The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (21 page)

There was an unmistakable note of respect in Mawdudi’s description of how completely the West had bypassed the Muslim world in scientific discovery and invention. And the brushes and pens of the West, he allowed, were no less ingenious than their swords. When Muslims finally awakened, he wrote, Christian Europe ruled over them with both sword and pen, making them foreigners in their own land. It was past time to contest the lurid history of Islam the West had written, Mawdudi insisted. It was time for a full awakening.

The historical failings of Muslims were inconsequential when they were weighed against the human cost of five centuries of Western domination. Yet such was the West’s skill at depicting the gory history of Islam that its own crimes had long been obscured. Muslims had been fooled into shame and apology, Mawdudi held, when it was the West that had been shameless. No part of this planet has been spared the bloodbaths resulting from their wars, he pointed out, wars fought not for God but for Mammon. The year he gave this speech, 1939, Western civilization was on the brink of another godless bloodbath, one that would be accompanied by inconceivable barbarism. Muslims would be fools no longer, Mawdudi pronounced.

But what form would wisdom take?

Gandhi, assessing the power of the empire he confronted, had turned to nonviolence not simply as a political tactic, but as an expression of deeply held beliefs. Mawdudi, dazzled by a storied Mughal past and a vision of the Prophet as righteous leader, turned to war. In
Al-Jihad fil Islam,
he sketches a brief history of how Western powers defined the laws of war. Until the seventeenth century there was no provision for amnesty; to surrender was to be killed. Until the twentieth century, no country had to even make a declaration of war before starting one. The First World War involved no higher principle than a fight over the spoils of weaker nations. International laws governing the conduct of war were broken at whim. What kind of civilization was this? Mawdudi asked. What kind of moral example was being upheld?

According to Mawdudi, Islam provided a far nobler model for war. Islam steered a middle course between the extreme pacifism of Buddhism and the wholesale slaughtering of the secular state. Drawing on the Qur’an, Mawdudi outlined the conditions in which military jihad was justified. It might be used to right wrongs against the Muslim community, to regain land or possessions that had been unjustly taken from them. But Sharia also dictated that wars be fought only for “the cause of Allah,” never to exact retribution, to prove oneself brave, for material gain, or to preserve national honor. Similarly, divine law dictated that no combatant should be killed in a surprise attack, set on fire, or tortured to death. Jihad was not permissible against a country with which the Muslim state has a signed treaty. Prisoners of war could never be killed, only enslaved. Following Sharia in the conduct of war was a moral and political obligation, he insisted. By confining his discussion of Islamic warfare to this ideal, Mawdudi neatly skirted the way wars had actually been fought by Muslim conquerors. Undoubtedly these wars were no less high-minded and no less lawless than any other. Sharia has proved as easy to set aside as the Geneva Conventions.

Yet the more deeply Mawdudi immersed himself in the holy laws governing war and peace, the more central a militant notion of jihad became to his vision of how Islam might be renewed. After sketching the precise circumstances in which jihad is justified, Mawdudi suddenly reverted to broad and careless brushstrokes. Jihad might also be used against infidels who “are preventing the truth of God from prevailing.” Others would follow his lead. In 1951, soon after he returned to Egypt after studies in America, Sayyid Qutb encountered Mawdudi’s treatise on jihad for the first time. To define jihad as primarily, in a military sense, defensive was to embrace intellectual and spiritual defeat, Qutb soon wrote.

After Pakistan became a state, Mawdudi would insist that he disdained “direct action.” He raised no secret militias; his swords and rented veils remained figures of speech. As the leader of an opposition party, targeted by Pakistan’s unelected and lawless leadership, he developed a deep respect for law and order. His political activism was carried out openly and peacefully. In November 1962 he issued the following statement:

After years of study and thinking, I have come to the firm conclusion that respect for Law is indispensable to the very existence of civilized [society] and if any movement destroys this respect [even] once, it becomes virtually impossible [for society] to restore it.… Similarly, underground work suffers from such inherent defects [that] make those who resort to it a great menace to the society.… Thus, whatever I have done I have always done openly within the boundaries of the law and existing Constitution, so much so that I have never violated even those laws which I have fought hard to oppose.… I have tried to change them through lawful and constitutional means.

