret now announced her plan to serve the cause of Islam through her writings instead of marriage. To her parents, she betrayed no trace of regret in the trade-off. But if this was the end result, it would have been far easier to stay in New York, where books and research materials were more easily obtained. In Pattoki even English-language newspapers were hard to come by. Perhaps Maryam’s failure to take any of her suitors seriously was a greater source of regret than I had supposed.

Despite the difficulty of obtaining books, by the end of her third month in Pattoki, Maryam Jameelah had written four new articles. There was one condemning Western efforts to influence the Muslim world; another criticized the ill-begotten efforts of the modernizing reformers of Islam. Her work began to appear in translation in the Arab daily
An Nadwah,
out of Mecca; in the
Daily Kohistan,
a Karachi monthly; in a newspaper out of Kerala, in India; as well as in a few Urdu publications out of Lahore. A collection of essays was released in Istanbul.

Her progress in Urdu was slow, Peggy confessed, but she planned to tackle Arabic and Persian once she had mastered it. In the meantime, she began work on another book project.
Western Civilization Condemned by Itself
would be an anthology in which she would take on the greatest thinkers of Western civilization (beginning with Plato) to demonstrate how their ideas had brought the world to the brink of extinction. Her ambitions certainly hadn’t deserted her.

But for this work, Margaret’s life seemed a lonely and parched existence, and except for the occasional rat in her room, an exceptionally dull one. Yet for the most part, however, her letters expressed near perfect contentment. If she had any complaint it was that that the neighborhood ladies tended to sit and stare at her
as if she were some kind of exotic animal. Pattoki retained aspects of the traditional peasant society she had always longed for, at least as it had been prettily photographed by
National Geographic.
There was no more joyful way to start the day, she insisted, than with the sound of the muezzin’s call at dawn—“Prayer is better than sleep! Prayer is better than sleep!”—followed by dogs barking, buffalo lowing, and babies crying. Here, Peggy wrote her parents, she was truly happy. She had always felt that to live the life she had always wanted, she would have to leave America. She now insisted that she couldn’t imagine what circumstances might compel her to return, even for a brief visit. She promised never to forget all her parents had done for her, but she knew now they were on different paths.

On their journey through life, she had once told Herbert and Myra, they had always focused on the scenery and accommodations, anticipating with pleasure their next cocktail hour or hand of bridge. They had never considered where life might be taking them. But she was different. She needed to get to the absolute heart of things. To do this, she constantly reminded herself that she might die at
any
moment and would have to answer for the life she had lived. To achieve something noteworthy and enduring with the few gifts God had provided her was her keenest desire. Only then would God realize that she had not squandered her life, dishonored her limited time on earth by meaningless pursuits or sinful behavior. She planned to give a good account of herself.

By the time Margaret left for Pakistan, Herbert and Myra had become members of the Unitarian Church, forsaking their Jewish heritage much as their daughter had, yet remaining within the American pale. What were they thinking? Were they simply leaving behind burdensome beliefs like a closetful of clothes that no longer fit? Were they trying to elude what Margaret called “the tragic history of the Jews” in favor of one that was sunnier, more sensible, and quintessentially American? Whatever their reasons, I didn’t fault them. Faith can be a slippery thing.

As a young man in love, my father had converted to Catholicism. He schooled himself in every facet of Catholic doctrine and every chapter of church history. Yet by the time we came along he went his own way on Sunday mornings, never accompanying the rest of us to Mass. Over dinner he would hold forth on corrupt and hypocritical popes, lecturing us on their self-serving encyclicals on birth control and infallibility—his own version of a Sunday sermon. In this way he took the thin cloth of my belief and poked it with holes.

When I asked him what then had led him to convert, he said simply, “I was young,” as if having once believed in something inaccessible to reason was a romance he had long since outgrown. Family arguments over religion continued until the last of us grew up and moved away. My siblings found the answers they needed (pagan, yogi, evangelical Christian), but I never had. Instead I looked to poetry and the lives of poets to get me to that ineffable and absolute “heart of things.” Like Margaret, I aspired to give a good account of myself.

