PREFACE

Maryam Jameelah (formerly Margaret Marcus) was born in New York in 1934, a fourth-generation American of German-Jewish origin. She grew up when the furor of the Palestine debate was at its height and the Partition of Palestine by the United Nations on November 29, 1947 and the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948 was creating greatest excitement in New York. Emotionally torn by the injustice of Zionism, she was driven to begin writing this novel, her first and only attempt at fiction, when she was just a school-girl of fourteen in order to refute Zionist propaganda and demonstrate to her family and friends, who were Zionists, that so-called “backwardness” of the Palestinian fellaheen at that time provided no justification for the Zionists to deprive an entire people of their homeland and their human rights. The latter portion of the book, written during her early twenties while a student at New York University, clearly reveals her growing sympathy for Islam, its culture and ideals.

The concluding chapters were added several months before her formal conversion to Islam in Brooklyn, New York on May 24, 1961. Although since her migration to Lahore, Pakistan in 1962, she has made corrections, objectionable portions omitted, and many details added, the theme of the story and its characters remain unchanged. Since this book was written before she embraced Islam, had never been outside her native America, had no firsthand acquaintance with Palestinian Arabs and lived in a prosperous Westchester County suburb, surrounded by all the comforts and luxuries enjoyed by other American youth, and she had never encountered any personal experience with the poverty, hardships and injustice depicted on the following pages, factual errors and literary flaws were inevitable. She only hopes that they are not serious enough to mar the book as (vi) It is no exaggeration that due to the long years of pre-occupation with Ahmad Khalil, Maryam Jameelah was converted to Islam. She began to write this story in 1948 as an atheist; by 1961 so intense was her emotional identification with Ahmad Khalil and his family that she had become a fervent Muslim in all but name.

Ahmad Khalil is the last of the older generation of Palestinians who clings tenaciously all his life to the traditional peasant ways of his rural village. The authoress depicts a lifestyle which is no more for today’s cosmopolitan, urbanized Arabs and middle-class sophisticated, educated, and for the most part, religiously indifferent Palestinians have nothing in common with the Ahmad Khalil, Khalifa and Rashid portrayed in this story. She also expresses in her indignation against “Progress” and the crass materialism it has brought in its wake, nostalgia over the loss by the Arabs of irreplaceable spiritual values and ideals.

UMAR FAROUQ Ramadan ul-Mubarak 1, 1399 (July 25, 1979)