Was there then a role for a militant jihad once a true Islamic republic has been achieved? In “Jihad in Islam,” Mawdudi wrote that once Pakistan had implemented the Islamic system he had in mind it would fall to the state to ensure that once a person becomes a Muslim, he follow Islamic laws to the letter. Force would be used only as a last resort. If such a person committed apostasy, the “sword of law” descended. The same would be true for “communities on the wrong path.” Mawdudi would later identify the Ahmadiyyas as one such community. Similarly, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan should seek to export its system to other countries around the world, to whatever extent possible. To achieve this, it was imperative that the Islamic state have complete access to and understanding of the most up-to-date military technology: tanks, airplanes, and so on.

This was both menacing and puzzling; like something written in code. Which was it, the sword or the law? In his last sermon at Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad related how Allah had explicitly cautioned him: “Remind them, for you are but an admonisher, / You are not at all a warden over them. / But who is adverse and disbelieves, / Allah will punish him with direst punishment. / Lo! unto Us is their return / And Ours is their reckoning.” (88:21–26). Yet Mawdudi, conflating Muhammad’s role as a military leader with that of fiery prophet, seemed to override this with another sleight of hand. In the third edition of
Al-Jihad fil Islam,
published the year Maryam arrived in Lahore, Mawdudi made his own translation of the last four lines: “But after the failure of admonishing, when the Caller to Islam took the sword in his hand, and said ‘Beware! All kinds of distinctions and blood and wealth are under my feet today.’”

In all the major translations of the Qur’an, the sword of punishment is Allah’s alone to wield. Yet here Mawdudi seemed to take the sword from Allah’s hand and pass it to the Prophet, using the euphemism “Caller to Islam.” Jihad as Mawdudi now conceived it not only mirrored imperial conquest but ended up looking very much like the Orientalist painting he had begun his 1939 speech trying to discredit. The leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, a man who had been declared a non-Muslim by Mawdudi, understood all too well what Mawdudi was calling for. He despaired upon reading the 1930 work on jihad: “I tremble after reading this writing.… These are not words but merciless stones.” It is possible that the Mawlana also came to reject this appropriation; in the English translation of
Towards Understanding the Qur’an,
the more traditional interpretation of the verse is quoted.

Al-Jihad fil Islam
had begun as a simple virus of an idea, a rereading of the genetic code of an entire faith that, several decades on, had mutated into something far more virulent and less susceptible to negotiation. We were all now witnesses to the worldwide contagion. Mawdudi’s proposed jihad would not stop once the Indian subcontinent had rid itself of its British overlord or when Pakistan became a proper Islamic republic. “Islam requires the earth,” he proclaimed in 1939, “not just a portion, but the whole planet.”

For many months I had struggled to summon the man who wrote these words from the frisson of alarm he inspired. Mawdudi was thirty-six and had only recently (and reluctantly) begun to sport a beard. He was the father of two young sons, newly arrived in Lahore after the holy community he founded in the northernmost reach of the Punjab had foundered. India was not yet in his past, Pakistan was eight years in the future, and the British Empire still ruled. Yet his utopian belief that Islam was destined to annihilate all tyrannical and evil systems in the world was undimmed.

There was, nonetheless, something familiar about Mawdudi’s worldview. The more I considered him, the more he grew to resemble a twentieth-century avatar of America’s own forefathers, those doleful and anxious seventeenth-century dissenters for whom it was an offense to smile. They too saw in the struggle with Satan at large in the world, an echo of the civil strife in their hearts. Permanent and total warfare was also their favorite metaphor. A self-imposed exile from worldliness, sacred readings, and ceaseless self-scrutiny were the means to excise the impurities of their hearts and minds. Those beyond redemption—adulterers, thieves, wayward women—might be whipped, be branded with a hot iron, have their ears cut off, or be hung from the scaffold in public executions. The Puritans saw the conquest of their own souls and those of their community sufficient territory for their rule. Once that wilderness was tamed, however, their descendants would discover that they, too, had a manifest destiny to exorcise the sins of the world.

