The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (3 page)

As I went about these tasks, I discovered in myself a sense of purpose. I was resourceful, efficient. For the first time, I realized how long I had been stuck in this netherworld between childhood and adulthood, alone in my room with my books, practically friendless, unhappy and frustrated. And then Mawlana Mawdudi opened a door. He showed me how I might escape the awful destiny that awaited me if I remained in America. Approaching my twenty-eighth year, I had the sense that his invitation had arrived not a moment too soon. I was grateful. I am still grateful.

That is how I now find myself, finishing this letter to you while sitting on a narrow bed across from a wall of thousands of books, just outside the study of Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi.

Like many children, I had once been haunted by big questions. Who created us? What is it to be good? Is there life after death? I took on the question of how to live my life and what to believe in dutifully, like a somber homework assignment. In church, I knelt at the communion rail to contemplate the man hanging immobile before me, forlorn and defeated yet also impossibly beautiful.

As I grew older the big questions receded; my mind would wander off before I could get anywhere near them. In my work I tended to stick with smaller questions and look for larger meanings in the answers I found. Of Margaret Marcus’s life I might have asked: How did she come to reject America and all it stood for? Did she ever regret her decision to leave? Of the man who invited her to live in Pakistan as his daughter, I might have wondered: Who was he and where did he come from? What did he believe and what did he see in Margaret Marcus? Contemplating Marcus’s letters and writings, I wondered if littler questions were the wrong ones, or equally unanswerable. Whether only the big metaphysical questions were worth asking. Margaret Marcus struck me as the sort of person who wouldn’t settle for less. I found something to admire in that and wondered how well the answers she found served her.

Margaret’s life, too, went straight to the heart of the heated debate over the notion of a divide between Islam and the West. Many Western scholars and diplomats, thoughtful editorial writers, and old-fashioned Orientalists, even a few secular-minded Muslim writers, are convinced this divide is real and irreconcilable. “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards,” one influential scholar insists. “The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.” Maryam Jameelah echoed these convictions from the opposite shore. For Margaret and Maryam, it was always the West that persisted in considering itself the superior civilization, with inevitably tragic results. Far from seeing her own life as a bridge between America and the Muslim world, Maryam believed that Western civilization and Islamic civilization were implacably opposed: “any compromise with the former,” she writes, “equaled defeat of the latter.”

In works spanning three decades Maryam deconstructed and denounced the work of those Orientalists and theologians trying to find common ground between the values of the God-centered Muslim universe and those of the secular and scientific West. She encouraged readers of her books to have nothing to do with them: “This kind of sophistry fails to strike the slightest response in me,” she writes primly. “After Copernicus, the western astronomer saw man as a puny speck on a tiny planet revolving around a tenth-rate star, drifting aimlessly in a cosmic ocean… his creation perhaps only an accident or a mistake.” There was something slightly enviable in Maryam Jameelah’s clarity of purpose, in her insistence on meaning over meaninglessness, on a divinely directed life over aimless drifting, on big questions over small ones.

However, it still struck me that, in the effort to claim the superior culture or civilization, both sides traded in caricatures and insights of varying subtlety. Both seemed to use or abuse history, particularly histories of violence and cruelty, to further their agendas. Both sides wrote from Olympian heights of authority and scholarly erudition. And, inevitably, both shed tears over the treatment of women. Crocodile tears, Maryam Jameelah sniffed. Confronted by the clashing assumptions of the morning newspaper and the message of Maryam’s books I often felt that the impasse between “Islam” and “the West” was truly unbridgeable. Confused by the warring abstractions, seduced by one view at one moment only to betray it in favor of its opposite the next, I was wary of stepping between them.

My attitude toward Maryam Jameelah was, initially at least, curious but distant.

