The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (18 page)

Eventually, of course, they would.

In Maryam Jameelah’s final letter to the Mawlana Mawdudi before she left New York, there had been a note of unease, as if she were trying to prepare him for the possibility that she might not be exactly as he imagined. Maryam began the letter by telling Mawdudi of a comment made by the director of the World Federation of Islamic Missions regarding a certain convert to Islam. “Must be a mental case,” he was overheard saying. At first she was shocked, Maryam said, but having given the matter further thought, she decided there was wisdom in his remark.

Considering the perfect contentment of her mother and father, her well-adjusted and attractive sister, her prosperous aunts, uncles, and cousins, what sense would it make for them to exchange the familiar comforts of the West for an alien and uncomfortable Islamic life? They lacked any motivation to do so. Conversely, had she been a girl more “favorably endowed by nature,” there would have been no reason to make such a radical break. Otherwise, what cause would she have to doubt the essential goodness of American society? What would have distinguished her life from that of her sister or parents?

By the end of her letter, Peggy seemed to find her own answer to the questions she posed. What she had once considered the curse of her existence, her sense of being a misfit, she was now obliged to view as a mysterious blessing. Didn’t the Qur’an instruct her not to covet those gifts “Allah has bestowed more freely on others” (4:32)? Perhaps she had done some foolish things, but she was now convinced that Islam was exactly the medicine she required, for Allah was forgiving and merciful.

The Mawlana no doubt approved of her conclusion, as he did not address any of her questions in his reply. He had already made it clear that Margaret’s maladjustment was a natural consequence of the incompatibility of Islam and the West. Her temperament and taste, her ideas, habits, and conduct, were all fundamentally different from the peculiar and sinful mores of the society she found herself in. In his mind, she was lucky to have been spared even more serious damage. In a metaphor that clearly pleased him, the Mawlana had described her as an equatorial sapling struggling to survive in an Arctic climate. Her spinsterhood was due to similar incongruities, he insisted. By the time he received her final letter, Mawdudi was more focused on what Maryam would need to bring with her and how she might prepare herself for the challenges that awaited her in Lahore.

One year later, as Maryam’s fate was being decided, the disappointment of all those hopes that had accompanied her on her journey to Pakistan resembled nothing as much as a comedy of manners. Despite Maryam’s frank portrayal of her troubled history, Mawdudi had been too blinded by his assumptions about the West to hear her. After her arrival he must have asked himself: how could he possibly have known from her brilliant writings that this young woman was so deeply adrift? Had he been a more thoughtful man, he might have known that there are no simple calculations about human nature. To cap it all off, just when he had begun making preparations for her release from the hospital, suddenly he heard that she had the temerity to publicly denounce
him,
to question
his
integrity.

Mawdudi had once thought Maryam only required a husband to settle her nerves. But who would marry her now? Once more the whole city was talking about his mad protégée. Questions were being raised both in public and behind his back about the soundness of his judgment. He deeply regretted having invited her to live with his family and having volunteered to be her guardian.

As for Peggy, in her long letter from the Paagal Khanaah, she kept returning to the thought that she would never have accepted Mawdudi’s offer to live with his family if she hadn’t felt that her life in America was absolutely ruinous. Islam forbade suicide, but wasn’t the living death of the asylum nearly the same thing? Her decision to travel to Pakistan was as sane as the logic that had brought her to Islam. What greater proof could there be than the fact that Allah had saved her life the day she stood in front of her father’s medicine cabinet?

Yes, Peggy conceded to her parents, she had written intemperately about the Mawlana. On reflection she thought that perhaps the conclusions she drew about his intentions were unsound. He had never intended to kill her. At the time, she had thought it would be better to write down her worst fears than to let such suspicions fester. Bringing her letter to a close, Peggy informed her parents that she had decided to put aside her petty grievances. She would not let them overwhelm her better judgment. Like a good Muslim, she would resign her fate to Allah. And she would write Mawdudi one last time, begging his forgiveness.