Suddenly, in Margaret’s letters from Pattoki, I came to this: “I have completely stopped taking the Compazine pills. I don’t think I need them anymore. This is fortunate since they can not be obtained here.”

*
A zamindar is a feudal landowner.

Uthman b. Haif told that a blind man came to the Prophet and asked him to pray to God to cure him. He replied, “If you wish, I shall make supplication to God, but if you endure, that is better for you.”

Mishkat al-Masabih

CHAPTER 4

The Misfit

Maryam’s letter from the madhouse was written on the eve of her release. In it she proposed to answer all her parents’ questions. To do this properly she would have to start at the beginning and tell Herbert and Myra what had really happened upon her arrival in Pakistan. In the light of these subsequent revelations, she would then revisit her stay in the Mawlana’s house and the circumstances of her move to Pattoki. She would tell the whole story of how she ended up at the madhouse and what was now in store for her. Everything would be explained.

I found something amiss in the fact that Margaret felt free to write frankly about her life in Pakistan only once she was certain of leaving the Paagal Khanaah, as if she had first to wait and see how her fate would be decided. What had happened during those five months when there were no letters from Pattoki? Was she loath to concede that her parents might have been right about the treatment of women in Muslim countries? Perhaps she had simply been bullied into writing this new letter in exchange for freedom. Perhaps the letter was a closely supervised exercise in self-criticism.

But of course Maryam’s arrival in Lahore is not actually where her story begins. In file 5 of Box 2 of the Jameelah collection there is an odd little book published in July 1989 by Mohammad Yusuf Khan and Sons, and printed off Ferozepur Road in Lahore. The front cover reads
Quest for the Truth: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America (1945–1962): The Story of One Western Convert
by Maryam Jameelah (formerly Margaret Marcus).

Larchmont Acres Apartments, Apt 223-C
Mamaroneck, NY

November 1959

Until I was four years old I was completely silent. My mother even took me to the Neurological Institute in White Plains so the doctors could tell her what was wrong with me. When I finally began speaking, my mother said, it wasn’t baby talk but complete sentences. After worrying so much about the fact that I wasn’t talking, suddenly she was driven to distraction by my unending questions. Why was this and why was that. Questions she never gave much thought to. That first year my father bought me a gramophone so that I might give her a moment’s peace.

There were some things I didn’t question. I believed in the Easter Bunny until I was six. I didn’t stop believing in Santa Claus until I was in the third grade. Even after Betty convinced me otherwise, the Easter baskets filled with chocolate eggs kept coming and I received just as many Christmas presents as before. I never really made the connection between these holidays and being Christian until Julia Bustin, the smartest girl in my class, refused to sing Christmas carols in school and told me she celebrated Hanukah, not Christmas. I loved to sing carols and act in pageants and decorate our Christmas tree; I’d even go to the candlelight service at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church. Julia Bustin didn’t get nearly as many presents at Hanukah as I got at Christmas. I didn’t entirely understand why anyone, if they had a choice, would want to miss out on Christmas.

It was Ellen Barrett and Joan Armstrong who let me know I wasn’t a Christian but a Jew. I met them in the fall of 1939, soon after we moved into the two-bedroom in the Larchmont Acres apartment complex and just after I started kindergarten. The following spring, I was on the swing set behind Saint Augustine’s Church when a procession of fourth-grade Catholic girls and boys waving palm fronds came after me throwing rocks. Ellen and Joan led their taunts of “Christ killer, Christ killer.” The same thing happened at Central Elementary playground with the older boys. I complained to the teacher and my mother spoke with the principal. I asked a boy in my class why he and his friends tormented me and he said the priest told them to. For the next three years Ellen and Joan made my life completely miserable, but it was that first year at Larchmont Acres that I learned I was a Jew. Every Easter after that it was the same story.

