This American Jewish Woman Is MY SISTER NOW!!!!!!!!
Enzo
by Maryum Jameelah (formerly Margaret Marcus), an American Jew who
convert to Islam in the late 1950's.
I trace the beginning of my interest in Islam when as a child of ten ,
while attending a reformed Jewish "Sunday School" , I became fascinated with
the historical relationship between the Jews an the Arabs. From my Jewish
textbooks, I learned that Abraham was the father of the Arabs as well as the
Jews. I read how centuries later when in medieval Europe, Christian
persecution made their lives intolerable, the Jews were welcomed in Muslim
Spain and that it was the magnanimity if this same Arabic-Islamic
civilization which stimulated Hebrew culture to reach its highest peak of
achievement. Totally unaware of the true nature of Zionism, I naively
thought that Jews were returning to Palestine to strengthen their close ties
of kinship in religion and culture with their Semitic cousins. Together I
believed that the Jews and Arabs would cooperate to attain another Golden
Age of culture in the Middle East.
Despite my fascination with the study of Jewish history, I was
extremely unhappy at the "Sunday School". At this time I identified strongly
with the Jewish people in Europe, then suffering a horrible fate under the
Nazis and I was shocked that none of my class-fellows nor their parents took
their religion seriously. During the services at the synagogue, the children
used to read comic strips hidden in their prayer books and laugh to scorn at
the rituals. The children were so noisy and disorderly that the teachers
couldn't discipline them and found it very difficult to conduct the classes.
At home the atmosphere for religious observance was scarcely more congenial.
My elder sister detested the "Sunday School" so much that my mother
literally had to drag her out of bed in the mornings and she never went
without the struggle of tears and hot words. Finally my parents were
exhausted and let her quit. On the Jewish holy days instead of attending
Synagogues and fasting on Yum Kipper, my sister and I were taken out of
school to picnics and gay parties in fine restaurants. When my sister and I
were convinced our parents how miserable we were both at the Sunday School
they joined agnostic, humanist organization known as the Ethical Cultural
Movement.
The Ethical Culture Movement was founded late in the 19th century by
Felix Adler. While studying for the rabbinate, Felix Adler grew convinced
that devotion to ethical values as relative and man-made, regarding and
supernaturalism or theology as irrelevant, constituted the only religion fit
for the modern world. I attended the Ethical Culture "Sunday School" each
week from the age of eleven until I graduated at fifteen. Here I grew into
complete accord with the ideas of the movement ad regarded all traditional,
organized religions with scorn.
Throughout my adolescence I remained under the influence of humanistic
philosophy until, after I began to mature intellectually and atheism no
longer satisfied me, I began a renewed search for my identity. For a time I
joined a bahai group in New York called the "The caravan of East and West"
under the leadership of a Persian by the name of Mirza Ahmed Sohrab (D.1958)
who told me that he had been the secretary of Abdul Baha, one of the
founders of the Bahai. Initially I was attracted to the Bahai because of its
Islamic origin and its preaching about the oneness of the mankind, but when
I discovered how miserably they had failed to implement this ideal, I left
them a year later bitterly disillusioned. When I was eighteen years old, I
became a member of the local branch of the religious Zionist youth movement
known as the Mizrachi Hatzair, but when I found out what the real nature of
Zionism was, which made hostility between Jews and Arabs irreconcilable, I
left several months later in disgust. When I was twenty and a student in New
York University , one of my elective courses was "Judaism in Islam". My
professor, Rabbi Abraham Issac Katsh, the head of the Department of Hebrew
Studies there, he spared no efforts to convince his students -- all Jews
many of whom aspired to become Rabbis-- that Islam was derived from Judaism.
Our textbook, written by him * took each verse from the Quran ,
painstakingly tracing it to its alleged Jewish source. Although his real aim
was to prove to his students the superiority of Judaism over Islam, he
convinced me diametrically the opposite. I was repelled by the
sub-ordination of the Hereafter, so vividly ported in the Holy Quran, to the
alleged divine right of the Jews to Palestine. The Jewish God in the Old
Testament and in the Jewish prayer book appeared to me distorted and
degraded into some kind of real estate agent ! The fusion of Parochial
nationalism with religion, I thought had spiritually impoverished Judaism
beyond redemption. The rigid exclusiveness of Judaism I felt had a great
deal of connection with the persecutions the Jews have suffered throughout
their history. I reflected that perhaps these tragedies wouldn't have
happened if the Jews had competed vigorously with other faiths for converts.
I soon discovered that Zionism was merely a combination of the racist,
tribalistic Judaism with modern secular nationalism. Zionism was further
discredited in my eyes when I learnt that few if any of the leaders of the
Zionism were observant Jews and that perhaps nowhere is orthodox,
traditional Judaism regarded with such intense contempt as in Israel. When I
found nearly all important Jewish leaders in America uncritical supporters
of Zionism who felt not the slightest twinge of conscience because of the
terrible injustice inflicted on the Palestinian Arabs, I could no longer
consider myself a Jew at heart.
One morning in November 1954, Professor Katsh during his lecture,
argued with irrefutable logic that the monotheism taught my Moses (PBUH) and
the Divine laws related to him at Sinai were indispensable as the basis for
all higher ethical values. If morals were purely man-made as the Ethical
Culture and other agnostic and atheistic philosophies taught then they could
be changed at will according to mere whim, convenience or circumstance. The
result would be utter chaos leading to individual and collective ruin.
