The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (24 page)

More than the revolution in Iran, this war would become the crucible that would transform the ideological legacy of Maryam Jameelah and Abul Ala Mawdudi. Within weeks of the Soviet invasion, Osama bin Laden made his first visit to Pakistan, ferrying money for the Jamaat from the Saudis. It was not long before CIA money and donated weaponry began pouring into Pakistan. An Afghan branch of the Jamaat-e-Islami had sparked the insurgency that prompted the invasion, but it was American money that funded the full-fledged war that followed.

“Freedom fighters” from Egypt, Iraq, China, Chechnya, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Turkmenistan, and
India arrived to bring down the “evil empire.” The American fight against the godless communists had finally been reframed as Sharia-sanctioned jihad. As Pakistan now became the principal front in the cold war, great numbers of Jamaatis joined the Pakistani intelligence service. In the 1980s and 1990s the Jamaat-e-Islami would become the mother of all jihadi organizations.

“We are not bigots or fanatics,” Maryam wrote in her 1969
Manifesto of the Islamic Movement.
“We make our case for Islam on the basis of calm and logical reason.” Yet by 1979 Maryam, too, had reached the end of calm and logical reason. As the Afghan war heated up, Maryam began to relish the talk of jihad. With the death of Mawdudi, perhaps she hoped to claim the title of ideological heir. In cheap, simply written pamphlets devoured by restless teenagers in Kashmir, Islamabad, Tehran, and Brooklyn, Maryam Jameelah began writing accounts of famed mujahidin. Whether their long-ago battles were against British or French imperialists, Zionists or Christian crusaders, each of these mujahidin was shown to be a true Muslim of sterling and gallant character; a “freedom fighter” who had embraced violent jihad as the “highest form of worship.”

“Make up your mind to participate in jihad,” Maryam quoted the eighteenth-century jihadist Sayyid Ahmad as saying, as he brandished his carbine and matchlock. “Learn the use of weapons for that purpose.… Mystical exercises can never excel the virtues of fighting in the way of Allah. Did not our own Prophet take up arms against the infidels to spread the light of Truth?” “Since we are all destined to die anyhow, is it not better to die as a
Shahid
or martyr… at the peak of one’s mental and physical powers and usefulness to society?… We must… launch an offensive and provide from the Quran and the Sunnah the only remedies that can save mankind from destruction and collective suicide.” Attempts to reconcile Islam with the man-made philosophies of Voltaire, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and the French existentialists would mean the destruction of the human race: “Everything they stand for [is] EVIL!”

William James wrote that in “the possibility of violent death [lies] the soul of all romance.” Among those members of the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami who signed up for the Afghan jihad were the two sons of Maryam Jameelah.

I resolved that my last interview with Maryam would be different. As soon as I sat down, I asked her if she had ever considered how her denunciation of Westernized Muslims and Americans might have inspired the extremists of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Maryam immediately became agitated, either because she had already worried herself over this question or because she hadn’t expected me to ask it. She began to rock.

“I have never preached violence,” she said, punctuating her insistence with a high-pitched “oooo, no, no, oooo, no, no.” “I wrote only on a
philosophical
plane,” she said, with emphasis. “I never incited hatred of Westerners as
individuals,
” she said. She wrote admiringly only of those mujahidin and freedom fighters who fought against foreign domination one or two centuries ago,
never
al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

When I pointed out that these distinctions might be lost on some, Maryam was insistent, stubborn. “I never wrote with any of that in mind,” she said. “I feel no responsibility.” Besides, she added, in the sixties and seventies, when she was publishing, “extremism was not evident.”

But violent extremism was evident by then in Egypt, I pointed out. Maryam had taken Wilfred Cantwell Smith to task for unjustly maligning the Muslim Brotherhood. In one essay she quoted a long passage from his
Islam in Modern History,
only to discount it. Smith had written:

All the discontent of men who find the modern world too much for them can in movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood find action and a satisfaction.… The burning of Cairo, the assassination of prime ministers, the intimidation of Christians, the vehemence and hatred in their literature—all of this is to be understood in terms of a people who have lost their way, whose heritage has proven unequal to modernity, whose leaders have been dishonest, whose ideals have failed. In this aspect, the new Islamic upsurge is a force not to solve problems but to intoxicate those who can no longer abide the failure to solve them.

