The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (16 page)

The language here is inevitably that of inmates and prisons, Peggy wrote Betty. Everyone asks how long you have been here, when you expect to get out, and whether your time has been “hard” or not. But the question that worried everyone was never broached: “Can I make it on the outside?” It wasn’t until Margaret was transferred to the main building, which housed the chronic patients, that she realized how desperate a question this could become. It was only then that she began to miss the air of hopefulness that sustained the new arrivals in Ward C.

There was a woman in the chronic ward who had been an inmate for fifty years and hadn’t had a visitor since 1910. And then there were the girls who were too friendly and simpleminded to make it on the outside. But most depressing of all for Margaret was the long bench filled with women with vacant faces, never looking at one another, never making conversation, but simply lost in their own private hell.

And if the mental hospital alone wasn’t a sufficiently dismal fate, for chronic patients who could not be trusted outside unsupervised, a poor diet, close quarters, and badly ventilated rooms conspired to raise the specter of contracting tuberculosis and being moved into the tuberculosis ward. Margaret wrote at length about the desperate conditions of these patients, as if to find something in her own lot to be grateful for.

In contrast to Hudson River State, she found that the private ward of the Paagal Khanaah had a great deal to recommend it. With three ayahs at her beck and call, Maryam was treated like a kind of royalty. Even Janet Hanneman, the Peace Corps nurse, would undertake small errands for her. Still inclined to favor the Muslim way of doing things, Maryam held that it made no difference if you were the daughter of a feudal zamindar or an illiterate Punjabi peasant; every patient at the Paagal Khanaah was treated with kindness. Maryam, of course, was neither the daughter of a zamindar nor a peasant. In the Lahore madhouse, however, there was social cachet in being an American, and she seemed to accept as her due the privileges and protection that came with this.

As the Margaret Mead of Nichols Cottage, Peggy had once silently calculated the likelihood of relapse of her former ward mates. She observed young girls undergo the savage rituals of treatment without blinking. At the Paagal Khanaah she now took it upon herself to confer with the medical director over the paranoid delusions of a fellow patient. She inquired about the prospects of babies born to mothers in the public wards. (Dr. Rashid did his best, she reported, but most of them died.) Similarly, just as she had at Hudson River State, at the Paagal Khanaah she managed to gain access to her case file (at Hudson State she read everyone else’s as well). Peggy never hesitated to find a way around the rules, either because she could not resist the pull of her questions or because she was simply nosy. Of course the same thing might be said of a biographer, burrowing away in boxes and old letters.

Maryam made the most of her experience in mental institutions when she came to write “A Manifesto of the Islamic Movement” in 1969. In this document she encouraged Muslims who persisted in seeing America as a model society to visit its asylums and witness the lives of the lost souls hidden there. It was not only the senile and aged who found themselves rejected and abandoned by their families, but also thousands of others who had been “left to die, herded naked and incontinent like cattle.”

“Schizophrenia is the scourge of the twentieth century,” Maryam quoted one unnamed psychiatrist as saying. The diagnosis was not hers alone, she seemed to think, but part of a larger, more existential contagion: “Schizophrenia is no longer limited to isolated individuals but the entire social order has become contaminated… wherever modernization and urbanization are taking place.” Qutb had made a similar observation, describing the “hideous schizophrenia” of modern life, a disease Europe had inflicted on the cultures of the colonized. The remedy for being torn between Islamic values and Western ways, between devout faith and crushing doubt, spiritual values and material longings, remained the same, Maryam insisted. Pakistan must not waver. Islam was an “all embracing system of absolute transcendental morality” that promised “salvation of the individual personality” along with much else. Ten years after she left the Paagal Khanaah, Maryam suggested that she had at last found the salvation that would forever elude all those who chose any other path. She was no longer a divided woman.

Whatever Maryam Jameelah might say, clinical schizophrenia has never been proven contagious. Yet there were other conditions at Hudson State that, like tuberculosis, did appear to be. The crimes of the recent war had infected not only those who had committed them but also those who had suffered them, thereby creating a distinct pathology. Like the majority of the professional staff, the psychiatrist who had been assigned to Margaret Marcus had been trained in Europe before the war. As she was not licensed to open a private practice in America, Dr. Cohen, like many other refugees, was relegated to treating the patients of public institutions.

