Interview with Maryam
Jameelah
Q: Would you kindly tell
us how your interest in Islam began?
A: I
was Margaret (Peggy) Marcus. As a small child I possessed a keen
interest in music and was particularly fond of the classical operas
and symphonies considered high culture in the West. Music was my
favorite subject in school in which I always earned the highest
grades. By sheer chance, I happened to hear Arabic music over the
radio which so much pleased me that I was determined to hear more.
I would not leave my parents in peace until my father finally took
me to the Syrian section in New York City where I bought a stack of
Arabic recordings. My parents, relatives and neighbors thought
Arabic and its music dreadfully weird and so distressing to their
ears that whenever I put on my recordings, they demanded that I
close all the doors and windows in my room lest they be disturbed!
After I embraced Islam in 1961, I used to sit enthralled by the
hour at the mosque in New York, listening to tape-recordings of
Tilawat chanted by the celebrated Egyptian Qari, Abdul Basit. But
on Jumha Salat (Friday Prayers), the Imam did not play the tapes.
We had a special guest that day. A short, very thin and
poorly-dressed black youth, who introduced himself to us as a
student from Zanzibar, recited Surah ar-Rahman. I never heard such
glorious Tilawat even from Abdul Basit! He possessed such a voice
of gold; surely Hazrat Bilal must have sounded much like
him!
I traced the beginning of my
interest in Islam to the age of ten. While attending a reformed
Jewish Sunday school, I became fascinated with the historical
relationship between the Jews and 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
of 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 the 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 the 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 myself strongly with the Jewish
people in Europe, then suffering a horrible fate under the Nazis
and I was shocked that none of my fellow classmates 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 could not 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 it never went without the
struggle of tears and hot words. Finally my parents were exhausted
and let her quit. On the Jewish High Holy Days instead of attending
synagogue and fasting on Yom Kippur, my sister and I were taken out
of school to attend family picnics and parties in fine restaurants.
When my sister and I convinced our parents how miserable we both
were at the Sunday school they joined an agnostic, humanist
organization known as the Ethical Culture Movement.
The Ethical Culture Movement was
founded late in the 19th century by Felix Alder. While studying for
rabbinate, Felix Alder grew convinced that devotion to ethical
values as relative and man-made, regarding any 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 and
regarded all traditional, organized religions with
scorn.
When I was eighteen years old I
became a member of the local Zionist youth movement known as the
Mizrachi Hatzair. But when I found out what the nature of Zionism
was, which made the hostility between Jews and Arabs
irreconcilable, I left several months later in disgust. When I was
twenty and a student at New York University, one of my elective
courses was entitled Judaism in Islam. My professor, Rabbi Abraham
Isaac Katsh, the head of the department of Hebrew Studies there,
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 allegedly Jewish source. Although
his real aim was to prove to his students the superiority of
Judaism over Islam, he convinced me diametrically of the
opposite.
I soon discovered that Zionism was
merely a combination of the racist, tribalistic aspects of Judaism.
Modern secular nationalistic Zionism was further discredited in my
eyes when I learned that few, if any, of the leaders of 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
supporters for Zionism, who felt not the slightest twinge of
conscience because of the terrible injustice inflicted upon 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 by Moses (peace be upon him) and the
Divine Laws reveled to him 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 Professor 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
Judgement Day to render a complete account of our life on earth and
rewarded or punished accordingly, will possess the self-discipline
to sacrifice transitory pleasure and endure hardships and sacrifice
to attain lasting good.
It was in Professor Katsh's class
that I met Zenita, the most unusual and fascinating girl I have
ever met. The first time I entered Professor Katsh's class, as I
looked around the room for an empty desk in which to sit, I spied
two empty seats, on the arm of one, three big beautifully bound
volumes of Yusuf Ali's English translation and commentary of the
Holy Quran. I sat down right there, burning with curiosity to find
out to whom these volumes belonged. Just before Rabbi Katsh's
lecture was to begin, a tall, very slim girl with pale complexion
framed by thick auburn hair, sat next to me. Her appearance was so
distinctive, I thought she must be a foreign student from Turkey,
Syria or some other Near Eastern country. Most of the other
students were young men wearing the black cap of Orthodox Jewry,
who wanted to become rabbis. We two were the only girls in the
class. As we were leaving the library late that afternoon, she
introduced herself to me. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family, her
parents had migrated to America from Russia only a few years prior
to the October Revolution in 1917 to escape persecution. I noted
that my new friend spoke English with the precise care of a
foreigner. She confirmed these speculations, telling me that since
her family and their friends speak only Yiddish among themselves,
she did not learn any English until after attending public school.