Belief in the Hereafter as the Rabbis in the Talmud taught, argued Prof.
Katsh. was not mere wishful thinking but a moral necessity. Only those he
said who firmly believed that each of us will be summoned by God on judgment
Day to render a complete account of our life and rewarded or punished
accordingly, will possess the self-discipline to sacrifice transitory
pleasures and endure hardships and sacrifice to attain lasting good. While
Prof. Katsh was lecturing thus, I was comparing in my mind what I had read
in the Old Testament and the Talmud with what was taught in the Quran and
Hadith and finding Judaism so defective, I was converted to Islam.
Although I wanted to become a Muslim as far back as in 1954, my family
managed to argue me out of it. I was warned that Islam would complicate my
life because it is not like Judaism and Christianity, part of the American
scene. I was told that Islam would alienate me from my family and isolate me
from the community. At that time my faith wasn't sufficiently strong to
withstand these pressures. Partly as the result of my inner turmoil, I
became so ill that I had to discontinue college long before it was any time
for me to graduate so that I never earned any diploma. For the next two
years I remained at home under private medical care, steadily growing worse.
in desperation from 1957-1959, my parents confined me both to private and
public hospitals where I vowed that if I ever recovered sufficiently to be
discharged I would embrace Islam.
After I was allowed to return home, I investigated all the
opportunities to meet Muslims in New York City and it was my good fortune to
make the acquaintance of some of the finest men and women anyone could ever
hope to meet. I also began to write articles for Muslim magazines and carry
on an extensive correspondence with Muslim leaders all over the world. I
corresponded with the late Sheikh Abrahimi, the leader of the ulema in
Algeria, Dr, Muhammad El-Bahay of Al-Azhar, Dr. Mahmud F Hoballah , then the
director of the Islamic center in Washington D.C., Dr. Hameedullah of Paris,
Dr. Said Ramadan, the director of the Islamic center of Geneva, and Maulana
Sayyid Abul Ala Maudoodi.
Even before I formally embraced Islam, I found the integrity of the
faith in the contemporary world greatly threatened by the so-called
modernist movement which aimed at adulterating its teachings with man-made
philosophies and reforms. I was convinced that had these modernizers had
their way , nothing of the original would be left ! As a child I had
witnessed with my own eyes in my own family how the liberals had mutilated
what had once been a Divinely revealed faith. Having been born a Jew and
reared in a Jewish family ,I had seen how futile was the attempt to
reconcile religion with atheistic environment. "Reformed Judaism" not only
failed to check the cultural assimilation of the Jews I knew but actively
encouraged the process. As a result they had become Jews by label only. None
had any religion worthy of the name. Throughout my childhood, the
intellectual dishonesty, hypocrisy and superficiality of "reformed" Judaism
was a vivid experience. Even at that early age I knew that such a watered
down, half-hearted compromise could never hope to retain the loyalty of its
members, much less their children. How dismayed I was when I found among the
Muslims, the same threat! How shocked I was when I found certain scholars
and some political leaders within the Muslim community guilty of the
identical sins for which the God in our Holy Quran has vehemently denounced
the Jews! Convinced that God wouldn't spare us from calamity and doom us to
the same fate the Jews have suffered unless we sincerely repented and
changed our ways, I vowed that I would devote all my literary struggle to
combating this menace from within before it was too late.
Thus in his first letter to me of January 1961, Maulana Maudoodi
wrote:
"While I was scanning your essays. I felt as if I were reading my very
own ideas. I hope your feeling will be the same when you have the
opportunity to learn Urdu and study my books. And that despite the fact
there has been no previous acquaintance between you and me, this mutual
sympathy and unanimity in thought has resulted directly from the fact that
both of us have derived our inspiration from one and the same source-- Islam
"
MARYUM JAMEELAH's BOOKS:
1. ISLAM VERSUS THE WEST
2. ISLAM AND MODERNISM
3. ISLAM IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
4. ISLAM VERSUS AHL AL KITAB PAST AND PRESENT
5. AHMAD KHALIL
6. ISLAM AND ORIENTALISM
7. WESTERN CIVILIZATION CONDEMNED BY ITSELF
8. CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN MAULANA MAUDOODI AND MARYUM JAMEELAH
9. ISLAM AND WESTERN SOCIETY
10. A MANIFESTO OF THE ISLAMIC MOVEMENT
11. IS WESTERN CIVILIZATION UNIVERSAL
12 WHO IS MAUDOODI ?
13 WHY I EMBRACED ISLAM
14 ISLAM AND THE MUSLIM WOMAN TODAY
15 ISLAM AND SOCIAL HABITS
16 ISLAMIC CULTURE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
17 THREE GREAT ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS IN THE ARAB WORLD OF THE RECENT PAST
18 SHAIKH HASAN AL BANNA AND IKHWAN AL MUSLIMUN
19 A GREAT ISLAMIC MOVEMENT IN TURKEY
20 TWO MUJAHIDIN OF THE RECENT PAST AND THEIR STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
AGAINST FOREIGN RULE
21 THE GENERATION GAP ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES
22 WESTERNIZATION VERSUS MUSLIMS
23 WESTERNIZATION AND HUMAN WELFARE
24 MODERN TECHNOLOGY AND THE DEHUMANIZATION OF MAN
25 ISLAM AND MODERN MAN