Hudson River State Hospital
Poughkeepsie, NY

April 1959

I wasn’t in the least surprised to learn that Dr. Cohen is a survivor of Hitler’s camps. One might think that such an experience would have granted her a certain degree of compassion but that is far from the case. She is more like a prison guard than a doctor and I am not alone in finding her sicker than any of the one thousand inmates whose treatment she is responsible for. Look at how your hands are shaking, she says to me with a look of contempt, look at how you have neglected your personal appearance. I can’t imagine how you think you are ready to go home looking the way you do. She tried to have me assigned to the laundry, where the work begins at eight in the morning and ends at six in the evening. There you are made to stand over steaming vats of wet clothes, putting them through the mangle machine until you are ready to keel over. Unpaid labor is considered “therapy” here.

Work will set you free.

I am counting the days until Easter, when I am due to have a month-long trial visit at home. I wish you believed in God, Betty, because then I would ask you to pray that Daddy won’t send me back here.

Like a politically fragile country that persists in acquiescing to one strongman after another, Margaret Marcus seemed to live in fear of what she was capable of if she was left to her own devices. In a letter to the Mawlana Mawdudi, written close to her departure for Pakistan, Maryam admitted to having “made mistakes in my life” and “done some foolish things.” She provided no details. Perhaps Margaret’s condition was simply a response to a culture that refused to rein in her desires or curb her ferocious temper. When it came to sorting out what it meant to be good, Margaret Marcus could not find the single template she required. Only by embracing the notion of a powerful and all-seeing God, nurturing a constant awareness of His gaze, would she be kept in line. Here was her moral guidance.

Writers on Islam, including Mawdudi, make constant reference to the idea that Islam is not a religion, but a way of living in harmony with God and His laws. Those who veer from the Right Path risk hell in the afterlife and maladjustment in the present. Mawdudi wanted the same clear destiny for Pakistan as he wanted for every Muslim, as if he, too, didn’t trust what would become of his country if it chose another, more open-ended path. Given the bloody circumstances under which Pakistan came into being, I couldn’t begrudge him the necessity of this security.

As the date of Margaret’s month-long trial release came close, the uncertainty and temptations of freedom, however eagerly awaited, must also have been terrifying, particularly if Peggy had begun to believe her fate in the hereafter hung in the balance. Would she make it on the outside? Would she be good? Yet the day finally arrived in the spring of 1959, when a long white envelope from Hudson River State Hospital appeared in the apartment mailbox at Larchmont Acres. It was addressed to Miss Margaret Marcus:

Upon the written recommendation of your father, your discharge is hereby confirmed. You must try not to harbor too many grievances against us. The pressure of our patients is so great and our resources are very limited. Our knowledge is even more inadequate. We can only do our best with what we have in hand.

Years later Maryam would remember the exact wording. It was like a benediction.

CHAPTER 6

The Convert

Go clear out your heart’s chamber.
Make it ready to be the dwelling place of the Beloved.
When you depart, He will come in.
And to you, with self discarded, He will unveil His beauty.
Mahmud Shabistari

Herbert Marcus was intent on keeping his daughter out of the apartment while he and Myra were at work. While it was all well and good for Peggy to do volunteer work at the Westchester Association for Mental Illness, he was impatient for her to settle on a suitable livelihood. This was his constant refrain, Margaret complained to Betty. When she protested, insisting that for that to happen she would have to change into an entirely different person, Herbert lost his temper. She was just lazy! All she thought about was Islam!

And before Margaret knew what was happening, her father was threatening to call an ambulance and have her sent back to the state hospital. Weeping, she would run into her room and slam the door. Afterward, Herbert would knock softly and offer his apologies. The door would open and Margaret would reciprocate. He would suggest that she take a typing course at the Vocational Guidance and Rehabilitation Center in White Plains.

You may find it easier to be accepted in an office, he said.

I’ll try, Daddy.

That’s my good girl.

For the rest of 1959 Margaret tried to land a position as a secretary, going from office to office and filling out job applications. Without a degree or any work experience, she found that prospective employers were not interested, even if she lied about her age to evade awkward questions about the missing years. She imagined that every interviewer she spoke with had no trouble seeing through her stories, and that only made her more nervous. She resigned herself to typing up the papers and master’s theses of international students whose grasp of English was shaky. They seemed to appreciate her expertise and were happy to talk with her about the lives they left behind. Unfortunately, demand for a typist was unpredictable; she was not close to making a living.

On the pretext of looking for a job, Margaret gradually began spending more time in the city, going to the Oriental Division of the New York Public Library, where Mr. Parr helped her find the books she sought. He also brought to her attention
Muslim Digest,
where she would publish her first essays on Islam. After reading
Islam at the Crossroads
by Muhammad Asad, the Jewish convert whose book
The Road to Mecca
had made such a deep impression on her, Margaret began to articulate the kernel of her argument against modern America.

Without some framework of belief, Margaret imagined that America would eventually face a general cultural collapse. Having personally witnessed the havoc Western secular values had wrought upon Christianity and Judaism, she felt obliged to warn Western-educated and English-speaking Muslims that Islam would very likely share the same fate unless they took heed. Margaret was certain that Islam would prove a better vehicle for the dream of social justice, equality, and communal harmony that America and Israel had so clearly reneged upon. More keenly than anyone else, she had seen how the manicured lawns and pruned landscapes of her suburban childhood could not obscure the ethnic rivalries, religious hatreds, and petty racisms that seethed beneath its smug surface. Nor did it shelter her from the stinging ridicule she had suffered as a stout and stubborn little girl who could not control her temper. One of the first essays she sent off was a paper she’d written at New York University, a glowing appreciation of Sayyid Qutb’s work
Social Justice in Islam.

Maryam would also ascribe the high incidence of mental illness, juvenile delinquency, promiscuity, perversion, children born out of wedlock, and obscenity in the arts and entertainment to the destructive inroads materialism had made into the American mainstream. As for technological progress, medical breakthroughs, and loss of sexual inhibition, she felt these developments had debased rather than liberated the Western world. The obsession with economic prosperity had enslaved both men and women. Out-of-control technology had expanded the reach of America’s destructive powers. Education was deemed desirable not to enhance human potential but because it created better workers. The campaign to eradicate mental illness, too, arose not from any sympathy for the afflicted but so that no one’s potential to contribute to the GNP would be untapped. Even the appropriate number of babies per family was subject to a cost-benefit analysis. This was the end result of scientific rationalism: a predisposition to surrender awareness of the sacred in manic pursuit of the wholly mercenary.

Underlying these arguments there were echoes of Margaret’s arguments with her father over her refusal or inability to become financially independent. And there were more intimate but still unspoken calculations. Peggy’s paralyzing childhood fear of death had forced her to ponder the most profound questions of existence for hours on end. When she grew older she compared the sacred texts of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam for their teachings on the hereafter. Of all these faiths, only Islam provided her the clear assurance that her efforts to live a pious life would be justly rewarded.

Similarly, Islam embraced all, not only without regard for birth, skin color, and nationality, but also without regard for private affliction. Indeed, the protection of the weak by the strong is valued above all else. Whatever tribute Islam might exact in return for the promise of heaven and its protective embrace, Margaret was prepared to pay it. Finally, Islam had made the Arabs a great people. Might it ennoble her as well? Provide her the hard and
fast practical advice on how to go about the infinitely mysterious, riotously confusing task of finding her place in the world?

Eventually, Margaret Marcus found her way to the Islamic Propagation Center of America, housed in a run-down storefront in Brooklyn Heights. Shaikh Daoud Ahmad Faisal told her he was a pure Moroccan Arab, but Margaret was skeptical; he looked, spoke, and acted like any black man from the Deep South. Margaret judged his Arabic wanting as well. His West Indian wife, Khadija Faisal, introduced Peggy to cricket and taught her how to recite her five daily prayers. While Shaikh Faisal swanned around the Syrian neighborhood in elaborate Arab costume, boasting about his plans for a network of madrasas and colleges, Sharia courts, and halal shops on Atlantic Avenue, Khadija quietly took in young black men who had fallen behind on their rent.

Yet despite her doubts about him, it was Shaikh Daoud Ahmad Faisal who finally convinced Margaret Marcus to submit to God, to obey His commands as set forth in the Holy Qur’an, and to sacrifice her life in this world for the life in the hereafter. Despairing at the news of her daughter’s conversion, Myra Marcus consulted a rabbi, though by then it had been years since she and Herbert had gone to temple. The rabbi reassured Myra that Islam was a close kin to Judaism. Consoled, Myra told her daughter, who now called herself Maryam, “You will always be Peggy to me.”

Margaret had always imagined that her aunt Helen was more open and sympathetic to her embrace of Islam than her parents ever were. Her aunt had even treated her to occasional meals at Lebanese restaurants. Then one afternoon Aunt Helen dropped by the apartment and Margaret was astonished to discover how long she could talk about the plans for her daughter’s wedding. She described in excruciating detail the trips to the city to decide between several competing venues. She shared the minutiae of shopping for the perfect fur coat among the hundreds to be found in Manhattan’s most exclusive Fifth Avenue department stores. Finally, the fine points of the cocktail reception her parents were going to host in honor of her cousin required further deliberations. An entire afternoon passed in this way.

