The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (8 page)

I saw, too, how long-standing legal protections ordinary Americans considered their due might simply disappear. Surveillance could become a free-for-all. Language, too, had become a game; just how far could the leaders we heard from in those days take words from their meanings? The Patriot Act? Homeland Security? Total Information Awareness? In this new season every mention of the word
terror
had the power to make cowards or dupes or bigots of reasonable people. The word
freedom
summoned righteous legions at home while elsewhere cynicism and rage proliferated. Maryam’s question echoed in my head: Suppose the American government decided to abandon its Constitution and Bill of Rights and put in their place a police state so as to better defend itself. Would not sovereignty be meaningless after we lost our very
raison d’être?
I began to think that something essential in the entire project of my country had come undone.

I couldn’t help but ask, how much had my trust in America been a cipher for a deeper and more lasting set of beliefs? How much of what I considered right and wrong was predicated on being a citizen of a well-armed country? I was exiled to a state of devastation and doubt. This was my new nationality.

The discovery of the archive had become the crooked key to understanding how all this had come about. Here there would be an explanation. Who were these nineteen men? Who were we? Who was their God? Who was ours? It hadn’t escaped my notice that Maryam’s letters also gave me the chance to peer in the window of the house of the aging leader who first issued the call for global jihad. Did Margaret live to see the attacks? What did she make of them? Did she watch the city she had once known so well fall to pieces? Had she changed her mind about the evils of the West or did she remain resolute? Would she defend the indefensible? What could she tell me?

“There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity,” Susan Sontag once wrote. “The truths we respect are those born of affliction.” It wasn’t that I hadn’t questioned Maryam’s reason. Rather, I looked to her for the outsider’s crucial insight, a blind seer’s clarifying truth. I found in her story a secret history that would challenge those we had been telling ourselves. The wars we were selling.

I couldn’t shake the sense, too, that the new wars were being waged by the same flinty-eyed men whose aggressive intentions, a scant generation before, were focused elsewhere. “America is allegedly determined to bestow upon Viet Nam a truly free democratic society,” Maryam Jameelah wrote in 1969. “But while buckets of crocodile tears are shed by officials in Washington over Viet Nam’s backwardness and miserable living standards, four million are slain.” These same men had watched that war unfold from lowly government desks and decades later thought they could do better. They wanted a different ending and would stop at nothing to get it. Where others were inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, the shock of this fact kept me nailed squarely in place. That war, too, was painted as a war between freedom and tyranny. “They hate our freedom,” the speechwriters now wrote, picking up where the earlier litanies had left off.

Like the young Margaret, I began to feel maladjusted, to harbor grudges. I kept a blacklist of those who had written in measured, manly tones about the unpleasant necessity, the sober duty, of choosing this war. Not the war against those who had attacked us, but a fatter, easier, and far more profitable target: conveniently Muslim, as if that were a bonus. In those long years I veered toward shrillness, oppressed by people talking about children and real estate. Friends became strangers. And when conversation turned to the war (and only then, it seemed, because it was going so badly), the general tone was either complacent or meekly despairing. Every day I raked the news for a story that would open everyone’s eyes. But even the most outrageous accounts of torture and mendacity were fleeting distractions. Something more final was required. An unnamed thought lodged inside me like a swallowed curse, a thought heretical and traitorous. By then my widowed friend had left for a new neighborhood; her children grew older in different schools. I lost track of her.

Once in a while I would stop spinning and remember I wasn’t always like this. But still I wanted to know: By what mechanism did America and the world’s Muslims suddenly become each other’s evil caricature? Metaphor? Narrative? Racist propaganda? In moments of clarity, it seemed to me that whichever side of this war one was on had nothing to do with who believed in divine revelation or who had the most righteous cause. Nor did it have to do with who was Muslim and who was Jewish or Christian. Rather, it seemed simply that neither side really wanted this train to stop, with the possible exception of those families who were actually on board. And no one knew in what direction it was headed. This was the drill on both sides: let the drama play out, then comm3emorate the heroes and the martyrs.

It was really a very simple story, I thought bitterly, as I returned with relief to the letters in the marble library. By then I knew that the answers to my questions weren’t all to be found there. By then I knew I would go to Lahore.

*
Ulema
or
ulama
refers to a religious scholar of Islam.

CHAPTER 3

Doubt

Accounts of the Prophet Muhammad began to be recorded during his lifetime, but the first printed collection of his words and deeds (the Sunnah) did not appear until well after his death. Each of the biographical scraps in these collections was known as a hadith (ahadith, plural). Where God’s emissary, the angel Gabriel, was believed to have dictated the Qur’an to the Prophet, ahadith were culled from the Prophet’s family and early followers. Only those who shared his day-to-day existence, who were privy to his most intimate reflections, were sanctified. Khadijah, the Prophet’s first wife and first convert, their daughter Fatimah, and his third wife, Aishah, were all considered Companions. They were all trusted sources for compilations of the Hadith.

But unlike the Qur’an, with its unchanging 114 suras, ahadith proliferated wildly after the death of Muhammad. As the Prophet’s life receded into the distance, the circle of those who claimed to have known him widened. Many embroidered a slight acquaintance or a chance meeting to claim the status of Companion. Others fantasized a nonexistent friendship into an intimate one, plying stories of the Prophet to feed the hunger of his followers for guidance in the long years without him. The decision to commit the ahadith to print was an effort to curtail these inventions and establish a canon. Yet from the start doubts trailed ahadith like the tail of a kite.

In Sunni Islam, there are six major compilations of the Prophet’s sayings and doings. Each reflects the temperament of the compiler and the methodology used to judge which sayings out of hundreds of thousands were authentic and trustworthy, and which were weak or entirely made up. To settle competing versions, the science of Hadith study—
ulam al-hadith
—arose. To evaluate a specific hadith, each compiler focused not only on the human links in the chain of transmission, called
sanad,
but also on the precise wordings of their texts, or
matn.

The finest, most sensitive minds applied themselves to the arduous task of authentication. Which Companion first recounted this hadith and to which Successor? Apocryphal anecdotes needed to be identified. Biographical methods were employed to weigh the character of the witness who first proffered testimony. In Arabic this was called
ilm al-rijal.
Where a teacher in the line of transmission passed along the Prophet’s words to various pupils, his credibility was enhanced. Some of the less punctilious compilers invented entirely new Companions for the Prophet; one trespasser was snuck in as a servant in the Prophet’s household. Yet even the early ahadith that were flagged as fiction remained part of the canon, providing insight into how judgments of authenticity were determined.

The process of ahadith winnowing by these early scholars seemed an effort to find a way back to the clarity and compassion Muhammad had first bequeathed to them. Through this exacting discipline they would recapture the sense of certainty about how Allah expected them to conduct their lives. Whatever the truth or falsehood of any particular anecdote, each wisp of testimony gave evidence of their community’s strenuous effort to inhabit the Prophet’s thinking and, by extension, the mind of God. From this effort would arise the beginnings of Islamic jurisprudence, wherein civil laws were either extrapolated from the judgments implied by the Prophet’s actions or arose directly from his statements.

One of the earliest compilations of ahadith came out of Medina, the city where the Prophet and his early followers took shelter from persecution. This was a work called
al-Muwatta.
Compiled over four decades by Imam Malik, its authenticity was universally agreed upon as second only to that of the Qur’an. One of his ahadith read: “You people bring disputes to me,” the Prophet said, “but it may be that some of you are able to put your case better than others. I have to decide on evidence that is before me. If I happen to expropriate the right of anyone in favor of his brother let the latter not take it, for in that case I have given him a piece of hell-fire.”

This suggested that while direct testimony and material evidence can tell part of the story, it is still possible for a miscarriage of justice to take place. The law is applied according to the information at hand, the Prophet intimated, but damnation awaits those who have been unfairly rewarded at the expense of the innocent. Reading this, an early scholar concluded that the Prophet was telling his followers that those who possessed only the law were not infallible, not even the Prophet himself. Equally, this scholar went on to say, those who relied purely on inner conviction while remaining ignorant of the law were not true Muslims. From the earliest days of Islam, it seems, there was a running conversation between the mandates of Sharia and the lawgivers’ search of their own faithful hearts and consciences.

As with the hadith, there were competing methodologies for arriving at legal judgments. One school of law might arrive at a ruling through the rigorous application of legal principle and inductive reasoning. Another might take its lead from long-established legal precedents. And yet another might find guidance in the more fluid realm of community consensus. Whatever the school or tradition, the spirit of critical inquiry was evident from the very beginning.

These early jurists seemed to be assembling the pieces of a vast puzzle, certain only that when they were finished, when they had cast their judgment, the spirit of Islam would once again be passed on, whole and complete. Naturally, this sense of completion would last only until it was time for the next generation to further finesse the struggle of interpretation, of
ijtihad.
Mastering the cautious logic of generations of lawgivers would provide not only subtle training in the unreliability of texts, but also a lesson in humility. However theoretical and inconclusive, however antique and esoteric the skills required, the care with which these fragile wares were parsed stands as testament to the sincerity and doggedness of faith.

The Mawlana, however, was impatient with medieval hermeneutics. Perhaps justifiably, he wanted Islam to move on, to engage with the world outside these learned tomes. Having made his own study of the Qur’an and the various permutations of Hadith, he was ready to pronounce upon the true intentions of the Prophet and draw from them an entire schema of legal opinion, indeed an entire constitution for the state of Pakistan, if he but had the time. And just as he had insisted that the pure and essential laws of Islam were practically self-evident, he made hadith study sound quite simple. He claimed he could tell at a glance whether the hadith in question was truly an authentic account of something the Prophet had actually said, or a later corruption. In short, he had no single critical method, no precisely unfolding argument, just his own intuitive grasp of the Prophet’s intentions.

There was something of this improvised attitude in his handling of Maryam Jameelah. Within days of her commitment, Mawdudi and his family had embarked on a long-planned pilgrimage to Mecca. While he was in the Holy Land, Mawdudi met with King Saud bin Abdul Aziz and received honors from many Saudi dignitaries and ulema. He had had the pleasure of participating in a special sacred ceremony in which an exquisite black
kiswah,
handwoven and embroidered with gold thread in Lahore, was placed over the Holy Kaaba of Mecca. Two special trains manned by Jamaati workers had ferried this
kiswah
across the length of Pakistan, stopping at rail depots to meet ecstatic crowds waiting to kiss and weep over the precious cloth. This was considered a great diplomatic coup for Pakistan and served to burnish Mawdudi’s spiritual credentials among the traditional ulema. When he called a press conference on his return six weeks later, the Mawlana was prepared to answer questions about the many honors bestowed upon him by the Saudis. He was not expecting questions about the fate of his wayward American charge.

In carrying the Mawlana’s remarks, the editors of Pakistan’s major Urdu-language daily, the
Nawai Waqt,
were doubtless answerable to the Mawlana’s avowed enemy, President Ayub Khan. Their account of Mawdudi’s press conference gave them an opportunity to ingratiate themselves with the president and embarrass and undermine an increasingly powerful adversary at the same time. It was they who first publicly revealed that the Mawlana Mawdudi’s celebrated protégée, Maryam Jameelah, had been committed to the madhouse.

“She is simply suffering from hysteria,” Mawdudi began, trying to play down the significance of Maryam’s plight. He had left everything to Mian Tufail Muhammad and had yet even to visit her at the Paagal Khanaah. He had only just begun to sort through the stack of mail that awaited him on his desk in Icchra.

“I received a letter from her a few days ago written from the hospital,” he continued. “The manner and style of this letter is so logical and rational that it is inconceivable to me it could have been written by a madwoman.”

Of course, the Mawlana could not admit publicly that he might have been mistaken in his previous appraisal of Maryam Jameelah; his judgment might be questioned. Furthermore, Maryam wasn’t a cynical political adversary; to the general public she was for all intents and purposes his daughter. Nonetheless, it seemed a feeble defense for the Mawlana to cite the logical manner in which Maryam’s letters were written as proof of her sanity.

Perhaps he felt more comfortable drawing conclusions from textual study than from going to see her in the hospital. If so, this was of a piece with his overly bookish take on the world, not to mention a definite skittishness when it came to unmarried women. It was as if he now regarded Maryam not as his daughter, but as yet another difficult text, written in a language he didn’t entirely understand, which, like German or English, he would master once he found the time.

Perhaps this is unfair. I might have asked the same question of myself. Was the Peggy Marcus of the letters an altogether different person from the woman the Mawlana encountered at the dinner table or the one Appa taught to make rotis in Pattoki? Could one be crazy and the other sane? If Maryam’s letters to the Mawlana seemed entirely rational, perhaps that was the point in writing them: to convince Mawdudi that she remained the true and earnest Muslim daughter he had first taken her for. Peggy’s letters to her parents would have a similar intent. These letters were filled with endless details engineered to allay her parents’ concern about her welfare and perhaps, like a person whistling in the dark, her own. Whatever conflicts had arisen out of the difficulties of her life in Pakistan, in her letters at least, Peggy held tight to the Right Path.

The Mawlana expressed his complete confidence that Maryam would recover her senses in a matter of days, two weeks at most. Then, rather than returning her to live with his family, he planned to arrange a separate residence for her.

“This lady is a true Muslim who came to Pakistan to join a true Islamic society,” the Mawlana concluded, deftly working his way round to his final pitch: “We are also interested in arranging her marriage to a like-minded Muslim gentleman.”

Though news of Maryam Jameelah’s commitment six weeks before had doubtless already reached him, Mawlana Mawdudi’s published remarks caught the eye of Ghulam Ahmad Parwez. Born the same year as Mawdudi and the author of a competing commentary on the Qur’an, Parwez was the Mawlana’s archnemesis. A self-styled Islamic thinker not unlike Mawdudi, Parwez exhibited a similar impatience with the subtleties of Hadith study. Only he went even further. He thought nearly everything about it spurious. Instead, he brought his focus to bear entirely on the Qur’an. This evidently granted him far greater latitude when it came to his vision of what Islam entailed.

Rejecting Hadith as a source of Islamic law and practice also proved amenable to the secular leadership of Pakistan. Parwez was one of the authors of the recently implemented Family Laws Ordinance, the new civil code of Pakistan. He and Mawlana Mawdudi had fought a pitched battle over the legislation. In a failed effort to derail its passage, the Mawlana had joined forces with the more traditional ulema to pronounce the ordinance un-Islamic. Among other innovations, the Family Laws Ordinance made taking a second wife subject to the first wife’s consent, required that divorce be processed and mediated in civil as opposed to religious courts, and outlawed child marriage.

Thus the fate of Maryam Jameelah at the hands of Mawlana Mawdudi and his party was of more than passing interest to Ghulam Ahmad Parwez. An unsigned editorial published in his organization’s official magazine that July made clear that he intended to extract his pound of flesh by parsing Mawdudi’s comments on her fate. This amounted to his own biographical study, an
ilm al-rijal
in Urdu on the character of both Mawlana Mawdudi and that of his ward, Maryam Jameelah.

Mawlana Mawdudi has said that Maryam has not become insane while at the same time he says she is hospitalized due to hysteria. We would be grateful if someone could explain how hysteria is not madness. To cite her coherent prose as evidence of her sanity is to overlook the fact that many crazy people sound perfectly sane, showing no evidence of mental imbalance until that moment when sanity deserts them. And we have heard that she is in the
notorious Paagal Khanaah. No one is hospitalized in the Paagal Khanaah unless they are unlikely ever to recover, much less in a matter of weeks. And we now understand that Maryam Jameelah has already been in residence for over a month.