The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (20 page)

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

April 2007

I was overjoyed to receive your beautiful letter of March 24 and to be assured that my manuscripts and artwork are preserved and appreciated. My late parents, being Jewish and Zionist sympathizers, regarded my drawings of Arabs as merely products of a disordered mind. From 1988 to 2001 I started drawing again, more than fifty additional illustrations for my fictional Ahmad Khalil. I hope now to have conveyed the Palestinian tragedy in pictures by drawing scenes from his life from birth to death. My artwork is intended to convey the same message as my writings. I would be honored and delighted to meet you whenever you find it convenient to come to Lahore. I go outside very rarely and am almost always at home. Awaiting your earliest response with all best wishes…

Behind the front door of the house in Icchra the Mawlana’s library of Urdu, Persian, English, and Arabic books is encased in concrete. That was the rumor. The Mawlana himself is buried in an unmarked grave at the back. I had also been told the Mawlana’s house was no longer the headquarters of the Jamaat-e-Islami. Just before his death in 1979, Mawdudi’s party moved its offices to a Lahore suburb called Mansoorah. In Mansoorah today everyone wears Jamaati clothes, shops at Jamaati shops, and sends their children to Jamaati madrasas where they recite the Qur’an and study Mawdudi’s books all day long. The compound at Mansoorah is also rumored to be a martyr factory: for each one of their militants killed fighting for the Taliban, Jamaat-e-Islami leaders are said to receive 60,000 rupees. Of this, 20,000 rupees are passed along to the family.

After the Mawlana’s death, there had been an unseemly struggle over where he would be buried: in Mansoorah or in the Icchra backyard. The party elders had long nursed a suspicion that Begum Mawdudi exerted an unholy influence over their leader. Her family had made its fortune as prominent Delhi moneylenders, and usury was a serious offense in the eyes of Islam. Yet in 1937, when Mawdudi first met her, he had been immediately taken by his distant cousin’s independent spirit. This was, perhaps, the carefree mark of money. His wife’s family wealth had freed him to devote his time to the mission of a Muslim reawakening and, most precious of all, his books. For a time, the Begum proved to be a tad heedless when it came to the rules of purdah, often eschewing the full burqa covering for a mere headscarf. When Maryam asked her why she was not more observant in this matter, Begum Mawdudi suggested that she was unworthy of her husband’s great patience.

A judge eventually decided the disposition of the estate by dividing the house and book royalties between the widow and the political party Mawdudi left behind. To guarantee that nothing went missing, I suppose, the Mawlana’s library was entombed. If it is true, the idea that his books had survived the fraught 1947 journey to Lahore only to end up rotting under damp cement seemed emblematic of how much had gone wrong in Pakistan’s brief history. Though the Mawlana had little patience for poetry, he would have been heir to the collections of ghazals passed down from his grandfathers. His maternal grandfather was a close friend of the great Urdu poet Mirza Asadullah Ghalib. I was sorry to learn that I wouldn’t be able to see what remained of the wall of Persian, Urdu, Arabic, and English books that had so impressed Maryam during her sleepless nights in Icchra so many years before.

There is a newspaper photograph of Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi in one of the boxes of the Jameelah archive. In the photograph the Mawlana holds a delicate teacup. His beard is the required length of one and a half fists. Even his hair is combed and styled according to Sunnah practice. But his face contrives to wear no expression at all. Perhaps Mawdudi had walled himself off from the photographer out of his belief that the making of graven images was forbidden. One biographer surmised that his superior affect arose from the loneliness of his youth. I imagined that his sense of propriety was such that he could not look anyone in the eye, even a camera. What had Maryam seen when she first laid eyes upon him?

Though Margaret’s heart had first fixed on the Arab world, it was Mawdudi who read her work and who offered her both personal guidance and a refuge. In a letter to her sister a year before she left the United States and subsequently published in
Quest for the Truth,
Peggy refers to Mawdudi as her most faithful correspondent. In her archive, his replies to her letters were bound in a separate volume. Yet Margaret turned only reluctantly toward Pakistan, and tried to console herself by asserting there was nothing special about the Arabs. What virtues they had, Islam had bestowed. “Qutb is a great admirer of you and specially recommended your books to me,” she wrote Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi.

