One day, in 2007, Deborah Baker, Amitav Ghosh’s wife, was browsing through the catalogue in the Archives and Manuscript Division of the New York Public
Library. Suddenly, she came across the name Maryam Jameelah. She was taken aback to see a Muslim name among a list of Christian and Jewish names. “I wondered how a Muslim’s papers ended up in a New York library,” she says. So she asked to see the boxes containing Jameelah’s papers.
And this is what she discovered. Maryam Jameelah was born Margaret Marcus, daughter of a Jew, and grew up in Rochelle, a New York city suburb. As a child, she became interested in Arab culture. As she grew older, she read books like Muhammad Asad’s The Road to Mecca, which described his conversion from Judaism to Islam. Thereafter, she read many other books on Islam, and began a correspondence with religious leaders around the world, including Seyyed Qutb of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
Mawlana Abul A’la Mawdudi, founder of the Jama’at-I-Islami party in Lahore replied and encouraged the young woman’s interest in Islam. Convinced that only Islam had the answers to the great questions of human existence, on May 24, 1961, Margaret converted and became Maryam Jameelah. The next year, at the age of 27, she went to Pakistan to live as Mawdudi’s adopted daughter.
She began a series of letters to her parents over the next 30 years, describing her life in detail. “It was the voice of the letters that gripped me,” says Deborah. “It was ingenuous and chatty, and filled with detailed descriptions of life in purdah, and Mawdudi’s activities.” Maryam also wrote a series of books and articles, which were mainly harsh indictments of the Western way of life.
These writings had a powerful effect in the Middle East. “Earlier criticism was not very sophisticated, because Muslim thinkers, scholars, and writers did not have direct experience of the West,” she says. “But here was Maryam, coming from the bosom of the West, and providing this detailed critique from an Islamic point of view. She gave ammunition to those within the Islamic world who wanted to reject the West.”
Asked about the reasons for her antipathy, Deborah says, “Maryam felt the West was very materialistic, superficial, and tawdry. She hated Hollywood and commercial sex.”
She also was upset at the warfare between Catholics and Jews, blacks and whites, and the social inequities that were prevalent. She found Islam the perfect religion for her. “It was an answer to her innermost needs,” says Deborah.
Deborah took three and a half years to write, The Convert: A Fable of Islam and America. The book includes numerous letters written by Maryam, interspersed with commentary and background information by Deborah, who went to Lahore in 2007 for detailed research.
A year after Maryam went to Pakistan, she fell out with Maulana Mahdudi. Maryam moved out, and a year later, she married Muhammad Yusuf Khan, a leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami, and had five children. Two sons joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Maryam continued to write books, and essays, most of them diatribes against the West.
But the author rejects Maryam’s way of thinking. “I don’t agree with her claim that Western and Islamic civilisations are irreconcilable,” says Deborah. “It is an abstract view. You don’t live a civilisation. Are Muslims and Jews or Muslims and Hindus essentially antagonistic? The answer is no. All of them are human beings, and if they try they can get along with each other,’’ she says.
Security guard concerns
Thanks to the presence of Daman Singh, daughter of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the Special Protection Group was in full force at the festival. But they had an irritating ‘in your face’ attitude. Exasperated, I asked one of them why. “You have to understand that we are trained to treat every person as a threat,” he said.
I remember watching the televised funeral of US Senator Edward Kennedy last year. The most powerful people in America, including presidents and senators, were in attendance. But you could not see a single security person in sight. Perhaps, the SPG needs to learn a few tricks from their American counterparts.