5-A Zaildar Park
Icchra
Lahore
PAKISTAN

Mid-July 1962

After a few anxious days, I am now completely at home in the Mawdudi household. Language is my principal difficulty. Everyone seems more interested in practicing English than in teaching me Urdu. I feel that Humaira and Asma, not to mention the numerous neighborhood ladies who drop by to meet me, are crushed to see me dressed in the shalwar kameez provided me by the Karachi ladies I met upon my arrival in Pakistan. They were doubtless expecting a bobbed and blond memsahib with white skin and blue eyes, dressed in a short skirt. Instead, with my black hair and Semitic coloring, I really don’t look that much different from them. Used to hearing precise and British-inflected English, they all find my American accent impossible to follow. As for Lahore, unlike the bit of Karachi I saw in my few days there, it has lovely tree-lined streets. Beyond that, I thought very little of it, as I went immediately from the airport to purdah.

The house itself is somewhat dingy and primitive, at least by the materialist standards of Americans, but is well built of stone and cement. A Westinghouse fridge sits in the dining room but the two bathrooms consist of nothing more than chamber pots and a cold-water shower with an unreliable pump. As there are no closets, no one knew what to do with my hangers. There aren’t even chests of drawers. Everyone merely folds clothes and puts them away on shelves. It is far too hot for my cotton stockings and the bulky black sweaters I got at Gimbels bargain basement but they will be useful in winter as there is no such thing as central heating. For the midday nap everyone, with the exception of the Mawlana, takes to the largest room in the house, settling down on Indian bedspreads and pillows. At night we sleep in rope beds and on the hottest nights the servants carry these beds to the roof. To escape the mosquitoes, we all pull our covers over our heads, giving the roof the appearance of being littered with corpses.

At first I shared a room with Humaira but given the strain of my journey, the Mawlana decided I could have a room to myself. Not a bedroom, because there wasn’t one to spare, but the corridor adjoining his study. Here floor-to-ceiling bookshelves contain Mawdudi’s vast library of English, Arabic, Persian, and Urdu titles. There is also a lower shelf filled with magazines from all over the world. With a space cleared for my own books and a little wooden table for my typewriter, I have my own office.

I would never have guessed that Humaira and Asma were only two of the Mawlana’s children since he hadn’t mentioned the other
seven
in his letters. Umar Farooq is his oldest son and a student of Arabic. Next is twenty-five-year-old Ahmad Farooq, who is on summer leave from a medical college in Karachi. Both are so deeply immersed in their studies that neither pays me the least attention. Indeed, they behave as if I didn’t exist. Begum Mawdudi tells me that this is because Islam forbids young men to talk to strange women.
*
The entire household treats them, as the eldest sons, with great respect.

Twenty-three-year-old Humaira is hard at work studying for her finals. We are all obliged to be deadly quiet. Though the exam is eight months away, she reads
Richard III
and
The Canterbury Tales
in Old English for at least fifteen hours a day. She is shocked at my indifference to English literature. When she isn’t reading the classics, she rereads
Gone with the Wind.
She is so besotted with that novel that the other night she dreamed she was Scarlett O’Hara! When I asked her about her appreciation of the great Urdu poets Iqbal and Ghalib, she did not disguise her scorn. She said their work was “sentimental.” Asma, barely nineteen, is already embarked upon a master’s degree in economics. Though both girls are perfectly polite and obedient, with exceptionally refined manners, I was astonished that the Mawlana had agreed to such Western courses of study. He explained to me that in Pakistan, until one mastered Western subjects, a person wasn’t considered truly educated.

After Asma and Humaira comes Muhammad Farooq, in his last year of high school, and then my favorite, fifteen-year-old Haider Farooq. I think of all the children, the sweetness of this boy sets him apart. Haider, like many boys his age, has a soft spot for animals and promises to take me to the Lahore zoo. For more than a week, he nursed a baby pigeon in his room. His mother told me he had once brought a stray dog into the house, to his father’s absolute fury. Muslims consider dogs unclean. On my arrival, Haider presented me with a silly ring with imitation diamonds, which I wore until all the stones fell out. Even though he speaks little English he still manages to make me laugh, relieving me of some of my loneliness.

