Deborah Baker is a serious biographer who specialises in fairly crazy writers. Her study of the poet Laura Riding, who survived a suicide attempt in 1929, during her 14-year ménage-à-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 mesmerising 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 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, NY.
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 four, 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 US.
Jameelah’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 to date or form friendships.
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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 hospitalisation she reached out to Abul Ala Mawdudi of Pakistan, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, a political party favouring a radicalised 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.”
Assessing her life’s work, Baker criticises 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’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.
THE CONVERT
A Tale of Exile and Extremism
Deborah Baker
Graywolf Press
246 pages; $23
The New York Times