The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (9 page)

We know from her own writings and from newspaper interviews that Maryam has come from America and has long searched for spiritual peace in a community of like-minded souls. Such a community was not to be found in her native country. Nor did she find spiritual peace in her native religion of Judaism. This search brought her to Islam. In theory, no doubt Islam seemed to her an eminently practical religion. Unlike Judaism, for example, a faith limited to Jews, Islam is one that she might share with the whole of humanity. From her books she doubtless learned that the
ummah
embraces all human beings, whatever their race or nationality or station in life; it is a faith, too, that holds women in the highest esteem.

In Pakistan Maryam Jameelah expected to find this true Islamic society she had read of in her books. This was why she left her home and family, her childhood memories, her entire American identity. She left behind everything for Allah. All these wonderful thoughts were in her heart and mind when she reached our shores.

Yet as soon as she arrived here she was offered a burqa.

In America her natural modesty was deeply offended by the clothes worn by the typical Western woman. And so she embraced the burqa with relief and joy, equating it with her natural chasteness. She did not immediately grasp that a woman can be modest without a burqa and immodest beneath one. I imagine it did not take her long to realize the hypocrisy of those sisters for whom the burqa is an empty affectation. I have no doubt that this was a deeply unsettling discovery.

Any psychiatrist or psychologist will agree that those who become insane are oversensitive. For a person like Maryam Jameelah, the discrepancy between her dream of an Islamic society and the
reality of what she found here would be shattering.

What else did she learn about the Jamaat-e-Islami version of Islam? What were the rights they sought to uphold in the face of the recently imposed Muslim Family Laws Ordinance?

A man can marry off his four-year-old daughter.

A man can take four wives whenever he wants.

A man, whenever he wants and without providing any reason, can divorce his wife, but if a woman wants a divorce she faces enormous obstacles.

If a woman does not agree with her husband he may beat her.

The purpose of marriage is to satisfy man’s sexual cravings or to have children, so he can have sex with four different women and impregnate all of them. A woman may have relations with only one man.

Our sister Maryam came from a society where humans are completely controlled by the capitalist machine, where human beings are treated like slaves. She had no idea that she would be joining a community where not only is the human body enslaved, but the soul is as well. In this world, there is no prospect of freedom. She might have been unhappy in American society, she might have been unhappy as a Jew, but at least she had the choice to question her society and renounce her family’s beliefs.

Now I will again return to the Mawlana Mawdudi’s comments about the fate of Maryam Jameelah. When this lady recovers, he tells us, he plans to find separate accommodation for her. I find this a subtle way of distancing himself. She is obviously being pushed out of his house. Then he will arrange a marriage with a man not of her choosing, a like-minded Muslim gentleman, he suggests.

The word
arrange
used here is typical. For in the Islam of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Maryam Jameelah cannot select her husband by herself. Here the right to select a husband is the prerogative of her guardian. The Mawlana Mawdudi will decide whom she is to marry.

I’ve discussed this case in detail because I feel strongly that whoever is involved in treating Maryam Jameelah should be aware of the conditions under which her breakdown occurred. And this is not only her tragedy. It is the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of Maryams who are crucified on the cross of religion. These girls are neither living nor dead. Before marriage their life is criminalized; they are made to wear burqas as if to bare their God-given face was a sin. They are never certain whether the man who comes to the door to marry them brings with him their freedom from this bondage or a knife across the throat.

There used to be a time when suffering people would come to find refuge within Muslim homes. There they were assured of being taken care of until they were healed. Now the situation has deteriorated to the point where people arrive completely sane and are turned out when they go crazy.

Unfortunate daughters of Islam! I implore you to wait for the day when a man will come with the light of the Qur’an in his heart. Only then will husbands understand that in nurturing you and all your gifts, we as a nation can change our destiny.