She told me that her name was Zenita Liebermann but recently, in an
attempt to Americanize themselves, her parents had changed their
name from "Liebermann" to "Lane." Besides being thoroughly
instructed in Hebrew by her father while growing up and also in
school, she said she was now spending all her spare time studying
Arabic. However, with no previous warning, Zenita dropped out of
class and although I continued to attend all of his lectures to the
conclusion of the course, Zenita never returned. Months passed and
I had almost forgotten about Zenita when suddenly she called and
begged me to meet her at the Metropolitan Museum and go with her to
look at the special exhibition of exquisite Arabic calligraphy and
ancient illuminated manuscripts of the Quran. During our tour of
the museum, Zenita told me how she had embraced Islam with two of
her Palestinian friends as witnesses.
I inquired, "Why did you decide to
become a Muslim?" She then told me that she had left Professor
Katsh's class when she fell ill with a severe kidney infection. Her
condition was so critical, she told me, her mother and father had
not expected her to survive. "One afternoon while burning with
fever, I reached for my Holy Quran on the table beside by bed and
began to read and while I recited the verses, it touched me so
deeply that I began to weep and then I knew I would recover. As
soon as I was strong enough to leave my bed, I summoned two of my
Muslim friends and took the oath of the "Shahadah" or Confession of
Faith."
Zenita and I would eat our meals
in Syrian restaurants where I acquired a keen taste for this tasty
cooking. When we had money to spend, we would order Couscous, roast
lamb with rice or a whole soup plate of delicious little meatballs
swimming in gravy scooped up with loaves of unleavened Arabic
bread. And when we had little to spend, we would eat lentils and
rice, Arabic style, or the Egyptian national dish of black broad
beans with plenty of garlic and onions called "Ful".
While Professor 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.
Q: Were you scared that
you might not be accepted by the Muslims?
A: My
increasing sympathy for Islam and Islamic ideals enraged the other
Jews I knew, who regarded me as having betrayed them in the worst
possible way. They used to tell me that such a reputation could
only result from shame of my ancestral heritage and an intense
hatred for my people. They warned me that even if I tried to become
a Muslim, I would never be accepted. These fears proved totally
unfounded as I have never been stigmatized by any Muslim because of
my Jewish origin. As soon as I became a Muslim myself, I was
welcomed most enthusiastically by all the Muslims as one of
them.
I did not embrace Islam out of
hatred for my ancestral heritage or my people. It was not a desire
so much to reject as to fulfill. To me, it meant a transition from
parochial to a dynamic and revolutionary faith.
Q: Did your family object
to your studying Islam?
A: Although I wanted to become a Muslim as far back as 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 was not sufficiently strong to withstand
these pressures. Partly as the result of this inner turmoil, I
became so ill that I had to discontinue college long before it was
time for me to graduate. 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 ever I recovered sufficiently to be
discharged, I would embrace Islam.
After I was allowed to return
home, I investigated all the opportunities for meeting Muslims in
New York City. It was my good fortune to meet some of the finest
men and women anyone could ever hope to meet. I also began to write
articles for Muslim magazines.
Q: What was the attitude
of your parents and friends after you became
Muslim?
A: When I embraced Islam, my parents, relatives and their friends
regarded me almost as a fanatic, because I could think and talk of
nothing else. To them, religion is a purely private concern which
at the most perhaps could be cultivated like an amateur hobby among
other hobbies. But as soon as I read the Holy Quran, I knew that
Islam was no hobby but life itself!
Q: In what ways did the
Holy Quran have an impact on your life?
