ABOUT THE AUTHOR

“Maybe when I am grown up, I’ll be happier living in some other country and stay there all my life if I like it. I want to do something important.”

Margaret (Peggy) Marcus was born to Herbert and Myra Marcus on the 23 of May, 1934; a Jewish family residing in the suburbs of New York—a happy, healthy little girl, “as fine a baby as anyone could ever wish for.” As she began to grow, however, her parents noticed a few peculiarities: she was a very sensitive baby. Two years old and still not talking, they grew concerned. A doctor was consulted; tests were run, and even though the results were inconclusive, soon after Peggy “found her tongue.” A tirade of questions followed; a never ending list of “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” As a five year old, Margaret was, in her mother’s words, “an attractive child with lovely soft dark-brown hair and large brown eyes,” albeit very nervous, sensitive, high-strung and demanding. She found it difficult to make friends and disliked group games as she was often subjected to “heartless and merciless teasing and ridicule from other children.” She found her solace in music and art. Classical music and Opera Symphonies gave way to Arabic music. Her paintings and drawings consisted of Arabs with their turbans and beards, their emaciated children, their suffering, their misery, all displayed on paper for everyone to see. They recoiled from it. She was discouraged from drawing the Arabs, being turned instead to the beauty life had to offer; all the pretty things. She found them to be empty. Her family found the music distasteful and she was ordered to keep the windows of her room closed when it played lest they be disturbed. Margaret (Peggy) Marcus, a child who could never decipher why the world around her could never truly see the sufferings of the less fortunate and was intent on focusing on all the glitter and glamour life has to offer. Peggy Marcus, with her ghastly paintings and her foreign music, became a stranger to her family and friends.

She was ten years of age when she started to develop an interest in Islam. While attending a reformed Jewish Sunday school, she became fascinated with the historical relationship of the Arabs and the Jews and naively thought them to be working together to attain another Golden Age of culture in the Middle East. She started 10 associate herself with the Jews in Europe, persecuted and suffering a horrible fate at the hands of the Nazis, and was shocked and vexed to find that none of her class fellows, nor her family members shared her passions or took religion seriously. Jew in name only, she hated the hypocrisy. “I would rather choose orthodoxy because they are not ashamed of their Jewishness. I don’t want a counterfeit religion. I want the real thing!” she wrote in a letter to her sister Betty (Elizabeth Marcus). Myra and Herbert Marcus left their original faith and joined an agnostic and humanist organization known as the “Ethical Culture Movement.” Margaret attended its Sunday school from the age of eleven until she graduated at fifteen. Here she grew completely in accord with the idea that all traditional, organized religion was man-made and viewed 11 with disdain. When she was eighteen, however, she turned to Judaism and joined a local Zionist movement named the “Mizrachi Hatzair”, but when she realized that the true nature of the movement made the hostility between the Jews and Arabs irreconcilable, she left in disgust. Twenty years of age and still in search of the truth, of peace; a student at the New York University, she took an elective course titled “Judaism in Islam.” It was taught by Professor Abraham Isaac Katsh, head of the department of Hebrew Studies, who tried his utmost best to prove to his students—all Jews, many of them aspiring to be rabbis—that Islam was derived from Judaism. The course books, written by him, took each ayaat of the Holy Qur’an and meticulously traced it back to its alleged Jewish source. Ironically, where his aim was to prove the superiority of Judaism over Islam, he convinced Margaret of the contrary. Further education revealed Zionism to consist of only the “tribalistic aspects of Judaism.” She learned that none of the leaders of the modern secular nationalistic Zionism were observant Jews and that traditional, Orthodox Judaism was regarded with utmost contempt in Israel. When she found almost all important Jewish figureheads 111 America to be supporters of Zionism and the atrocities inflicted on Palestine, she could, in her words, “no longer consider myself a Jew at heart.”

436 She suffered a lapse in health in 1953 which grew worse steadily resulting in her discontinuing her education two years later without earning a diploma. During this time she studied the translation of the Holy Qur’an by Marmaduke Pickthall which deeply moved her.

Her quest for truth led her to Shaikh Daoud Ahmed Faisal, the founder and head of “The Islamic Mission in America”, located in the slums of Brooklyn. She found in him a pure lover of Islam. “You must do as God says in the Holy Quran and follow the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet and sacrifice this world for the life Hereafter!” he had explained to her when she expressed her wish to convert to his faith. The Shaikh’s wife, Khadijah Faisal, became one of her best friends and religious teacher. Under her guidance, Margaret learned to perform Wudhu and Salat and to recite the Holy Qur’an in Arabic.

