An American, in search of Mecca

The Convert is biographer Deborah Baker's account of what compelled the 28-year-old Margaret Marcus, the daughter of secular Jewish parents living in New York, 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 in the Western world.

Baker uses the letters (both "actual" and "imaginary") Jameelah 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 traveled 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.u00a0It took me a long time to find anyone to publish it, and when I did it went through further revisions," says Baker, who is married to author Amitav Ghosh, 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. Though 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 one that the author had to take to engage with her subject. "The questions raised by Maryam Jameelah'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.

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 nonfiction.u00a0I 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, one that Baker 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."

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