In his later writings and speeches Mawdudi shifted to those moral and political “jihads” that would eventually bring about an Islamic renaissance and a new world order. To throw off intellectual slavery, to cast off infidel clothing, would require men of thought and vision. Yet the means to achieve this renaissance were as obscure and abstract as the means to embark on military jihad. Where were the poets? Where were the academies, the political institutions, the sources of patronage? What arts and sciences would be practiced? Despite Mawdudi’s lifelong efforts, despite the reading rooms and madrasas, the Jamaat-e-Islami never produced the required men of thought and vision.

A speech given in 1945 seemed to foreshadow this failure. Impatient with the repetition of vague exhortations and abstractions, sounding more and more like a voice in the wilderness, Mawdudi suddenly seemed to hit on an allegory that conveyed his urgency and impatience.

The world, he said, was like a train hurtling down a track. Passengers on this train are willing and unwilling hostages to the direction in which it is heading. Getting off the train is not an option, nor is returning to a time before trains. Those who would prefer to travel in the opposite direction might, at most, turn their face toward it. Yet this will not alter the train’s trajectory. They will find themselves getting further and further from their desired destination. If the direction of the world is to be changed, Mawdudi concluded, some believers in God should rise to the occasion and wrest control of the train.

And that, I now realized, is what happened. Those who rose to the occasion were not pious men of thought and vision, however certain their belief in God. In wresting control of the train, they did not first exhaust the tools of reason and debate. They did not even deliberate long over their holy texts to assure themselves that the means they chose had the blessings of Allah and Sharia. And while they had not yet succeeded in changing the world’s course, it was plain to see that Pakistan, with the fate of the subcontinent in its arsenals, was now heading in an ominous direction.

On my way to meet Haider Farooq Mawdudi, I had to stop numerous times to ask directions from harried-looking men carrying home sacks of vegetables. The car I traveled in, like my thoughts about the Mawlana Mawdudi, seemed to circle endlessly, turning down every tiny street in Icchra in search of 5-A Zaildar Park. After the death of his mother, Begum Mahmudah Mawdudi, Haider Farooq had taken over half of his father’s house. He now lived there with his wife and three children.

As the car turned left and right, backed up, reversed course, and followed one pointed finger after another, I wondered if the books of the Mawlana’s library might be preserved beneath their concrete blanket. Was the Qur’an that had opened his eyes still intact? Or had book beetles managed to tunnel their way in to ingest its contents? White ants would not distinguish the imported titles, the freighted Marx, the godless Voltaire, from indigenous fare. Western or Islamic, sacred or profane, it was all the same to them. Yet whatever titles survived would tell a far truer account of the complicated journey Mawdudi had taken through life than I would ever manage. I was certain of one thing. However roundabout the Mawlana’s journey, the path of those who followed him was as profound a betrayal of their God as it was of Mawdudi himself. While they took from him his unassailable sense of certainty, they drew on too few books, in too few libraries.

When the car finally turned into the drive, the fluorescent streetlights gave the half boarded up, half occupied house a desolate and funereal air. Despite the steady stream of income from the Saudis and its martyr factory in Mansoorah, the Jamaat-e-Islami had never relinquished its claim to half of Mawdudi’s house, the legacy of the man buried behind it, and the unreadable books inside it. As I stepped out of the car, a side door opened and a soft-spoken youth gestured for me to come in. Behind him a tall bearded man gave me a wordless and stone-faced greeting, indicating I should sit on a distant chair. This was Haider Farooq Mawdudi, the renegade.

Looking around the gloomy parlor, I wondered if someone had forgotten to turn on the lights. I had barely seated myself when Haider Farooq announced that his son, Ali, would translate what he had to say on the subject of Maryam Jameelah. But first he wanted to show me something.

Avoiding my eyes, he handed me a photocopy of a photograph of a mutton-chopped gentleman in a high starched collar, wide-lapeled waistcoat and suit, standing aside a table. His hand gripped the top edge of a book as if he planned to bang it down like a gavel. It was titled “Lord Macaulay’s Address to the British Parliament, 2 February 1835.” Beside the photograph were the words of the address: