The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (7 page)

Whatever Margaret’s role was to be, whatever merit her proximity to the Mawlana afforded her, it seemed purdah proved less of an obstacle than Urdu. Margaret could hear the low voices of the Mawlana’s “family” on the other side of the door, but she could not yet understand them. The typing continued.

Yet before I could begin to fathom the political and familial dynamics of the Mawdudi household, Margaret Marcus’s letters to her parents were suddenly all about a man named Hakim Rai Naimat Ali Khan and his wife, Khurshid Bibi. The return address was no longer the Mawlana’s house in Lahore but a place called Pattoki. A month into her stay, Peggy explained, she had received a kind letter from these friends of Mawdudi. Khan and his wife had invited her for a visit. After three days her childless hosts, whom she soon referred to familiarly as Baijan and Appa, asked her to stay on permanently as their daughter. Margaret gladly accepted, returning only briefly to Lahore to collect her clothes and books.

The lifting of the ban on the Jamaat had occasioned her move, she explained in her second letter from Pattoki, responding to her parents’ concerns and questions about these developments. The Mawlana had been overwhelmed by work, leaving him no time for his wife and family, much less for her. This had created a certain amount of tension in the house, which had its effect on everybody. In fact, it was the Mawlana who initiated the new arrangement.

So, with barely a backward glance, Peggy introduced a whole new cast of characters. Liberated from those Westernized and urbane Lahoris, and the close quarters of the Mawdudi household, she was in the thick of this new life in no time at all. Though Mawdudi remained her guardian and she continued to correspond with him, her letters to her parents now filled up with the minutiae of life in a small town an hour south of Lahore. For eight months the letters from Pattoki poured out in a bubbling current.

I let myself be carried along by these new developments, losing myself in Margaret’s slipstream account of a busy household in a small town in the Punjab half a century before. Then, in the second to last of those twenty-four letters, I was furiously trying to back away from the precipice in front of me. After an unexplained five-month lapse in correspondence, Peggy wrote from yet another address. The building on Jail Road in Lahore was known locally as Paagal Khanaah. Just under a year after her arrival in Pakistan, Maryam Jameelah had been committed to the madhouse.

Paagal Khanaah
Jail Road
Lahore
PAKISTAN

July 1963

The more I considered it, the more convinced I became that the Mawlana and his political cadres had taken against me. Baijan, I now saw, was in league with him, however reluctantly. He and Appa had been nothing but kind to me. But not one week before I received the Mawlana’s letter, I had noticed that Baijan had grown quiet and withdrawn. He and Appa had recently returned from Lahore, where they had gone to see a doctor about Appa’s migraines. Or so I had been led to believe.

Except for that single trip, whenever he wasn’t at the medical dispensary or at meals, Baijan spent hours on the roof, pacing, repeating his Dhikr and running his fingers through his prayer beads over and over again. Long after the electric and kerosene lights went out, I could hear Baijan pace above my head, alone with Allah. When I commented on Baijan’s distraction and absorption in his prayers, Appa suggested that perhaps Baijan was planning to become a Sufi. Now I could only conclude that after wrestling at length with his conscience, Baijan felt that he had no choice but to agree to Mawdudi’s plan. That was when I first became frightened.

I immediately took refuge with a village neighbor so I could collect my thoughts. I tried my best to keep a rein on my fears. This was very difficult. Not since my departure from New York had I known such unceasing torment. Of my many correspondents, however, there was one man I trusted implicitly. He was a journalist in Karachi named Shaheer Niazi. He alone had expressed a frank skepticism as to the saintliness of Mawlana Mawdudi.

I wrote to him of my deepest fears concerning Mawdudi’s intentions. As it seemed impossible for me to stay on in Pattoki under Mawdudi’s guardianship, I needed his advice. Could he come to Pattoki? I needed help figuring out what I had to do to extract myself from Mawdudi’s control. I would require new lodgings. I wanted nothing more than to remain in Pakistan and live simply and independently. He wrote back immediately. He would come as soon as he could get away.