A: One
evening I was feeling particularly exhausted and sleepless, Mother
came into my room and said she was about to go to the Larchmont
Public Library and asked me if there was any book that I wanted? I
asked her to look and see if the library had a copy of an English
translation of the Holy Quran. Just think, years of passionate
interest in the Arabs and reading every book in the library about
them I could lay my hands on but until now, I never thought to see
what was in the Holy Quran! Mother returned with a copy for me. I
was so eager, I literally grabbed it from her hands and read it the
whole night. There I also found all the familiar Bible stories of
my childhood.
In my eight years of primary
school, four years of secondary school and one year of college, I
learned about English grammar and composition, French, Spanish,
Latin and Greek in current use, Arithmetic, Geometry, Algebra,
European and American history, elementary science, Biology, music
and art--but I had never learned anything about God! Can you
imagine I was so ignorant of God that I wrote to my pen-friend, a
Pakistani lawyer, and confessed to him the reason why I was an
atheist was because I couldn't believe that God was really an old
man with a long white beard who sat up on His throne in Heaven.
When he asked me where I had learned this outrageous thing, I told
him of the reproductions from the Sistine Chapel I had seen in
"Life" Magazine of Michelangelo's "Creation" and "Original Sin." I
described all the representations of God as an old man with a long
white beard and the numerous crucifixions of Christ I had seen with
Paula at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But in the Holy Quran, I
read:
"Allah! There is no god
but He,-the Living, The Self-subsisting, Supporter of all. No
slumber can seize Him nor sleep. His are all things in the heavens
and on earth. Who is thee can intercede in His presence except as
He permiteth? He knoweth what (appeareth to His creatures as)
before or after or behind them. Nor shall they compass aught of His
knowledge except as He willeth. His Throne doth extend over the
heavens and the earth, and He feeleth no fatigue in guarding and
preserving them for He is the Most High, the Supreme (in
glory)." (Quran S.2:255)
"But the
Unbelievers,-their deeds are like a mirage in sandy deserts, which
the man parched with thirst mistakes for water; until when he comes
up to it, he finds Allah there, and Allah will pay him his account:
and Allah is swift in taking account. Or (the unbelievers' state)
is like the depths of darkness in a vast deep ocean, overwhelmed
with billow topped by billow, topped by (dark) clouds: depth of
darkness, one above another: if a man stretches out his hand, he
can hardly see it! for any to whom Allah giveth not light, there is
no light!" (Quran S.24: 39-40)
My first thought when reading the
Holy Quran - this is the only true religion - absolutely sincere,
honest, not allowing cheap compromises or hypocrisy.
In 1959, I spent much of my
leisure time reading books about Islam in the New York Public
Library. It was there I discovered four bulky volumes of an English
translation of Mishkat ul- Masabih. It was then that I learned that
a proper and detailed understanding of the Holy Quran is not
possible without some knowledge of the relevant Hadith. For how can
the holy text correctly be interpreted except by the Prophet to
whom it was revealed?
Once I had studied the Mishkat, I
began to accept the Holy Quran as Divine revelation. What persuaded
me that the Quran must be from God and not composed by Muhammad
(PBUH) was its satisfying and convincing answers to all the most
important questions of life which I could not find
elsewhere.
As a child, I was so mortally
afraid of death, particularly the thought of my own death, that
after nightmares about it, sometimes I would awaken my parents
crying in the middle of the night. When I asked them why I had to
die and what would happen to me after death, all they could say was
that I had to accept the inevitable; but that was a long way off
and because medical science was constantly advancing, perhaps I
would live to be a hundred years old! My parents, family, and all
our friends rejected as superstition any thought of the Hereafter,
regarding Judgment Day, reward in Paradise or punishment in Hell as
outmoded concepts of by-gone ages. In vain I searched all the
chapters of the Old Testament for any clear and unambiguous concept
of the Hereafter. The prophets, patriarchs and sages of the Bible
all receive their rewards or punishments in this world. Typical is
the story of Job (Hazrat Ayub). God destroyed all his loved-ones,
his possessions, and afflicted him with a loathsome disease in
order to test his faith. Job plaintively laments to God why He
should make a righteous man suffer. At the end of the story, God
restores all his earthly losses but nothing is even mentioned about
any possible consequences in the Hereafter.