In a letter to her Aunt, dated September 11, 1960, she made her aware of her resolution to employ her knowledge of typing “for a much more important task. I have decided to dedicate my life to writing articles and essays from the Islamic point of view.” Her work serves to compare and contrast the Islamic and Western civilizations and prove why they are both irreconcilable. “The road to Mecca” and “Islam at the Crossroads” by Allama Muhammad Asad served to be great influences. Having seen the havoc wrecked upon Judaism and Christianity by Modernism, she intended to refute all the ideas of the Muslim modernists such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Shaikh Muhammad Abduh, and the reformist ideas presented by Syed Ameer Ali in his “The Spirit of Islam” and, despite being a great lover of his poetry, Allama Muhammad Iqbal in his “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam”. Through her “Islam Versus the West”, she wished to warn the Muslims what would be the fate of Islam if effective steps were not taken in time. May 24, 1961, after endless research and attaining complete satisfaction, Margaret Marcus embraced Islam 2 the hand of Shaikh Daoud Faisal. He also gave her a Muslim name. “… so henceforth you will no longer call me Peggy” she wrote to her parents, “but now I am Maryam Jameelah.”

Maryam Jameelah began correspondence with numerous Muslims all over the world: Shaikh Muhammad Bashir Ibrahimi of the Algerian ulema, Dr. Muhammad al-Bahay, the Director of Cultural Affairs at al-Azhar University, Dr. Said Ramadan, the Director of the Islamic Centre in Geneva and the son-in-law of the late Shaikh Hasan al-Banna of the al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian author, Islamic theorist and the leading member of the “Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood”. However, her “most faithful correspondent” was Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maudoodi, the leader of the banned “Jama’at-e-Islami Pakistan” in Lahore, who in addition to fully supporting her condemnation of nationalism, secularism, materialism and modernism in Islam extended a special invitation to come to Lahore and reside there permanently as a member of his family. “If life here in America becomes impossible for me”, she had responded. On February 28, 3962, Maryam Jameelah confessed in a letter to Dr. Said Ramadan that life had become intolerable. Previously she did not have the courage to break ties with her past but now she was convinced that she could not function in the American society any longer. With permission from her parents, she accepted Maulana Maudoodi’s proposal and set out on the journey to Pakistan, a third world country on the other side of the globe where she found her home and family. “I am now convinced that my only salvation is to go and live in a Muslim country.” She had written. In May 1962, she left America never to return. Upon reaching Pakistan Maryam Jameelah found that Maulana Maudoodi’s religious views and actual ideas and goals of re-interpretation of Islam were far from the traditional orthodoxy she sought to immerse herself in; she wanted to practice Islam wholly and freely - she found what she desired in Pattoki where she lived for a year. In 1963, Maryam Jameelah’s health deteriorated again and she was hospitalized. Mohammad Yusuf Khan, “tall, fair-complexioned with a heavy, long black beard and extraordinarily handsome”, a member of Jama’at-e-Islami was appointed caretaker to her. In August 1963, he proposed marriage to her. She was hesitant to accept; he was married and in love with his wife; he was offering moral and social protection that she desperately needed. So on Maulana Maudoodi’s advice, she accepted. On August 5, 1963, Maryam Jameelah became the second wife to Mohammad Yusuf Khan in whom she found a compassionate life partner, and came to live with him and his family.

437 Her sacrifice was greatly appreciated by her co-wife. Maryam Jameelah bore five children and lost one, her first daughter, Ayesha. The remaining four, two boys and two girls are alive with families of their own. Maryam Jameelah spent most of her time in her room writing, reading and reviewing books. She was fully supported in her literary pursuits by her husband, Muhammad Yusuf Khan, who was also the publisher of her books. She authored thirty four books and reviewed several others. She sent the original manuscripts of her books, her artwork and family photos to the New York Public Library, which has an entire section allocated to her; her “second home” where she spent most of her adolescence. Shafiqah looked after both of their children and raised them as her own. There was and is to this day no distinction between the siblings.

For Maryam Jameelah, life began in Pakistan where she found a home, a family; where she became a wife and a mother and launched her literary career. In Islam she found all that was good and pure and true and beautiful and “that which gives meaning and direction to human life (and death).” For her work she was both praised and criticized. “If you are not criticized for 1it, you are not doing the right thing,” she would say.

Her family grew: children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, her own and those of her step-children. It grows still. She was, is and will always be equally loved and valued by all. Her struggles will always be remembered and esteemed. “My childhood was the worst time of my life, and my old age is the best when I am surrounded by my family,” she had said, contentment adorning her features.

Maryam Jameelah departed from this world on October 31st, 2012. The struggle to live up to being her family will be challenging but continuous (InshaAllah). May we succeed. Ameen.

Masuma Khanum

Grand Daughter of Maryam Jameelah

Sources: Memoirs of childhood and youth in America by Maryam Jameelah At Home in Pakistan by Maryam Jameelah

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