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Summary
Summary
*A 2011 National Book Award Finalist*
A spellbinding story of renunciation, conversion, and radicalism from Pulitzer Prize-finalist biographer Deborah Baker
What drives a young woman raised in a postwar New York City suburb to convert to Islam, abandon her country and Jewish faith, and embrace a life of exile in Pakistan? The Convert tells the story of how Margaret Marcus of Larchmont became Maryam Jameelah of Lahore, one of the most trenchant and celebrated voices of Islam's argument with the West.
A cache of Maryam's letters to her parents in the archives of the New York Public Library sends the acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker on her own odyssey into the labyrinthine heart of twentieth-century Islam. Casting a shadow over these letters is the mysterious figure of Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, both Maryam's adoptive father and the man who laid the intellectual foundations for militant Islam.
As she assembles the pieces of a singularly perplexing life, Baker finds herself captive to questions raised by Maryam's journey. Is her story just another bleak chapter in a so-called clash of civilizations? Or does it signify something else entirely? And then there's this: Is the life depicted in Maryam's letters home and in her books an honest reflection of the one she lived? Like many compelling and true tales, The Convert is stranger than fiction. It is a gripping account of a life lived on the radical edge and a profound meditation on the cultural conflicts that frustrate mutual understanding.
Author Notes
Deborah Baker is the author of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as A Blue Hand; The Beats in India . She divides her time between Calcutta, Goa, and Brooklyn.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer finalist Baker (A Blue Hand) unravels the often contradictory life of an American woman who became one of the pre-eminent voices of Islamic revivalism, in this stellar biography that doubles as a mediation on the fraught relationship between America and the Muslim world. Margaret Marcus was a secular Jew in Mamaroneck, N.Y., before she became fascinated with Islam and moved to Pakistan in 1962 and took the name Maryam Jameelah. Baker, who discovered the archive of Marcus's papers in the New York Public Library, carefully reconstructs her movements after her arrival in Lahore, Pakistan, using letters Marcus sent to her parents and articles she published in various Islamic magazines. Jameelah's criticism of the West is unwavering: she denounces American foreign policy, particularly its support of Israel, and secularism in general, insisting that law be derived from the Qur'an. As Baker digs deeper into her subject's difficult life-Jameelah's time in Pakistan grew increasingly strained-she ponders the effect Jameelah's writings on global jihad may have on today's al-Qaeda and Taliban. This is a cogent, thought-provoking look at a radical life and its rippling consequences. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Baker's fascinating biography attempts to recount the life of Margaret Marcus. Born in New York and raised as a Jew, Marcus eventually converted to Islam, moved to Pakistan in the early 1960s, changed her name to Maryam Jameelah, and became one of the most prolific Muslim revivalist ideologues. Her scathing critique of modernism and her denunciation of the West have not only provided an intellectual foundation for but also have been an inspiration to many present-day revivalists. This is no introduction to Jameelah's thought. By reconstructing the events of the journey from Margaret to Maryam, Baker hopes to understand how an American-born woman could come to reject the West, choose a life of relative isolation and obscurity in Pakistan, and adopt what many would regard as an extreme religious position. Although this biography can be read, as the subtitle states, as a tale of exile and extremism, it might also be read as the sad story of a woman simultaneously struggling with severe mental illness and seeking meaning in a confusing world.--McConnell, Christopher Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
How a Jewish girl from Larchmont became an Islamic polemicist. DEBORAH BAKER is a serious biographer who specializes in fairly crazy writers. Her study of the poet Laura Riding, who survived a suicide attempt in 1929, during her 14-year ménageà-trois with Robert Graves and his wife, was a Pulitzer finalist. Next came "A Blue Hand," her portrait of the Beats in India, few of whom were in robust mental health. Yet even these have nothing on Maryam Jameelah, a New York Jewish convert to Islam, who - as a disciple of Pakistan's most world-renowned fundamentalist - made a career out of condemning the West in dozens of books and pamphlets. Baker not only makes us care about this disturbed woman and her hectoring prose, she has succeeded in composing a mesmerizing book on one of the more curious East-West encounters. She proves once again how a marginal case can be an illuminating way into vast and much disputed subjects, in this instance the meeting of West and East and the role of women under orthodox Islam. Sexual secrets? Suspense? Drama? Reversals? They're all here. With them come compromises on Baker's part as a biographer. In a "Note on Methodology" she explains she's presented "rewritten and greatly condensed letters" by Jameelah that are "reconstituted" versions of their originals. She calls the book "a tale" that is "fundamentally a work of nonfiction." Whatever one calls it, this is a thoroughly New York yarn. The records that are its foundation can be found in the manuscripts and archives division at the main branch of the New York Public Library. When I visited recently, I found nine gray boxes of the letters, fiction, polemic, memoir, drawings, paintings, photographs and videos that document the life of Jameelah, born as Margaret Marcus in 1934 in New