Although I did find the Hereafter
mentioned in the New Testament, compared with that of the Holy
Quran, it is vague and ambiguous. I found no answer to the question
of death in Orthodox Judaism, for the Talmud preaches that even the
worst life is better than death. My parents' philosophy was that
one must avoid contemplating the thought of death and just enjoy as
best one can, the pleasures life has to offer at the moment.
According to them, the purpose of life is enjoyment and pleasure
achieved through self-expression of one's talents, the love of
family, the congenial company of friends combined with the
comfortable living and indulgence in the variety of amusements that
affluent America makes available in such abundance. They
deliberately cultivated this superficial approach to life as if it
were the guarantee for their continued happiness and good-fortune.
Through bitter experience I discovered that self-indulgence leads
only to misery and that nothing great or even worthwhile is ever
accomplished without struggle through adversity and self-sacrifice.
From my earliest childhood, I have always wanted to accomplish
important and significant things. Above all else, before my death I
wanted the assurance that I have not wasted life in sinful deeds or
worthless pursuits. All my life I have been intensely
serious-minded. I have always detested the frivolity which is the
dominant characteristic of contemporary culture. My father once
disturbed me with his unsettling conviction that there is nothing
of permanent value and because everything in this modern age accept
the present trends inevitable and adjust ourselves to them. I,
however, was thirsty to attain something that would endure forever.
It was from the Holy Quran where I learned that this aspiration was
possible. No good deed for the sake of seeking the pleasure of God
is ever wasted or lost. Even if the person concerned never achieves
any worldly recognition, his reward is certain in the Hereafter.
Conversely, the Quran tells us that those who are guided by no
moral considerations other than expediency or social conformity and
crave the freedom to do as they please, no matter how much worldly
success and prosperity they attain or how keenly they are able to
relish the short span of their earthly life, will be doomed as the
losers on Judgement Day. Islam teaches us that in order to devote
our exclusive attention to fulfilling our duties to God and to our
fellow-beings, we must abandon all vain and useless activities
which distract us from this end. These teachings of the Holy Quran,
made even more explicit by Hadith, were thoroughly compatible with
my temperament.
Q: What is your opinion of
the Arabs after you became a Muslim?
A: As
the years passed, the realization gradually dawned upon me that it
was not the Arabs who made Islam great but rather Islam had made
the Arabs great. Were it not for the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH),
the Arabs would be an obscure people today. And were it not for the
Holy Quran, the Arabic language would be equally insignificant, if
not extinct.
Q: Did you see any
similarities between Judaism and Islam?
A:
The kinship between Judaism and Islam is even
stronger than Islam and Christianity. Both Judaism and Islam share
in common the same uncompromising monotheism, the crucial
importance of strict obedience to Divine Law as proof of our
submission to and love of the Creator, the rejection of the
priesthood, celibacy and monasticism and the striking similarity of
the Hebrew and Arabic language.
In Judaism, religion is so
confused with nationalism, one can scarcely distinguish between the
two. The name "Judaism" is derived from Judah-a tribe. A Jew is a
member of the tribe of Judah. Even the name of this religion
connotes no universal spiritual message. A Jew is not a Jew by
virtue of his belief in the unity of God, but merely because he
happened to be born of Jewish parentage. Should he become an
outspoken atheist, he is no less "Jewish" in the eyes of his fellow
Jews.
Such a thorough corruption with
nationalism has spiritually impoverished this religion in all its
aspects. God is not the God of all mankind but the God of Israel.
The scriptures are not God's revelation to the entire human race
but primarily a Jewish history book. David and Solomon (peace be
upon them) are not full-fledged prophets of God but merely Jewish
kings. With the single exception of Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of
Atonement), the holidays and festivals celebrated by Jews, such as
Hanukkah, Purim and Pesach, are of far greater national than
religious significance.
Q: Have you ever had the
opportunity to talk about Islam to the other
Jews?
