An American in search of Mecca

What were the political and emotional consequences that compelled Margaret Marcus to become Maryam Jameelah? Renowned biographer Deborah Baker gets under the skin of the 'first American woman to convert to Islam', who would become one of the most prominent voices in the continuing 'West vs Islam' debate, in her latest book, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism

An American in search of Mecca

The Convert is biographer Deborah Baker's account of what compelled 28-year-old Margaret Marcus of New York, the daughter of secular Jewish parents, to reject the idea of '60s America in her quest for identity.

Margaret Marcus would become Maryam Jameelah: the first American woman to convert to Islam, and a distinct voice for traditional Islamic culture and beliefs from the Western world.

The Convert: A tale of Exile and Extremism; Deborah Baker; R 450;
Penguin Books India; available at leading bookstores

Baker uses the letters (both "actual" and "imaginary") Maryam wrote her parents, followed by her own grappling with the ideas of a person she was initially "curious" about, but yet "distant" from.

"I first stumbled on the archive (in the New York Public Library) in the spring of 2007 and travelled to Pakistan that December. My experience there so rattled me that after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, I put the book aside for nearly a year. I returned to it and completed the first draft, the first of many, by the summer of 2009. It took me a long time to find anyone to publish it, and when I did it went through further revisions," says Baker in an email interview.

The acclaimed biographer, who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, defines her vocation as "anonymity", but admits to initially finding Maryam's voice hard to "perform" in light of the 9/11 attacks.

"Biographers are meant to be rather invisible presences; an anonymous yet authoritative voice, ferreting out facts, secrets, elucidating themes, adjudicating conflicting versions of signal events. I was always more comfortable inhabiting my subjects than judging them, I understood this role. However, as I was researching and writing this book in the midst of the war on terror, it was impossible to pose as a disinterested observer."

The chronicle of Maryam's journey therefore, also marks the journey taken by Baker in the effort to engage with her subject. "The questions raised by Maryam's life, her religious beliefs and political convictions, were just too fraught. I conceived of the book not as a traditional biography, but as a tale or a parable in which my voice purportedly represented 'the West' while Maryam's represented 'Islam'," explains Baker.

Not imagined
In the book, Baker mentions that the actual letters of Maryam do not appear as she [Maryam] wrote them, and that the letters have had to be re-written and condensed. She is keen however that the book not be classified as 'fiction'.

"This is a work of non-fiction. I did not make anything up. I felt bound by the real letters Maryam wrote, and the "fictional" letters, because I decided that both were sincere efforts on Maryam's part to make narrative sense of her life, both the one she had lived in America prior to leaving for Pakistan, and the life she lived in Pakistan up to the time of her marriage."

About being drawn to a voice so distinct from her own, but one that the writer, who is married to author Amitav Ghosh, would eventually define as one "that often came more easily than my own", she says, "I wanted readers to like her, to find her appealing in exactly the way I found her appealing, so that when I introduced the more problematic aspects of her life, the reader would have too much invested to simply abandon her."

She adds, "The challenge was in keeping this balance and using the reader's natural curiosity about how the story was going to end as a means to explore the real cost of the political and religious philosophy of Maryam Jameelah."