The New York Public Library has dozens of books in various languages on Mawdudi. There is a two-volume work that tracks his life practically month by month. There are books that herald him as the founding father of political Islam and a pioneer of Islam’s twentieth-century revival. There are even hints throughout the party literature that he might have been the prophesied Redeemer, whose arrival heralds the day of Resurrection. The Mawlana did little to discourage this particular view. Finally, there are works that trace the influence of his writings (and that of others) on the teachers of Osama bin Laden and his proliferating jihadi stepchildren. Just as a librarian named Mr. Parr in the Oriental Division had once helped Maryam find the books she needed in her study of Islam, the librarians of the (renamed) Asian and Middle East Division were unfailingly helpful in my study of Mawdudi. I was even allowed to enter the closed stacks in search of particular titles and obscure journals.

The books on Mawdudi rarely stray into intimate territory. Abul Ala Mawdudi as a husband or brother, son or father, is almost entirely absent. His motivation for inviting Maryam Jameelah to Lahore remains a mystery. The crisis over her commitment is passed over in similar silence, as if what happens in real life isn’t nearly as important as what is pronounced upon in speeches or written down in books. However partial or impartial, all these books portray Mawdudi as he portrays himself: as a commanding voice of political and religious authority. He is a Mujaddid: a Renewer of the Faith.

Many of the works that Mawdudi wrote are also available in the library stacks. In one hundred and fifty books and countless issues of his journal
Tarjuman al-Qur’an,
Mawdudi holds forth tirelessly on purdah, education, birth control, law, morality, war, marriage, governance, and the treatment of religious minorities. His unpublished memoirs (quoted by a few writers) tell the story of his intellectual evolution, beginning with his schooling in his saintly father’s library, followed by a period in the wilderness after his father’s death, and climaxing with his triumphant embrace of the Qur’an as his “beacon,” “master-key,” and “true benefactor.”

Even in translation, Mawdudi’s voice is lucid and muscular, a seductive symphony of learning and worldliness. He broadcasts the authority of a man who traffics in realities, not the trivia of scholarship, mystic vagueness, or defensive apologetics. He refuses to let centuries of debate over questions of interpretation mediate his response to the holy texts. Even the great Urdu poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal found himself fortified by Mawdudi’s brush-clearing, hortatory tone. Both his English translator and his Urdu biographer are compelled to remark admiringly on Mawdudi’s scientific and logical approach to Islam. Mawdudi himself characterized his approach to Islam as “scientific.”

Yet though Mawdudi often uses the language of science, engineering, and logic to make his points, his rhetorical feints would exasperate the most cool-headed scientist or logician. A 1947 address given at his father’s alma mater, Aligarh University, is typical. In this speech Mawdudi takes pains to establish that the arrival of an Islamic state was an entirely natural and inexorable eventuality, historically determined: “Just as in logic, deduction always follows the arrangement of premises; in chemistry a chemical compound is formed by the combination, in a particular way, of certain ingredients… likewise it is an undeniable fact that in sociology a state is merely the natural consequence of the circumstances which pre-exist in a particular society.” In Mawdudi’s thinking, science and “Nature’s plan” are interchangeable: the “laws of Nature” are a cover for the hand of Allah (the “Engineer” and “Designer”) at work in human events. And Allah, he believed, was intent on delivering to the subcontinent an Islamic state. There was clearly more alchemist than scientist in Mawdudi.

Mawdudi’s occasional gestures of humility, like his tone of rationality, can also seem like a rhetorical trick. From the evidence of his written work, he does not allow much in the way of personal reflection or doubt to temper his cast-iron judgments. “Now that I have access to the roots of knowledge and the world of reality,” he writes casually, “Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx and other secular thinkers began to look like pygmies. In fact, I began to pity them, for they could not resolve issues, despite grappling with them throughout their life and producing thereon huge volumes.” No one else need bother with these men and their tedious inconclusive books, he seems to say; I’ve read them for you.

Mawdudi’s most widely read book is undoubtedly the brief introductory primer
Towards Understanding Islam,
a required text in nearly every madrasa curriculum in Pakistan and elsewhere. But it was the multivolume
Tafhim al-Qur’an,
a work of translation and Qur’anic commentary, that established the foundation of Mawdudi’s intellectual authority and provides the key to the leader he struggled to become. The revelations contained in the Qur’an, Mawdudi writes in the introduction, “drove a quiet, kind-hearted man from his isolation and seclusion, and placed him upon the battlefield of life to challenge a world gone astray.” This was a reference to Muhammad’s transformation, but perhaps there was something of Mawlana Mawdudi, too, to be found here.