Unlike those poor Jews who came from ghettos in Russia and Poland, my mother’s great grandparents weren’t driven out of Germany by pogroms. They came to America in search of greater economic opportunities. Their ancestors had been followers of Moses Mendelssohn. His movement to get Jews to assimilate and embrace Western culture and secular education, I learned, was called “the Haskalah,” or the Enlightenment. Later I would compare the reforms of Moses Mendelssohn to those pushed by Shaikh Muhammad Abduh in Egypt and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in India on behalf of the Muslims. They, too, wanted the Muslims to assimilate Western values. By the time my mother’s great grandmother came to America she was in the habit of celebrating Christmas and didn’t know the first thing about Judaism. Her son, my grandfather, was always scornful of religion, but he nonetheless married a woman who never failed to attend Friday services and observe the Sabbath. I called her Nana. When Nana came to visit us, she wouldn’t even allow me to draw pictures or sew clothes for my dolls on the Sabbath. I adored Nana.

In contrast to Mother’s side of the family, my father’s grandfather came to America from East Prussia and was an Orthodox rabbi and not nearly so assimilated. My father once told me that his only memory of his grandfather was the day he boxed his ears when he caught him reading Horatio Alger stories instead of studying his catechism. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising, then, that my father’s father had nothing but contempt for Judaism. As soon as he could he moved to New York, where he started his own business manufacturing and selling men’s neckties. After graduating from Brooklyn Boys High, my father briefly considered rabbinical school but his father forced him to go straight into the family business. By the time he was twenty he had traveled all over America selling neckties. I often wonder if things would have turned out differently if my father had become a rabbi. The Depression killed the market for ties.

We celebrated the Jewish holidays in the same spirit in which we celebrated Easter and Christmas. On the High Holy Days Betty and I would be kept home from school, and if Grandfather and Nana were visiting from Savannah we would go for a drive in the country and have dinner at a nice restaurant. One year a man saw me on the playground and asked me why I wasn’t in school. It was Yom Kippur, I said innocently. He must have been a Jew because he gave me a dark look and asked me why I wasn’t in synagogue. Suddenly ashamed, I realized I had been stuffing myself with food and playing when real Jews like Julia Bustin were fasting and sitting in temple.

After that I never went outside on a Jewish holiday and I became intent on learning what it meant to be a good Jew. This led my mother to enroll Betty and me in two years of classes in the Reformed Liberal Sunday School at Temple Israel in October 1943. I was nine years old before I learned anything about Judaism but once I began reading about the tragic history of the Jews, I was unable to stop. But in the very years when the Jews of Europe were suffering untold horrors at the hands of the Nazis, my classmates at Temple Israel were horsing around or reading Superman comics hidden in their prayer books. I found this disgraceful.

In my Bible study textbooks I learned that both Arabs and Jews claimed Abraham as their patriarch and that the Arabs had offered the Jews sanctuary from Christian persecution in medieval Spain. There, under Arab rule and protection, the Jews experienced a golden age of literature. The Oriental Jews of Cairo and Palestine, and the Sephardic Jews of Granada, interested me far more than the hypocritical Reformed Jews of Westchester. When my English teacher asked which poets I liked to read, I mentioned the turn-of-the-century Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik. Bialik wrote gloomy poems about the Russian pogroms and exhorted the Jews to rise up in self-defense. From the way my teacher looked at me, I’m sure she had never heard of him. Obviously, her idea of a poet was Keats or Shelley. My parents always tried to pretend we were no different from the Christians, but the Christians didn’t see it that way. For a time, I decided I’d rather have been born an Orthodox Jew. They, at least, never apologized for being Jews.

At home I pored over the
Saturday Evening Post, Holiday,
and
Look
magazines, ignoring the spreads of Hollywood starlets in swimsuits to follow the progress of the war in Europe. When the German army invaded Russia in 1941, my mother hid the
Life
magazine issue that showed the horrible pictures of frozen Russian and German soldiers, bloodied and distorted, lying in the snow. After the war, she hid the dreadful photographs of the concentration camps. But I always found them. I read all the newspaper accounts of how the Nazis tortured and gassed the Jews. I had nightmares for years afterward but I studied the photographs and never forgot a thing.