Rochelle, N.Y. Most of the letters in the archive are addressed to Jameelah's parents. Liberal assimilated Jews, they raised her and a sister in the Westchester County village of Larchmont, "a wealthy suburb of mock-Tudor homes." Her mother went to Smith, and her father worked in his family's tie business. Jameelah didn't begin speaking until age 4, but when she did, her mother told her, it was in complete sentences. At 10, she was drawing Arabs based on photographs in the National Geographic magazines at the school library and planning to live in Palestine or Egypt as a painter. At 15, while her friends were listening to Frank Sinatra, she was buying records by the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. After dropping out of New York University, she spent years reading Muslim texts in the public-library's Oriental division. At 27, she converted to Islam with the help of a Brooklyn imam, and the following year, in 1962, boarded a freighter for Pakistan, never to return to the United States. Before she departed, she donated an unpublished novel and accompanying drawings to the Oriental division, where she had spent so much time. From Lahore, where she still resides, Jameelah continued to send documents to the library through 2005. In the days I spent reading through the files Baker used, I felt transported to a now lost version of Lahore, but also to Jameelah's New York. Her affectionate letters home contrast sharply with her tendentious books, many of which are fixtures in madrasas around the world. Baker's parents were dumfounded by her zigzagging fixations and flirtations - first with Holocaust photographs, then Palestinian suffering, then a Zionist youth group and, ultimately, fundamentalist Islam. While her classmates fell happily into "boys, dates, dances, parties, clothes and film stars," Jameelah recoiled, refusing io date or form friendships. Extensive psychoanalysis didn't help her stay in college or get a job. Finally, in 1957, at age 23, she voluntarily checked into psychiatric hospitals for about two years. Baker's work on the Beats makes her particularly awake to the deficiencies of psychiatry of the time. "Margaret Marcus was not the sole misfit in the 1950s asylum. Artists, poets, homosexuals, Communists and unhappy housewives joined her." But she may be the only such '50s misfit who sent letters to one of the world's most notorious Muslim fundamentalists. After her hospitalization she reached out to Abul Ala Mawdudi of Pakistan, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, a political party favoring a radicalized version of Islamic governance that became a powerful force in Pakistani politics; in later years, Mawdudi would be a strong influence on both Osama bin Laden and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Mawdudi became her correspondent and protector. He compared her to an "equatorial sapling struggling to survive in an Arctic climate" and invited her to live with his family. Whatever the reason for the invitation, it's clear his rigid Islam solved some problems. Her virginity was prized. Purdah suited her reclusiveness. Her frenetic writing - her archived letters are single-spaced and multi-paged - matched Jamaat-e-Islami's interest in promoting her diatribes against secularism and women's rights. But Mawdudi's misinterpretation of her illness backfired. The charming autodidact of her letters became, in the flesh, a logorrheic pest with an explosive temper. Within a month, after she refused to get a job and declined marriage proposals, he sent her to live with friends 50 miles from Lahore. There, she tried to learn Urdu and how to cook. Seven months later, Mawdudi committed her to a Lahore psychiatric hospital. After her release, she married a Jamaat worker who, with Mawdudi's blessing, published her books. She never became a part of her mentor's inner circle; but then, no women did. Her prose was not the key to the popularity of her books. "The true source of Maryam Jameelah's authority arose not from her readings and argument, but from the circumstances of her life," Baker writes. "Every book she wrote is framed by an account of how . . . the daughter of secular Jewish parents . . . came to reject America and embrace islam" and "sacrificed the supposed freedoms and privileges of a Western lifestyle to live . . . by the sacred laws laid out in the Holy Koran." BAKER sidesteps one of the book's most crucial questions: "Was Maryam Jameelah a schizophrenic? I couldn't say." Yet the letters led me to believe she was. Baker mentions that Jameelah was medicated with Compazine, but blurs the implications when she omits that it's prescribed for schizophrenia. She also leaves out instances when Jameelah unambiguously acknowledges why she takes the anti-schizophrenic medication Thorazine. In a letter of Sept. 15, 1981, for example, Jameelah wrote: "I have to take Thorazine every night. I know if I stop taking it, I will soon relapse into the same condition I was before I went to the hospital both in New York and Lahore." Assessing her life's work, Baker criticizes Jameelah for presenting "a savage and titillating portrait of America" while disclaiming "all responsibility for the crimes" committed by young terrorists who were inspired by her. She also wonders why Jameelah was intent on limiting the role of women to that of wife and mother, a way of life she herself "never managed to live." (Baker says Jameelah's children were raised by her husband's first wife.) Baker's visit to Lahore to confront Jameelah on such issues ends the book. While I wish she'd spent more time with her subject in person, the disclosures she elicits there about Jameelah's childhood are stunning. As it is, Baker's captivating account conveys the instability, faith, politics and improbable cultural migration that make Jameelah's life story so difficult to sum up yet impossible to dismiss. Lorraine Adams is the author of "Harbor" and "The Room and the Chair." She is now writing a novel set in Pakistan.