In her favorite childhood game of make-believe Margaret had always taken the part of the handsome but tight-lipped Arab chieftain. Her best friend, Barbara Kenny, playacted the role of a Proper Victorian Lady whose explorer husband had died of thirst in the Syrian Desert, leaving her at the mercy of the elements. In the confines of her parents’ two-bedroom apartment, Margaret would throw the protesting, ungrateful Barbara over the back of a camel and cart her off to a tent, a neat contraption of blankets and dining room chairs. Barbara was directed to affect haughty airs, to complain about the heat and the filthy ignorant Arabs. Eventually, faced with this Arab’s implacable, fierce nobility, Barbara would finally submit to his proposals. The script rarely changed; Margaret never tired of it.

In her appeal to the Mawlana Mawdudi, Maryam wrote that she now realized that Shaheer Niazi was an evil man who did not have her interests at heart. She recognized all the trouble she had caused him and Begum Mawdudi. She begged him to once again take up his guardianship of her. She gave the letter to Dr. Rashid and asked him to see that the Mawlana received it.

Margaret’s tight-lipped Arab chieftain would not have hesitated. It was the code of his desert tribe to shelter the destitute, confer bounty on honored guests, and rescue a woman in distress, no matter how rude or uncivilized her behavior. But several days went by without any word from anyone on Maryam’s fate. Maryam became terrified that at any minute the nondescript man from the American consulate would pull up in his long black car to take her to the airport.

The Mawlana might easily have washed his hands of Maryam Jameelah. But he didn’t. He had saved her from permanent commitment and given her another chance to make a life, a not insignificant gift and perhaps a greater and more profound indictment of the West than anything to be found in his books. I didn’t have to travel to Pakistan to learn this. The evidence is there in the archive and in the long string of books Maryam Jameelah published out of Lahore.

And so it was no surprise when Maryam, returning to her room one night in early July, found two bottles of syrup and a box of sweets on her bedside table. Mawdudi’s emissary, Mohammad Yusuf Khan, had returned. The following day Dr. Rashid handed her a three-page letter from the Mawlana.

If Maryam accepted that he had done his utmost for her. If she promised not to disturb his family or his work. If she ceased in her calumnies and tirades of propaganda against him. If she could totally and completely clear her mind of further concoctions and defamations that might even slightly tar his reputation. And if she completely accepted that he had taken the risk of inviting her to Pakistan out of a simple feeling of Islamic fraternity and fatherliness, then he, Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, would resume his guardianship and put the past behind him. As soon as Dr. Rashid approved her release, he would find her a safe lodging in a private home where she might live independently, running her own kitchen according to her taste. She would support herself to the extent that she was able. “The rest will be borne by me,” the Mawlana wrote. “If you require any female servant, that too can be arranged. Please let me know if you accept these arrangements or not.”

Maryam Jameelah gratefully and gracefully accepted his terms.

c/o Mohammad Yusuf Khan
15/49 Sant Nagar
Lahore
PAKISTAN

Mid-August 1963

On his very next visit to the hospital, Mohammad Yusuf Khan brought not only more presents, but also his wife, sisters, and a gaggle of young children. We spent the month of July going on excursions to the Shalimar Gardens and to the bazaars for all those items I would need to set up housekeeping. It was he who found me the room I moved into from the hospital at noon on August 2, 1963. I became the tenant of a school inspector and her three children. It was just five minutes from there to Mohammad Yusuf Khan’s home in Sant Nagar. If I got lonely, he said, I could just throw on a burqa and visit them.

As soon as I entered the Khan home, I realized that the Mawlana had been right. I had been there once before, soon after my arrival in Lahore. There had been a big tea party, and unlike at the dozens of tea parties held by Begum Mawdudi’s brothers where I got into so many arguments, in the home of Mohammad Yusuf Khan I had been warmly welcomed. When I returned to his home last week, his aged mother, his aunts, his sisters, and his nieces all knew my name. From then on I took my meals there or at the homes of his sisters who lived nearby. When I finally dared ask Mohammad Yusuf Khan why he was being so nice to me, he said that while Mawdudi remained my guardian, he had delegated the day-to-day responsibility for my care to him.

Less than a week after I settled in to my new lodgings, Begum Mawdudi invited me to come to the Zaildar Park house in Icchra for tea. It was August 8, 1963. Mohammad Yusuf Khan arrived to pick me up. I was very nervous. I wanted to be on my best behavior. I imagine I was somewhat distracted. And so I wasn’t sure I had heard him properly when Mohammad Yusuf Khan asked me a question. He looked at me expectantly but I couldn’t seem to find the right words. So he asked again. Will you marry me?