But before Shaheer Niazi had time to arrange his journey, Mian Tufail Muhammad, the secretary general of Jamaat-e-Islami Party, arrived in his sparkling white shalwar kameez. He was accompanied by a pretty young Peace Corps volunteer named Janet Hanneman and a nondescript man from the U.S. consulate. Hanging back was yet another man, handsome and heavy-set, whom Mian Tufail Muhammad introduced mysteriously as Dr. Rashid, a personal friend.

After an awkward round of tea, I was told to pack and get ready to go. Filled with foreboding, I nonetheless acquiesced. I was entirely at their mercy. Of course, the entire village turned out to get a glimpse of the uncovered, slim, and attractive “Memsahib” Janet and that only added to the spectacle. After an hour or so, the car stopped. Even before I looked out the window, I had somehow known where I was being taken. I turned to Janet.

It’s the mental hospital, isn’t it? She nodded sadly.

We thought it was the best place, she said.

Once I had been admitted, I snuck a look at my case file. There I discovered a copy of the Mawlana’s March 12 letter to me and all my suspicions were confirmed. Dr. Rashid turned out to be the hospital director and answerable to the Jamaat-e-Islami.

I wondered if Shaheer Niazi would ever find me.

According to Margaret, the crisis had been set in motion when she received a letter from Mawlana Mawdudi. Dated March 12, 1963, nearly eight months after she had left his home, his letter was quite different from earlier ones, she told her parents, so distinct as to make her think Mawdudi had not written it. She studied it with a wary eye, each time testing it for a false note. Leaving aside an account of its content, she was suddenly struck by its tone. Mawdudi had never addressed her with such detachment before! He did not mince words, Peggy reported; it was a cold and ruthless letter. She couldn’t help but conclude that it was not addressed to her, but written so that the Mawlana might justify his subsequent actions to himself. The thought terrified her. After this preamble, Peggy then provided a bare summary of the letter’s contents.

Mawdudi began by saying that it had always been his intention to find her a suitable young man to marry. He had first thought her misbehavior was due to the frustration of her unmarried state. Given the most recent report from Pattoki, he now felt he didn’t want to risk the ruin of a good man’s life. The Mawlana then proceeded not only to outline her transgressions in Pattoki but to list those she had committed in Lahore as well.

Earlier, Peggy had assured her parents that it had been entirely her own decision to leave Mawdudi’s home. She now admitted this wasn’t the case. The Mawlana had sent her to Pattoki to be “rehabilitated,” and on the evidence of Baijan’s testimony he had evidently determined that her rehabilitation had failed.

If Herbert and Myra expected to learn the substance of the Mawlana’s complaints from their daughter, they would have been disappointed. Whatever Margaret stood accused of doing, her crimes appeared to be either so inconsequential or so damning that she couldn’t bear to repeat them when she came to account for how she happened to be writing from an insane asylum.

I assumed evidence in the archive or the library would settle such questions and determine the direction of the story. But the March 12 letter was not among the letters in the Maryam Jameelah Papers. All I had was Margaret’s account of events: an account that, she now admitted, hadn’t been entirely truthful. I was thus obliged to consider, too, whether Margaret Marcus’s panic over Mawdudi’s intentions was, like her ardent religious zeal, a symptom of some deeper and more private pathos.

Or was it that beneath the story that Margaret’s letters told, there had all along been another story, a shadow story in which Herbert and Myra’s deepest fears about their daughter and the man into whose care they sent her were realized? Was she truly in danger? Had she been dispatched to Pattoki because she had displeased Mawdudi in refusing to marry? Had party elders or a jealous wife turned him against her? Was the lifting of the ban on his party somehow related to this development?

Perhaps Maryam had tried to argue some point about Islam with him. Mawdudi had written that for those “self-deceived” people who imagined they could get him to change his views, the “rightful place to accommodate them and their like is in an ‘asylum.’” Mawdudi also believed that women, by their very nature, posed a clear danger to the Islamic state; he traced the collapse and destruction of every great civilization to the moral decay and weakening of the social fabric that occurred when women were granted “undue freedoms.” In his view women needed to be restrained and sequestered; men needed to be vigilant “lest [they] should, like Adam himself, be lured into a life of pleasure.”