Pure slander, Maryam insisted. The Muslim brothers weren’t illiterate rabble-rousers; they were well-educated and responsible youth from modern colleges and universities. There was “hardly any truth” in this, she wrote then, as if she couldn’t quite come up with a blanket absolution.

I asked again. How could Maryam be sure her writings hadn’t played a role in the radicalization of Muslim youth?

“I can’t be so sure. I don’t know every reader of my books. All I can say is that it was never in my mind. It was never my intention.”

Maryam paused and then perked up. Her books were never cited in jihadist publications! And what of her mentors—Sayyid Qutb? Mawlana Mawdudi? Were they responsible or did they, too, only write on a “philosophical plane”?

“These are the writers they cite.”

“You created a very convincing picture of the West as an evil place.”

Maryam Jameelah didn’t hesitate: “I still feel that it is.”

“And 9/11? Was it justified?”

“I think it was horrible. I never wrote anything in favor of that sort of thing. And you know the Muslims who were charged with 9/11 were not good Muslims. Before they boarded the plane they were drinking and gambling…”

I thought that was squirrelly and cut her off. “By that measure, bin Laden is a good Muslim.” Maryam neatly changed tack.

“I don’t think anything justifies 9/11. But if the building had been empty, if nobody had been in the World Trade Center at the time of the bombing
[sic]
, it might have been justified. It couldn’t have been empty, but if it
were
empty, its destruction would have been justified as a symbol of American finance. Because it was the center of Western civilization and so was the Pentagon.”

The destruction would have been justified because it was the center of Western civilization. Was this what I had come to Pakistan to hear?

“But it was horrible because of the many Muslims who were killed in the Trade Center; there were many Muslims working in the Trade Center.”

I stopped listening. What began as childish tantrums had, over time, become rages. Maryam’s rages, in turn, had grown grandiose until she believed the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were appropriate targets for spiritual practice, provided no Muslims were killed.

As I was leaving, I thanked Maryam’s stepdaughter-in-law for the tea and samosas she had brought up to the room. Her smile slowed my eagerness to flee: I began to feel myself again. Though she spoke no English, I was suddenly thanking her effusively. It wasn’t until I got into the car that I realized how abruptly I had left Maryam’s room. I’m not sure I said good-bye.

One week later Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, shattering the fragile atmosphere of hope I had found on my arrival in Pakistan. I was in India when I heard the news. I watched the civil-rights lawyer who had given me Haider Farooq’s telephone number weep like a child on television. At the sight of this weeping woman, the nuances of the argument between Islam and the West over modernity, the details of the dueling narratives of Margaret Marcus and Maryam Jameelah, seemed entirely beside the point.

The war had its own life now.

By the time I left Lahore, Haider Farooq and I had reached a kind of truce. I had made him laugh. He told me his father was a misguided man, but a good father. Yet he refused to produce Maryam’s original letters. I enlisted intermediaries to beseech him, but to no avail. He held no grudges, he insisted, in case such a thought might have occurred to me. If Maryam disavowed writing them he might change his mind. “Let her deny it,” he said.

Did it really matter, I wondered, if Maryam exaggerated the peril she would be in if she remained in America? Wasn’t lifelong commitment a sufficient calamity? In the meantime, it was enough to have glimpsed the curious boy within the embattled and conflicted son of Mawlana Mawdudi. This, too, was Mawdudi’s patrimony.

I didn’t return to the reading room for a long time. When I finally went back to the library, I took a closer look at the Mawdudi correspondence to see if I could determine whether letters were missing. Unlike the correspondence with her parents, which consisted entirely of Margaret’s letters, both sides were on deposit. On Margaret’s side, there were a number of postmarked aerograms to Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi. It briefly crossed my mind that Maryam had snuck into Mawdudi’s study and pinched them, but it was more likely that Mawdudi had returned the ones he could find to Mohammad Yusuf Khan. By the time the correspondence was published, Mawdudi might have felt responsible for the marriage and Maryam’s upkeep. He would have known that a book of her correspondence with him would sell well.