What had she wanted or expected from him? After her nerve-racking days at sea, she might have needed reassurance that Mawdudi was the compassionate and thoughtful man of his letters. Did she see simply an aloof old man, hobbled by infirmity? Yet what could Maryam really know of him? I asked this question equally of myself. Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi and the world he was part of seem as inaccessible as his library. He too is veiled, by differences in culture, belief, and language, distances of time and geography, and not least by the hot glare of recent history.

Mawdudi had come of age at precisely that moment when the struggle for Indian independence became a mass movement. In those years he was clean-shaven and wore Western clothes, signaling his disaffection with his father’s faith and his own modernity. As a young teenager he had translated a popular Egyptian book called
The New Woman
into Urdu. The book was a vehement condemnation of purdah. He was seventeen and editing a Delhi newspaper when Gandhi’s strategy of noncooperation electrified the subcontinent. For a brief period Gandhi managed to forge Muslim-Hindu unity over an unlikely cause: the fate of the Turkish caliphate. Though the Hindus had no investment in the matter, as Mustapha Kemal Ataturk laid siege to the Ottoman Empire, Hindus nonetheless joined Muslim leaders in a quixotic call for the British to defend the institution. Yet when a lone Muslim assassinated a right-wing Hindu leader for denigrating the Prophet, clashes between the two communities broke out. Rioting Muslims set fire to a police station in a village in Uttar Pradesh with the policemen locked inside. Hindu leaders returned to maligning Islam as inherently violent.

To Mawdudi’s dismay, Gandhi, fearful of the escalating violence, suspended the noncooperation movement. The alliance between Hindus and Muslims fell apart. By the time Ataturk dissolved the caliphate in 1924, the cause that had united them was dead and the path was opened for the Muslim League to lobby the British to carve its own, wholly Muslim state from the subcontinent. The league’s leader, the immaculately tailored Jinnah, had never seen the point of the caliphate. And Gandhi’s native getup and ascetic ways had always set his teeth on edge.

During these years Mawdudi was deep into reading entire libraries of Western philosophy, science, sociology, economics, and political theory. In the midst of the political tumult and disappointment surrounding the suspension of Gandhi’s movement, Mawdudi returned to Islam as if he were returning to an old friend. He matriculated at the renowned seminary attached to the Fatihpuri mosque in Delhi. Technically, a seminary degree would enable him to take the title of
alim.

But he had seen how the traditional clergy had groomed themselves under their British overlords, fiddling over hermeneutics until they could no longer distinguish between the sparkling clarity of the original Qur’an and Hadith and subsequent medieval corruptions. His writings conveyed a consistent tone of intellectual disdain toward those who were his teachers. Mawdudi would eventually take up the title of
mawlana
to highlight his independent cast of mind and thereby provide a bridge between the past and the future of Islam. But the title he cherished most was that of convert.

The fact that both sides of his family could trace their descent from the Prophet was, he implied, incidental. That his namesake was a Sufi saint who had spread the faith of Islam across India was beside the point. Instead, Mawdudi fancied he saw something of his own path in Margaret Marcus’s. In reply to her first letter, he had written, “I studied your life-sketch with great care and interest. As I read it I came to realize how an open and unbiased mind can find access to the Right Path provided it makes a sincere and steady effort. The story of your sufferings, tribulations and mental anguish contained nothing unexpected for me.” Like Margaret, Mawdudi held that his own embrace of Islam followed a dark night of the soul, an existential crisis that lifted only when he returned to the Qur’an: “I affirmed my faith after contemplation and reflections. I pondered whether there was another faith that promised more for the welfare of mankind. I applied my mind, heart, and soul to the question.” If one approached Islam with the requisite open mind and heart, as this young American woman clearly had, the Right Path would be revealed.

Subsequently, Mawdudi seemed more comfortable pronouncing certainties than showing how he arrived at them. His engagement with Western philosophers became primarily adversarial, more of a defensive gesture than an open-ended inquiry. He appropriated concepts he judged “Western” by renaming them “modern,” as if his right hand didn’t know what his left was doing. He viewed technological breakthroughs as easily acquired tools for his cause rather than as products inextricably embedded in the materialist worldview Maryam railed against. Similarly, he admired Marx not for his critique of capitalism but simply for having conscripted the masses in a worldwide movement and for having the boldness to insist the world was heading in the direction he willed it to.