Quest for the Truth
appeared to be a collection of Peggy Marcus’s thank-you notes to her grandparents and homesick letters from summer camp. There are lengthy missives addressed to her sister, Betty, at the University of Michigan, and letters to her parents away on Caribbean holidays and business trips. She also included copies of her expansive letters to prominent Islamic leaders, like the one above describing her ancestry, upbringing, and intellectual evolution, mapping each turn on the path to Islam. Taken together, the collection offers a self-portrait of her childhood and coming-of-age up to the moment Margaret Marcus sets off for Pakistan to become, more fully, Maryam Jameelah.

The letters portray a fairly typical suburban childhood. Herbert and Myra Marcus had provided their daughters a home that, like America itself, appeared to be a fundamentally benevolent and sunny place. As a little girl Peggy had fully embraced her parents’ view of the world, just as readily as she believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Yet soon enough Peggy realized, as every child must, that this wasn’t nearly the whole story. Indeed, there were certain ugly truths for which this outlook was wholly insufficient. The inevitability of death was one. When their daughter came to their bed in the middle of the night to ask, tearfully, why she had to die and what would happen when she did, what could they say? There was nothing to do but accept that death was inevitable. By the time Peggy grew up, Herbert and Myra promised her, medical science would enable her to live one hundred years or more. That was the sum of their consolation. How could Peggy not have felt betrayed?

The schoolyard bullies were mere nuisances. If Peggy faced any unpleasantness, a visit to the principal’s office, Myra assured her daughter, was all it took to set things right. Both Myra and Herbert were of the mind that American Jews needed to think, live, look, and behave exactly like other Americans. That was the kind of country America was. Until the liberation of the camps began in the fall of 1944, this viewpoint sufficed.

Accounts of what had been happening in the eastern parts of Europe had been largely dismissed as somebody’s propaganda or downplayed as isolated incidents. Those stories that did make the newspapers reflected this general disbelief, taking the form of brief mentions relegated to the back pages. It was not as if the rest of the war was going so well, such a placement seemed to suggest, that there was anything anyone could actually do about what was happening. Providing the stories were even true. The
New York Times
remained unconvinced. The photographs from the spring of 1945 changed that. Margaret would have just turned eleven.

Herbert and Myra Marcus were not the only ones to turn away from the utter ghastliness of the photographs. The war was over; better times lay ahead; never in America. Of course Myra might have known that her Peggy would refuse to leave well enough alone. And Myra knew she would never be able to answer all her daughter’s questions. There were always so many questions. It was upsetting. So she hid the newspapers and magazines. Finally, after discussing it with Herbert, Myra took her daughter to see a child psychologist.

Unimpressed with the principal’s handling of her tormentors, Peggy might have begun to suspect that once again her parents didn’t really grasp the larger implications of the crime. Perhaps they just preferred to close their eyes, refusing to admit what was perfectly clear. Even the journalists reported what they saw in the camps in a tone of bewilderment, awestruck at the scale of the extermination. They might have been covering a manufacturing industry dedicated to the marvels of mass production and cost-saving efficiencies. The photo captions of the newspaper and maga-zine coverage of the camps identified the bodies on display as concentration camp prisoners or concentration camp survivors. While there was always an obligatory reference to Nazi atrocities, there were few allusions to Jews.

That Halloween, Margaret went to a party dressed up as a ghost, with skulls and skeletons dangling around her neck and won an award for Most Original Costume and a write-up in the
Mamaroneck Daily Times.
Eventually she would see that the story behind the photographs wasn’t simply one of Nazi atrocity and concentration camps. It was about the Jews and it was about evil, and the question of what happened after one died could not be simply brushed off. There had to be an accounting. Otherwise . . . well, the prospect of that kept her awake at night. This is what I imagined Margaret Marcus would not forget.