Portrait of a rebel

The Convert is about Maryam Jameelah who converted from Judaism to Islam and became a hard-line defender of Islamic values and culture.

The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism is about Maryam Jameelah, the well-known conservative and hard-line defender of Islamic values and culture, currently living in Lahore. She has been publishing books, articles, and pamphlets since the 1960s. Some of the recurring issues are “condemning Western efforts to influence the Muslim world or criticising the ill-begotten efforts of the modernising reformers of Islam” (p.84). The Convert is predominantly about the conversion of Margaret Marcus, as she was born, from Judaism to the Jamaat-e-Islami brand of Islamic ideology.

Margaret or “Peggy” Marcus was born in 1934, but did not begin to speak till she was four years old. By this time, her anxious parents, Myra and Herbert, had taken her to various psychiatrists. When she finally began to speak, it was in complete sentences. Very much like the apocryphal, but well-known story about Macaulay, whose first words were, “Madam, the agony is abated.” Her mother described Margaret as hyper-sensitive and of a nervous disposition, but “she was considered an exceptionally gifted young girl. Her paintings were always praised in school and she had a beautiful singing voice” (p.109). At the summer school, where she was happy learning how to dance, she was severely condemned by the director and requested not to return as she had no flair for the art. Likewise with her painting — upon being informed by Mawdudi that painting was not looked upon kindly in Islam, she gave up painting till the late 1990s. Later, she was unable to complete her course at the University of Rochester as she had a nervous breakdown. By the time she began her correspondence with Maulana Abdul Ala Mawdudi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami, she had been diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia and had had a “fifteen-month long stay at the New York Psychiatric Institute and later the Hudson River State Hospital” (p.125). The other correspondents included “mature Arab Muslim leaders deemed reactionary fanatics by the New York Times”, such as Sayyid Qutb of the Society of Muslim Brotherhood and Shaykh Muhammad Bashir Ibrahim, leader of the insurgency against France and a member of the Islamic clergy (p.140).

Full report here Hindu