His relentless drive was perhaps a means to keep uncertainties at bay, as if in his race to extract a new social contract from the Qur’an and the Hadith he couldn’t afford to reflect too long on their manifold ambiguities. If these works didn’t have the exact solutions he needed, he didn’t hesitate to provide them or at least suggest they would soon be forthcoming. The ulema were often dismayed at his improvisations with classical Arabic, feeling he stretched the traditionally understood definitions to accommodate more modern vocabularies. Many were uncomfortable with Mawdudi’s scholarship and questioned the depth of his engagement with the issues surrounding Islamic jurisprudence and Qur’anic interpretation. Others doubted his grasp of Islamic history. Sometimes, in response to criticism, he accused his critics of intentional misreading and made the required clarifications. Equally often he let even the most glaring contradictions stand, as if to challenge those “mischief mongers” who sought to question his authority.

Mawdudi’s first major work was an early and influential series of essays on Islamic jihad, first published in book form in 1930, when he was twenty-seven. For centuries
jihad
has been a deeply contested word. Most plainly,
jihad
is the Arabic word for “struggle.” In an Islamic context, however,
jihad
refers to a particular religious duty and this is where it becomes complicated. Generations of Qur’anic commentators have sought to establish the exact nature of this duty. For some
jihad
refers purely to the quiet daily struggle to affirm one’s faith in word and action. For others
jihad
mandates a more vocal struggle against an unjust or un-Islamic political order or an assiduous effort to spread the word of Islam. Maryam and Mawdudi engaged in both these forms of jihad. But military struggle has also fallen under the rubric of jihad, sparking debates over even finer distinctions. Is military jihad solely “defensive” or, as generations of Orientalists have insisted, does it mean that Muslims must spread the word of Islam, enlarging its domain on Earth by any means necessary? This was the debate that Mawdudi hoped to join in the 1930 book,
Al-Jihad fil Islam,
as well as his 1939 speech, “Jihad in Islam.” In both works he described his mission as a response to those who portrayed Islam as intrinsically violent.

Though “Jihad in Islam” is readily available on the Internet,
Al-Jihad fil Islam
has never been completely translated into English. Mawdudi prefaced “Jihad in Islam” by describing an imaginary painting with a familiar Orientalist motif: hordes of bearded savages with fiery eyes holding swords to the necks of infidels. This image, captioned “The History of This Nation Is a Tale of Bloodshed,” was as familiar as it was indelible. Mawdudi mocked and parroted those ulema who, under the thumb of the English, sought to underplay more militant notions of jihad: “Sir, what do we know of war and slaughter. We are pacifist preachers like the mendicants and religious divines.… What concern have we with sabers! Now ‘Jihad’ only refers to waging war with the tongue and the pen. To fire cannons and shoot with guns is the privilege of your honor’s government and wagging tongues and scratching with pens is our pleasure.”

I imagined that Mawdudi’s caricature of the ulema betrayed something of his disillusionment with Gandhi’s decision to suspend his campaign of resistance. For a young man in a hurry, this would have smacked of defeatism and weakness, if not cowardice. That Gandhi had also publicly rebuked the Muslim community for its recourse to violence no doubt added to his disillusionment. A sympathetic account of Gandhi’s thought had been the subject of his first book, confiscated by British authorities before it could be published. More than any other thinker, Gandhi shared Mawdudi’s reservations about imposing an overlay of Western ideas of liberalism and democracy on India. His vision of an Indian state was rooted in the indigenous arrangements—inseparably spiritual, economic, and political—of traditional village life. Mawdudi’s subsequent turn away from Gandhi was premature, tragic yet not necessarily inevitable.

Instead, Mawdudi turned back to the Orientalist painting of the fanatical hordes and asked the question that would forever set him apart: who is the artist? He looked past the canvas to unmask the face of the foreigner at the easel. And then, in an inspired rhetorical flourish, he took up a brush himself. Mawdudi had a flair for painting a picture in words, suggesting a secret flamboyance. His own painting depicted a vast army of imperialist thieves, bristling with deadly weapons. Behind them lurked smartly dressed white-suited officials holding out pens and paper. These were the men who vowed to protect Muslims from tyrants, to guarantee their rights, he pointed out. These were the men who, in the midst of their fine speeches about freedom, never for a moment ceased their plunder.