Kirkus Review
A Pulitzer Prize finalist delves into the fascinating life and letters of a young Jewish woman who converted to radical Islam and moved from suburban New York to Pakistan.In 1962, 28-year-old Margaret Marcus left her parents' secular Jewish home to live in Lahore in the Muslim household of idealogue and Islamic political leader Maulana Mawdudi. In Pakistan, Marcus changed her name to Maryam Jameelah and penned expressive letters to her parents describing, during the next three decades, her newfound identity, community and the motivations behind her conversion and all-consuming embrace of Islam. Jameelah went on to write not only lettersthe archives of which Baker (A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, 2008, etc.) came across in the New York Public Librarybut an enormously popular set of books criticizing Western materialism and exalting life lived according to the laws of the Koran. Baker's account unfolds chronologically through Jameelah's letters, included in the book, as well as various articles she published in American magazines. Despite Jameelah's unwavering, outspoken disdain for Western secularism, she faced mounting obstacles in her new life, all of which the author examines as a platform to explore the broader subject of how radical idealism manifests itself. Jameelah eschewed what she viewed as the miserably misguided popular values of her native country, but this opposition did not tamp out her love for and connection to her parents. On this note, Baker, who corresponded and finally met with Jameelah in her home, opens the door to the vital questions of how radical Islam has impacted the world, and what part converts such as Jameelah have played.An important, searing, highly readable and timely narrative.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In 1962, Margaret Marcus (b. 1934), a young Jewish woman from New York's suburbs, converted to Islam, left America, and moved to Pakistan to live as a disciple of one of the major architects of the Islamist revival, Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903-79). As Maryam Jameelah, she excoriated American decadence and warned of the dangers of Western influence, laying a cornerstone of Islamic fundamentalist ideology. Biographer Baker (In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding) came across an archive of Jameelah's papers and became entranced; she presents here a spellbinding factual account of Jameelah's estrangement from her family, faith, and country; her quest to find an authentic Islam halfway around the world; and her confinement in mental asylums on two continents. How did this troubled woman become the theorist behind the notion of Islam vs. the West? Baker's investigation of Jameelah yields mysteries and surprises galore. VERDICT A significant contemporary figure in Islamic-Western relations becomes human, with all the foibles and angst that word implies. General readers will find this story compelling, while scholars will be pleased with the insight it brings to an important 20th-century Islamist voice. Highly recommended.-Steve Young, McHenry Cty. Coll., Crystal Lake, IL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Part I The Marble Library | |
| 1 al-Hijrah-The Escape | p. 3 |
| 2 The Mawlana | p. 35 |
| 3 Doubt | p. 61 |
| Part II Jahiliyya-The Age of Barbarism and Ignorance | |
| 4 The Misfit | p. 89 |
| 5 Paagal Khanaah | p. 107 |
| 6 The Convert | p. 135 |
| Part III The Concrete Library | |
| 7 The Renegade | p. 163 |
| 8 A War Between and Within | p. 187 |
| 9 The Lifted Veil | p. 217 |
| A Note on Methodology | p. 225 |
| Notes | p. 227 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 245 |
