IT’S A rivetting story of love and Islam set in New York and Lahore. But it’s not a work of fiction.
Margaret Marcus, a Jewish American girl, came of age in the New York suburb of Larchmont in the 1950s, studied at New York University, and sailed away to Lahore as Maryam Jameelah at age 28, after years of corresponding with the Jama’at- i- Islami founder ( and the ideological forbear of Pakistan), Maulana Abul A’la Maududi.
Her story is the subject of a fascinating new book, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism ( Penguin), by Deborah Baker, a Pulitzer- shortlisted author and wife of author Amitav Ghosh.
Jameelah, who’s 77 and continues to live in Pakistan, was first drawn to Islam through Arabic music on the radio, she said in an interview to the San Francisco- based journal, The Islam Bulletin . Her fascination became intense when as a 20- year- old student at New York University, she took ‘ Judaism in Islam’ as an elective.
Jameelah took to writing on Islam, and on the advice of a jailed Muslim leader, sent Maududi some of her articles. An impressed Maududi wrote back saying: “ When I was reading your articles I felt I were reading my own mind.” The Maulana invited her to spend Ramadan with his family in Pakistan. “ Mawdudi opened a door. He showed me how I might escape the awful destiny that awaited me in America,” she wrote to her parents.
Jameelah, who went on to marry and have children in Pakistan, attacked western materialism in her substantial volume of work. Pointing to Jameelah’s book, Western Civilisation Condemned By Itself , Baker says a pirated chapter from Catcher In The Rye was used to illustrate adolescent misery and selections from T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land , were used to evoke the toll of “ godless living”. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Modern Islam says: “ Jameelah’s significance [ lies] in the manner with which she articulates an internally consistent paradigm for [ Islamic] revivalism’s rejection of the West.”
–Agencies