Finally, there is ten-year-old Khalid and the family favorite, six-year-old Ayesha. As the “baby,” she is spoiled, bright, and mischievous. When she refuses to eat, the Mawlana takes her on his lap and feeds her like a baby bird. I am nothing to her but the butt of her jokes; she loves nothing better than to mimic my English. The household staff includes a cook and a twelve-year-old servant boy from rural Punjab named Hidris. No one seems to think it strange he isn’t in school. To round it off, friends and relations of the Mawlana and the Begum arrive in a steady stream, sometimes for tea and sometimes for months at a time.

Begum Mawdudi is forty years old but looks nearly fifty. She also gives lectures on the Qur’an and the Hadith at the homes of various women in the neighborhood. I always accompany her and sit on the floor with the rest of the women and their babies. I’m only sorry I can’t understand what she is saying, so I content myself with observing all very closely. Naturally, everyone in Begum Mawdudi’s social circle and immediate family has been eager to meet me. My early weeks in Lahore have been filled with tea parties. It won’t surprise you to hear that even in Pakistan where there is not a cocktail to be seen, I have no patience for such occasions.

All but one of the Begum’s younger brothers and sisters (she is the eldest of ten) live in Lahore and they are all far wealthier than we are. I couldn’t help but contrast these teas with the attitude of my hosts during my brief stopover in Karachi. They wanted nothing to do with the Peace Corps. They knew that if they accepted “technical assistance” from the Americans, vulgar Hollywood films and books were sure to follow, with the aim of turning Muslim youths away from Islam. My arrival in Lahore coincided with Jackie Kennedy’s visit with her foolish sister Princess Radziwill. Their exploits and shameless clothes were an inevitable topic of teatime conversation. Until I learn Urdu I am, alas, at the mercy of the English-speaking and Westernized upper crust of Pakistani society.

I did visit one household where I found the true Islamic atmosphere I had feared was lost forever (apart from our own, of course). This was the home of a man named Mohammad Yusuf Khan, a longtime worker for the Mawlana’s Jamaat-e-Islami party. The household includes his wife and children, his married and unmarried brothers and sisters and their small children, his mother, and various elderly aunts. While the young women looked quite vibrant and beautiful, the babies seemed malnourished. They were unnaturally still, with large unblinking black eyes, just like my paintings of poor starving Arabs you so disliked.

There must have been more than thirty people living there and though the family was obviously poor, the women of the household put out a most showy tea with fine china and white tablecloths in honor of my visit. I couldn’t help but calculate what such a spread must have cost them and how hungry they would be in the days to come. Nonetheless, they persisted in offering me cake after cake, biscuit after biscuit, sweet after sweet. All I could do was smile and say “asalaam aleikum” while they repeated over and over “a hundred times welcome.” I noticed a lone youth on a charpoy in the corner; he was nothing but skin and bones. Begum Mawdudi told me he was not right in the head and had been that way since he was a baby. His sisters looked after him lovingly, talking to him softly as we said our good-byes. That image stayed with me.

At dinner that night the Mawlana told me that Mohammad Yusuf Khan was an upright man. In India his family had been wealthy landowners but in 1947, when the Indian subcontinent was divided, they were forced to flee Hindu India. When they arrived here in Pakistan, honest people like him found nothing, while the crafty and the cunning made off with everything.

In her first book Maryam Jameelah argued that Western civilization had been on the wrong track pretty much from its beginnings in Greek philosophy but sealed its fate with the French Enlightenment. Subsequent books focused their critique on contemporary Western values and culture: “The destruction of the natural environment by modern technology for the short-sighted profit of the affluent countries of the West, threatens to destroy mankind, if not all life on earth.” For so-called “primitive” peoples, “the impact of modernization is inseparable from their degradation and often their extinction.” Nor had the more developed cultures of the formerly colonized been spared. She was a fierce critic of American foreign policy, its unfettered support of Israel, its meddling in the affairs of Muslim countries, and its headlong and blind belief in the notion of “progress.” American oil companies had insinuated themselves into the very heartland of Islam, she held, breeding greed and corruption where there once had been a proud desert culture. For Muslim nations governed by a secular Westernized elite, “our political sovereignty is more nominal than real and the Western powers… are determined to keep it that way.”