Apart from a few aerograms, however, I now saw that the majority of Maryam’s letters to Mawdudi were retyped and paginated like setting copy, either because she didn’t have the originals or because she had decided to rewrite them for publication. I hadn’t noticed any of this earlier. It would be impossible, I realized, to know when these letters were written or how much they had been altered.

The Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi’s side of the correspondence was bound separately and prefaced by a cover note describing the letters as “unexpurgated.” This volume included obviously authentic letters signed in his hand, on his personal stationery. It even included his letters in Urdu, which his secretary had translated. But here and there were letters that seemed questionable. These were typed on generic Jamaat-e-Islami office stationery, and Mawdudi’s printed signature was pasted in. The glue was brown with age.

I compared both the authentic and questionable letters with their published counterparts in
The Correspondence of Maulana Mawdudi and Maryam Jameelah.
I found that Mawdudi’s letters to Margaret Marcus as published were clearly edited to obscure the fact that a number of her letters to him were missing. I also caught a few details that Maryam sought to clean up. In one letter Mawdudi cautioned Margaret Marcus that she could not really do justice to the new book she proposed to write without proficiency in Urdu, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. This was cut. In another, Mawdudi pointed out that the Muslim name she had chosen—Jameel—was a man’s name. Maryam retroactively corrected it. I felt as if the entire archive had been rendered suspect. I opened another gray box.

When I had first read the letters collected in the 1989 book
Quest for the Truth: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America, 1945–1962: The Story of One Western Convert,
I had been puzzled by a few things. First, there were no accompanying manuscript letters in the archive. Second, Maryam referred to the book as a memoir. A letter to Betty oddly dated November 31, 1949, supposedly written when Peggy was fifteen, had also caught my eye. This was the same letter in which she described Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech glorifying the new state of Israel at Mamaroneck High School the previous evening.

I did a search in the back issues of the local paper and discovered that Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech wasn’t until the following February. The letter hadn’t been written on the date indicated. So when was it written? Peggy described Roosevelt’s speech as all about the triumph of the state of Israel, an issue on which she was known to be sympathetic. The
Larchmont Times
described the Roosevelt speech as being about the drafting of the Human Rights Proclamation.

And then there was the letter written to Betty from Hudson River State Hospital. On my third or fourth reading I finally noticed that Peggy had begun the letter by describing the stratagem she had taken to mail it: “I had to sneak it out directly to the staff post office box; luckily the clerk didn’t suspect I was an inmate.”

Had Maryam written all these letters in Pakistan? Did that explain why she had indulged in a meticulous evocation of her childhood: the games of make-believe, the multicourse holiday
meals, the Christmas concerts, beautiful dolls and memorable
books? There had always been something odd about them, as if
she had set out to evoke a lost and more innocent world, like Mohammad Yusuf Khan’s tales of Jullundur. Yet for every pleasant memory, there was an ugly one; the cruel bunkmates at camp, indifferent psychologists, bullying teachers, impatient job placement administrators, and enraged Zionists. In the initial twenty-four letters from Pakistan, Maryam had often responded to the family news related in her parents’ letters and fretted about those that had gone astray. The American letters acknowledged no family news and expressed no such concerns, I finally realized, because they had never been sent.

I now saw that Maryam had composed these letters as missives to posterity, a Cinderella backstory plotted to foreshadow how her embrace of Islam had rescued her from America. The evils of Western civilization amounted to no more than a stage drop for her private travails. It was as if Peggy never ceased mining the material of her own life to establish certain proof that Islam was the answer to all the riddles it posed.

Before Myra left on her round-the-world cruise, she had sent her daughter’s twenty-four letters to Mr. Parr at the New York Public Library, most likely on Peggy’s instructions. There they would sit until I came along to unearth them, childishly eager to know what happened next and how it all turned out. I had been a willing party to Margaret’s elaborate game of dress-up. By the time these letters made their way to the manuscript vault, Maryam had the consolation that the story of her journey to Pakistan from America, despite its unexpected detour to the madhouse, had the storybook ending she’d dreamed of. But what kind of story did I have?