But… you are already married. You have children. You love your wife, don’t you?

I love her very much but in Islam a man can have up to four wives and I want to marry you, too.

How can you want to marry me? You know with the condition I suffer from, it isn’t going to be easy for you. I don’t want to be a burden on anybody.

You know that Mawlana Mawdudi has told me to take care of you and since there is nobody else except me to provide for you now, what will the neighborhood think to see me entering your room alone every day? From the moral point of view, this is good neither for you nor for me, but if you will marry me, I assure you, everything will be all right.

But what about your wife and her family? Surely they will object to your taking a second wife.

Don’t worry about that, he said. This is my responsibility. Will you marry me?

I will ask Mawlana Mawdudi’s advice, I told him. If he says I should, then I will.

The man who proposed to take Maryam Jameelah as his second wife was a man whose life, like hers, had been divided in two
by exile. Mohammad Yusuf Khan was a Pathan whose ancestors, also known as Pashtuns, had traveled east from Afghanistan to settle in Jullundur in the Indian state of Punjab. There they became powerful feudal landlords. Behind a high wall and a gate locked at night, the residents of the Pathan quarter proved as proudly resistant to the inroads of British influence as they were to the neighboring Sikhs and Hindus. At the slightest sign of puberty, their daughters were veiled and thereafter ventured out of the house only on a litter, hidden behind curtains.

In 1947 Khan and his family fled India for their lives, abandoning their land, belongings, and comfortable life to join the mass migration of Muslims to Pakistan, just as the Hindus and Sikhs left the Pakistan territories for India. Over 7 million traveled in both directions. Trains arrived at their destinations spilling blood and mutilated corpses; refugee camps were attacked, women were raped; massacres of Hindus and Sikhs were answered by massacres of Muslims. Estimates of the number of those killed range from 200,000 to 1.5 million, inexplicably and evenly divided between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Like the subcontinent, the Punjab itself had been divided. Lahore became the capital city of Pakistan’s Punjab and Chandigarh the capital of India’s Punjab; the largest population exchange took place in this one region. In this exodus the Khans were no longer Pathans and zamindars; they were simply Muslims and refugees. Some of their clan went to Faisalabad, others to Multan, still others to Lahore. Sikhs moved into the grand homes they left behind. For many years tales of how perfect and harmonious life had been in Jullundur would color the struggle to survive in Lahore.

Mohammad Yusuf Khan began his two-hundred-mile journey to Pakistan a vigorous youth of twenty and ended up in a refugee camp not far from Lahore. Broken by malaria, dysentery, exhaustion, and misery, he would spend over a year recovering. It was in the refugee camps that he was first exposed to the work of the Jamaat-e-Islami. Once Pakistan became a reality, Mawdudi’s party had thrown itself into the work of caring for and resettling those displaced by the upheaval of Partition.

The ramshackle house in the old Hindu quarter of Sant Nagar where Maryam first visited Khan’s family was the house Mohammad Yusuf eventually appropriated after its Hindu owners abandoned it. Khan and his extended clan of brothers and sisters and in-laws broke up a house meant for one family into a tenement-like warren of little rooms bereft of plumbing, running water, and electricity.

Not long after they settled in, the former owners returned, as if such a thing were possible. By then the entire neighborhood had been converted: Hindu shrines into corner mosques, Hindu houses into Muslim ones. Despite Khan’s offer to compensate them, they broke down and wept to see what had become of their home, the memory of which had made exile bearable. They returned to India inconsolable.

In Lahore, Mohammad Yusuf Khan’s two sources of income were intimately linked with the Jamaat-e-Islami. In the early years a good portion of the Jamaat’s revenues came from the publication of the Mawlana’s works and from selling skins of the sacrificial goats donated to the party during Ramadan. While the party was banned, Khan oversaw the publication of the
Weekly Shahab,
the distribution of the Mawlana Mawdudi’s books, and the collection of goatskins. Like Mian Tufail Muhammad, Khan had been fined and arrested in the wake of the protests over the Family Laws Ordinance. He had published the full text of the ulema’s opposition in his weekly. He served nine months and was released just before Maryam arrived in Lahore. While he was in prison, his wife Shafiqa had to sell all her gold jewelry to keep herself and their children from starving.