Book review

(The Times of India Crest Edition, June 4, 2011)

THE CONVERT
Deborah Baker

Once upon a time there was a young woman called Margaret Marcus. She lived in Larchmont, a postwar suburb of New York City, and was born and brought up a Jew. As she grew into an adult, she became absorbed in certain questions that, to her, were important. And these have been discovered, read, mulled over and re-presented by the author as a book that highlights the disconnect between the beliefs and tenets of Islam and the ways of the West. The subject, Margaret, did something unusual for the time and unexpected for her context – she converted to Islam, left her country and moved to Lahore, Pakistan, to live a far more restricted life and yet become one of the best known individuals in the discussion on what Islam is in the modern world. As Maryam Jameelah comes through as a woman not at peace with herself or her life, but one who teeters on the edge of fundamentalism and wrote loud and long and profusely about and against her former existence and the West in general.

As a character with issues Maryam is not the first of her kind that Baker has profiled. She has written about suicidal poet Laura Riding and about the mentally fragile Beats of India. But in Maryam she finds a subject who is the personification of the age-old debate between Islam and the West, sometimes loud and hectoring, sometimes quiet and strangely frightening, always edgy and just that fraction off a balance that could tip either way with unwanted, unwonted results. As she trolled through anonymous grey boxes that made up the archives at the New York Public Library, Baker found a little surprise: a Muslim name where most were Christian or Jewish. There were nine boxes containing letters home to parents and astonishingly contrasting texts written with a fanatic flavour and cited and respected in madrassas, vignettes of a life that changed so dramatically and drastically that it was as if one person had died and another had been born. It was a choice made – “a life lived by the sacred laws laid out in the Holy Qur’an or one blackened by hell-bent secular materialism”.

The book is in some ways confusing, wavering between Baker’s thoughts and Maryam’s rather more radical arguments, but it is absorbing, interesting, informative and, eerily, acceptable. There is a culture that to an Indian – especially a modern-day Hindu - is familiar, but as if seen from behind a veil composed of all the traits, characters and quirks of a religion that is not fully known or understood. And there is a personality that is so swept away by faith and the people with whom she associates that it is difficult to accept that degree of trust. There is suspense, there is an almost-soap-opera like story that twists and turns and goes from secrets about very intimate feelings, situations and happenings to a forum that is very public and global. And there is the underlying and growing awareness that Maryam is indeed a woman who is mentally disturbed, one who has demons to face that only she can see and hear.

Whether Maryam was unusual in her beliefs and decisions is not for anyone except herself and her conscience to say. But whether Baker should have recorded this life should not be in question – it is one worth knowing, if not living.