Read Online The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism by Deborah Baker - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Deborah Baker
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Jamaat-e-Islami were looking up.
Whatever Margaret’s role was to be, whatever merit her proximity to the Mawlana afforded her, it seemed purdah proved less of an obstacle than Urdu. Margaret could hear the low voices of the Mawlana’s “family” on the other side of the door, but she could not yet understand them. The typing continued.
Yet before I could begin to fathom the political and familial dynamics of the Mawdudi household, Margaret Marcus’s letters to her parents were suddenly all about a man named Hakim Rai Naimat Ali Khan and his wife, Khurshid Bibi. The return address was no longer the Mawlana’s house in Lahore but a place called Pattoki. A month into her stay, Peggy explained, she had received a kind letter from these friends of Mawdudi. Khan and his wife had invited her for a visit. After three days her childless hosts, whom she soon referred to familiarly as Baijan and Appa, asked her to stay on permanently as their daughter. Margaret gladly accepted, returning only briefly to Lahore to collect her clothes and books.
The lifting of the ban on the Jamaat had occasioned her move, she explained in her second letter from Pattoki, responding to her parents’ concerns and questions about these developments. The Mawlana had been overwhelmed by work, leaving him no time for his wife and family, much less for her. This had created a certain amount of tension in the house, which had its effect on everybody. In fact, it was the Mawlana who initiated the new arrangement.
So, with barely a backward glance, Peggy introduced a whole new cast of characters. Liberated from those Westernized and urbane Lahoris, and the close quarters of the Mawdudi household, she was in the thick of this new life in no time at all. Though Mawdudi remained her guardian and she continued to correspond with him, her letters to her parents now filled up with the minutiae of life in a small town an hour south of Lahore. For eight months the letters from Pattoki poured out in a bubbling current.
I let myself be carried along by these new developments, losing myself in Margaret’s slipstream account of a busy household in a small town in the Punjab half a century before. Then, in the second to last of those twenty-four letters, I was furiously trying to back away from the precipice in front of me. After an unexplained five-month lapse in correspondence, Peggy wrote from yet another address. The building on Jail Road in Lahore was known locally as Paagal Khanaah. Just under a year after her arrival in Pakistan, Maryam Jameelah had been committed to the madhouse.
----
Paagal Khanaah
Jail Road
Lahore
PAKISTAN
July 1963
The more I considered it, the more convinced I became that the Mawlana and his political cadres had taken against me. Baijan, I now saw, was in league with him, however reluctantly. He and Appa had been nothing but kind to me. But not one week before I received the Mawlana’s letter, I had noticed that Baijan had grown quiet and withdrawn. He and Appa had recently returned from Lahore, where they had gone to see a doctor about Appa’s migraines. Or so I had been led to believe.
Except for that single trip, whenever he wasn’t at the medical dispensary or at meals, Baijan spent hours on the roof, pacing, repeating his Dhikr and running his fingers through his prayer beads over and over again. Long after the electric and kerosene lights went out, I could hear Baijan pace above my head, alone with Allah. When I commented on Baijan’s distraction and absorption in his prayers, Appa suggested that perhaps Baijan was planning to become a Sufi. Now I could only conclude that after wrestling at length with his conscience, Baijan felt that he had no choice but to agree to Mawdudi’s plan. That was when I first became frightened.
I immediately took refuge with a village neighbor so I could collect my thoughts. I tried my best to keep a rein on my fears. This was very difficult. Not since my departure from New York had I known
Whatever Margaret’s role was to be, whatever merit her proximity to the Mawlana afforded her, it seemed purdah proved less of an obstacle than Urdu. Margaret could hear the low voices of the Mawlana’s “family” on the other side of the door, but she could not yet understand them. The typing continued.
Yet before I could begin to fathom the political and familial dynamics of the Mawdudi household, Margaret Marcus’s letters to her parents were suddenly all about a man named Hakim Rai Naimat Ali Khan and his wife, Khurshid Bibi. The return address was no longer the Mawlana’s house in Lahore but a place called Pattoki. A month into her stay, Peggy explained, she had received a kind letter from these friends of Mawdudi. Khan and his wife had invited her for a visit. After three days her childless hosts, whom she soon referred to familiarly as Baijan and Appa, asked her to stay on permanently as their daughter. Margaret gladly accepted, returning only briefly to Lahore to collect her clothes and books.
The lifting of the ban on the Jamaat had occasioned her move, she explained in her second letter from Pattoki, responding to her parents’ concerns and questions about these developments. The Mawlana had been overwhelmed by work, leaving him no time for his wife and family, much less for her. This had created a certain amount of tension in the house, which had its effect on everybody. In fact, it was the Mawlana who initiated the new arrangement.
So, with barely a backward glance, Peggy introduced a whole new cast of characters. Liberated from those Westernized and urbane Lahoris, and the close quarters of the Mawdudi household, she was in the thick of this new life in no time at all. Though Mawdudi remained her guardian and she continued to correspond with him, her letters to her parents now filled up with the minutiae of life in a small town an hour south of Lahore. For eight months the letters from Pattoki poured out in a bubbling current.
I let myself be carried along by these new developments, losing myself in Margaret’s slipstream account of a busy household in a small town in the Punjab half a century before. Then, in the second to last of those twenty-four letters, I was furiously trying to back away from the precipice in front of me. After an unexplained five-month lapse in correspondence, Peggy wrote from yet another address. The building on Jail Road in Lahore was known locally as Paagal Khanaah. Just under a year after her arrival in Pakistan, Maryam Jameelah had been committed to the madhouse.
----
Paagal Khanaah
Jail Road
Lahore
PAKISTAN
July 1963
The more I considered it, the more convinced I became that the Mawlana and his political cadres had taken against me. Baijan, I now saw, was in league with him, however reluctantly. He and Appa had been nothing but kind to me. But not one week before I received the Mawlana’s letter, I had noticed that Baijan had grown quiet and withdrawn. He and Appa had recently returned from Lahore, where they had gone to see a doctor about Appa’s migraines. Or so I had been led to believe.
Except for that single trip, whenever he wasn’t at the medical dispensary or at meals, Baijan spent hours on the roof, pacing, repeating his Dhikr and running his fingers through his prayer beads over and over again. Long after the electric and kerosene lights went out, I could hear Baijan pace above my head, alone with Allah. When I commented on Baijan’s distraction and absorption in his prayers, Appa suggested that perhaps Baijan was planning to become a Sufi. Now I could only conclude that after wrestling at length with his conscience, Baijan felt that he had no choice but to agree to Mawdudi’s plan. That was when I first became frightened.
I immediately took refuge with a village neighbor so I could collect my thoughts. I tried my best to keep a rein on my fears. This was very difficult. Not since my departure from New York had I known
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