But it was when her aunt brought out a copy of the official newsletter of the Women’s Zionist Organization and tried to interest her niece in Hadassah’s fascinating humanitarian work that Margaret realized she was entirely alone. Despite all the time they had spent together when her parents were on holiday, all those occasions on which Margaret had described her strong feelings about the Arab cause, it was clear none of this had actually registered. Aunt Helen would listen like the fond and doting aunt she was, but her attention would wander. In the end she was no different from her parents or Betty. Not one of them could fathom what Shaikh Daoud Ahmad Faisal and Khadija meant to her. Suddenly she seemed to see them all from a great distance.

It was only a matter of time before Margaret and her father had their final argument. One evening she found Herbert at his desk writing out a check for two hundred dollars to the United Jewish Appeal. When she protested, her mother defended him, insisting that the money would be used strictly to help resettle destitute war orphans in Israel. She couldn’t imagine that her parents really still believed that propaganda. They must have known in their hearts where the money was really headed.

It will be used to kill and dispossess Arabs! she shouted.

Her father ordered her to her room. When she emerged some time later, tear-streaked and tentative, he told her it was time for her to leave home. He could no longer live with her in peace. Her mother said nothing.

By the summer of 1961 she had found a room at the Martha Washington Hotel, a women’s residence on East Twenty-ninth Street. Her rent and living expenses were still covered by her father, but her existence was no less lonely than before. Though the publication of her writings on Islam had begun to give her life a focus, it appeared that her conversion changed nothing about the outward circumstances of her life. More and more, Margaret came to believe that she would be condemned to live as a misfit in a society she would always hate. Though she couldn’t imagine where she would ever find the courage to emigrate, she began to correspond with figures across the Muslim world.

Peggy’s list of her correspondents included “mature Arab Muslim leaders deemed reactionary fanatics by the
New York Times.
” The mission of
al-ikhwan al-Muslimin,
the Society of Muslim Brotherhood, founded by Hassan al-Banna in Cairo, had first inspired her. He and Sayyid Qutb were deeply involved in questions of an Islamic social and political order. But al-Banna had been assassinated and, in the wake of an attempt on President Nasser’s life, his society was outlawed. Qutb responded to Margaret’s overtures through his sister Amina, but he was in prison. So Egypt was out.

Then there was Algeria. Shaykh Muhammad Bashir Ibrahimi, leader of the insurgency against France and a member of the Islamic clergy, had written her a long letter in elegant French about the unspeakable conditions in his country. But he was living in exile in Saudi Arabia. Qutb’s younger brother, Mohammed, along with many other members of the Society of Muslim Brotherhood, was too. He acknowledged neither Margaret’s letter nor the essays she sent. That ruled out Saudi Arabia.

Less than a year after she moved into the Martha Washington, the day came when her father reached the end of his patience. He and Myra wanted to retire and travel around the world. They would give up their lease on the Larchmont Acres apartment, sell the furniture and household belongings, and embark on a world tour, relieved of all civic and family responsibilities. Even if Peggy had wanted to accompany them, Herbert refused to have her along. Furthermore, once they left the country, he told her, he would no longer contribute to her support. She would be on her own.

It had been three years since her release from the Hudson River State Hospital, Maryam wrote Mawlana Mawdudi that spring, a year into their correspondence. If she didn’t find work soon, she would be reduced to joining the welfare rolls or face the prospect of lifelong commitment. She held out no hope for rehabilitation and saw that without her parents there to support her, she was lost. While Pakistan was neither an Arab nor a true Islamic state, it did offer a community of fellow Muslims. In the bosom of the Mawdudi family, under the direct thumb of the Mawlana’s rule, how could she go wrong?

“After declining your kind invitation for so long,” she wrote to Abul Ala Mawdudi, “would it be too late to accept it now?”

Paagal Khanaah
Jail Road
Lahore

Late July 1963

Long after his return from Mecca at the end of May, the Mawlana finally visited me. During the six weeks of my residence here, I had managed to settle into a routine, but my fear of the Mawlana Mawdudi and the Jamaat-e-Islami was not diminished by his sudden appearance at the hospital. The Mawlana was elaborately proper and polite, but reserved to the point of coldness. Subsequent visits brought no change in his manner and he soon stopped coming altogether, greatly increasing my apprehensions.

Accompanying him to the hospital was a bearded man he introduced as Mohammad Yusuf Khan. Mawdudi insisted that I had once been a guest in his home, but as I had no memory of him, I viewed him glumly as yet another of the Mawlana’s Jamaati henchmen. When Mawdudi’s visits stopped, Mohammad Yusuf Khan continued to come, often bringing candy, bottles of sweet syrup, and presents. This only heightened my suspicions.