Every narrative possibility turns on a question of character. In this case, the characters of the Mawlana Mawdudi and Maryam Jameelah. I could imagine any of these as possible scenarios, but before I could advance any further, there was one more question I was obliged to consider.

Which one did I secretly want to be true?

I had been in the city that morning.

In the days that followed I waited with a friend for the phone to ring. Our children were in and out of each other’s houses more than usual. We shared meals when we could and I smoked cigarettes for the first time in years. Though we recognized the irrevocability of what had happened, I echoed her quiet certainty that there would be a phone call. But little by little the outlines of the event became sharper, and the day finally came when we could sum it all up in a sentence. The husband this woman had left behind on the 88th floor had not followed her out and would never.

I listened to the explanation she provided her children. They had asked: Why hadn’t their father left with her? How had she been spared? Why was he dead?

He never imagined the towers would collapse, she replied. He stayed behind to help others find a way down.

It never occurred to me that the explanation could be that simple.

But after the children were put to bed and she was lying alone in her room trying to sleep, how did she begin to account for what had happened? Did she ever think to ask herself the larger questions? Why this? Who were these men? In all the time we spent together I could never bring myself to raise these questions. I was in awe of her quiet composure, perhaps, or fearful of unsettling it. So when I turned, alone, to thinking about the hatred that occasioned the attacks, I didn’t doubt it was real and it was frightening but it was hard, at first, to catch hold of. The act itself was so far outside what I knew that, like many others in the city, I couldn’t bear to contemplate it for long. That was not a mark of how much we were suffering, I felt certain, but of how much suffering history had spared us.

The city’s heart was left open in a way that left everyone dazed. In the early weeks I was swept up in an atmosphere that mixed dread and exaltation. It was months before I could bring myself to leave the city limits. How much longer would it take to circumnavigate the question of what had happened and why, to take its complete measure? Ten years? Twenty? The meanings already being worked out of the event from Washington were incomprehensible and, I foolishly imagined, beside the point.

But the details kept coming. Once I began to hear about the men in the planes, I couldn’t stop imagining them waiting their turn at the ticket counter, fingering their box cutters and their awful purpose. The unfolding accounts of the horror on the planes and inside the buildings, the calm expressions of love that poured into phones and message machines, were unbearable to fathom. At a certain point there was no disguising my revulsion.

The hatred when it came seemed as if it had always been there. I turned it over and over, rattled but also subtly empowered by the clarity of it. Yet, like the dread that preceded the hatred, this also subsided. Only after I stumbled across the Jameelah archive did the questions that haunted me during those days begin to flare up once again. At a certain point I realized that this was something I could do. I would find better answers than the hasty ones we managed to put together in those days. I would find answers more lasting than the easy ones provided for us.

By then, of course, years had passed. By then the American proxy wars on the Muslim world Maryam Jameelah had written about had become cataclysmic and genuine, no more so than in the aftermath of the attacks. My country now became directly and irretrievably responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Muslims. That is how, I learned, our new enemies imagined we thought of them. Not by their ethnicities or nationalities or family names, but by their religious beliefs. And this, a war on Muslims, had been our plan all along, they insisted, conveniently refusing to credit those behind the attacks. And yet were they entirely wrong? There was now reason to wonder. Had Maryam grasped something about America that I had missed? Had Mawdudi? As the years wore on, their war dead made up in numbers what they lacked in novelty, immediate impact, and intimate proximity. Yet these escalating figures—20,000, 50,000, 100,000, and more—rendered in simple, disposable newsprint, never seemed to register in quite the same way as the Technicolor ones we had suffered.

As with the attacks on the city, however, questions touching on the guilt or innocence of the dead were largely beside the point. Either they were all innocent and we were all guilty or
we
were all innocent and
they
were all guilty. We shared our enemies’ faith in the power of violent spectacle, in shock and awe. In kidnappings and secret prisons. Did we take after them, or did they take after us? A few voices entertained lingering doubts over our leaders’ rationale for the war; most seemed readily appeased by the bland promises of liberation from tyranny. I imagined my growing sense of shame and alarm equaled that felt by those families who, in the wake of the attacks, had sat quiet and thunderstruck in their homes, hoping against hope that their coreligionists had not been behind them.