Begun in February 1942,
Tafhim al-Qur’an
occupied Mawdudi during his years of incarceration at the New Central Jail in Multan. By the time he finished thirty years later, Mawdudi had at last retired from his leadership of the Jamaat-e-Islami. After his death in 1979, Zafar Ishaq Ansari translated this work into English as
Towards Understanding the Qur’an.
Unlike his primer, which invited shortcuts, these volumes of “interpretative exposition,” Mawdudi felt, would help orient a student on the Right Path of understanding Allah’s message.

He begins his masterwork by stating that the Qur’an is neither a narrative nor a closely reasoned argument. It is made up of seemingly random verses, exhortations, and divine fiats, arranged in no particular order. It is not sufficient to simply read it from beginning to end. To find the Right Path, Mawdudi counsels, the reader of the Qur’an must do exactly as he did. In the introduction he outlines the steps of the path he took.

First, as the Qur’an is a book like no other, the earnest seeker must abandon all preconceived notions of what will be found between its covers. Then, he must grasp the Qur’an’s fundamental claims. First among these claims is that God has conveyed upon every rational man and woman the gift of understanding. This understanding includes the ability to choose between good and evil, and the power to exercise one’s full potential. With these gifts alone, every human being will have what is needed to reach a sincere faith and an explicit grasp of God’s commands. There is no question for which the Qur’an and the various books of Hadith do not contain the answer. “Nothing is missing,” he writes elsewhere; “no part is vague or wanting.”

According to Mawdudi, what the Qur’an asked of its readers was clearly no different from any other disciplined course of study; there was something comforting and encouraging in that. But as he continued with his instruction on how to read it, the path seemed to get more and more treacherous. Each of the Qur’an’s 114 suras requires careful examination, the Mawlana cautions. The seeker must take notes, organize verses with similar themes together, and compare and contrast the Qur’an’s teachings with those found in other books, ancient and modern, sacred and secular, that have addressed the same large questions.

There will also be linguistic difficulties, he warns, even for those fluent in classical Arabic. The problem with literal translations, he explains, is that even though the Qur’an was written in “clear Arabic,” its terminology “may give rise to ambiguities.” One word may have several meanings or be used to denote different states of mind. There will be words whose meanings will have to be rethought and retooled, since they have been so long in disuse.

Despite all the subtlety and finesse required to thread these needles, Mawdudi didn’t believe that his representation of the Right Path signified new or idiosyncratic interpretation of the Qur’an. He was simply preserving the “primordial” and “pristine” Islam that was in danger of being lost forever in a thicket of scholarly obscurantism. This conviction might account for Mawdudi’s excitement over his discovery of a young American woman who had arrived at exactly the same understanding of Islam as he had, without any knowledge of classical Arabic or familiarity with all those antique debates. From vastly different starting points, their shared methodology of rationality, diligence, and sincerity had led them to the exact same Right Path. Of course, that was until Maryam veered off and ended up in the madhouse.

There is room, Mawdudi goes on to insist, for healthy debate. Such differences are the soul of a free society and a sign of intellectual vigor. In sorting out God’s intentions, even the Prophet is no greater authority on the text than his companions. To suggest that the meaning of individual suras is unchanging is the conclusion of a society of unthinking “blocks of wood.”

What then of his invocation of a primordial Islam? What of his insistence that no part of the Qur’an is vague or wanting? But Mawdudi continues on blithely, the tone of reasoned discourse obscuring the contradiction, as if it were possible to have it both ways. Only those who read the work to quibble over split hairs are unwelcome, he writes. The Qur’an absolutely condemns to perdition those who create mischief by sowing endless picky controversies. Those who induce schisms by misunderstanding the fundamental truths of Islam are similarly damned.