A: There is one particular incident which really stands out in my
mind when I had the opportunity to discuss Islam with a Jewish
gentleman. Dr. Shoreibah, of the Islamic Center in New York,
introduced me to a very special guest. After one Jumha Salat, I
went into his office to ask him some questions about Islam but
before I could even greet him with "Assalamu Alaikum", I was
completely astonished and surprised to see seated before him an
ultra-orthodox Chassidic Jew, complete with earlocks, broad-brimmed
black hat, long black silken caftan and a full flowing beard. Under
his arm was a copy of the Yiddish newspaper, "The Daily Forward".
He told us that his name was Samuel Kostelwitz and that he worked
in New York City as a diamond cutter. Most of his family, he said,
lived in the Chassidic community of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, but
he also had many relatives and friends in Israel. Born in a small
Rumanian town, he had fled from the Nazi terror with his parents to
America just prior to the outbreak of the second world-war. I asked
him what had brought him to the mosque? He told us that he had been
stricken with intolerable grief ever since his mother died 5 years
ago. He had tried to find solace and consolation for his grief in
the synagogue but could not when he discovered that many of the
Jews, even in the ultra-orthodox community of Williamsburg, were
shameless hypocrites. His recent trip to Israel had left him more
bitterly disillusioned than ever. He was shocked by the
irreligiousness he found in Israel and he told us that nearly all
the young sabras or native-born Israelis are militant atheists.
When he saw large herds of swine on one of the kibbutzim
(collective farms) he visited, he could only exclaim in horror:
"Pigs in a Jewish state! I never thought that was possible until I
came here! Then when I witnessed the brutal treatment meted out to
innocent Arabs in Israel, I know then that there is no difference
between the Israelis and the Nazis. Never, never in the name of
God, could I justify such terrible crimes!" Then he turned to Dr.
Shoreibah and told him that he wanted to become a Muslim but before
he took the irrevocable steps to formal conversion, he needed to
have more knowledge about Islam. He said that he had purchased from
Orientalia Bookshop, some books on Arabic grammar and was trying to
teach himself Arabic. He apologized to us for his broken English:
Yiddish was his native tongue and Hebrew, his second language.
Among themselves, his family and friends spoke only Yiddish. Since
his reading knowledge of English was extremely poor, he had no
access to good Islamic literature. However, with the aid of an
English dictionary, he painfully read "Introduction to Islam" by
Muhammad Hamidullah of Paris and praised this as the best book he
had ever read. In the presence of Dr. Shoreibah, I spent another
hour with Mr. Kostelwitz, comparing the Bible stories of the
patriarchs and prophets with their counterparts in the Holy Quran.
I pointed out the inconsistencies and interpolations of the Bible,
illustrating my point with Noah's alleged drunkenness, accusing
David of adultery and Solomon of idolatry (Allah Forbid) and how
the Holy Quran raises all these patriarchs to the status of genuine
prophets of God and absolves them from all these crimes. I also
pointed out why it was Ismail and not Isaac who God commanded
Abraham to offer as sacrifice. In the Bible, God tells Abraham:
"Take thine son, thine only son whom thou lovest and offer him up
to Me as burnt offering." Now Ismail was born 13 years before Isaac
but the Jewish biblical commentators explain that away be
belittling Ismail's mother, Hagar, as only a concubine and not
Abraham's real wife so they say Isaac was the only legitimate son.
Islamic traditions, however, raise Hagar to the status of a
full-fledged wife equal in every respect to Sarah. Mr. Kostelwitz
expressed his deepest gratitude to me for spending so much time,
explaining those truths to him. To express this gratitude, he
insisted on inviting Dr. Shoreibah and me to lunch at the Kosher
Jewish delicatessen where he always goes to eat his lunch. Mr.
Kostelwitz told us that he wished more than anything else to
embrace Islam but he feared he could not withstand the persecution
he would have to face from his family and friends. I told him to
pray to God for help and strength and he promised that he would.
When he left us, I felt privileged to have spoken with such a
gentle and kind person.
Q: What Impact did Islam
have on your life ?
A: In
Islam, my quest for absolute values was satisfied. In Islam I found
all that was true, good and beautiful and that which gives meaning
and direction to human life (and death); while in other religions,
the Truth is deformed, distorted, restricted and fragmentary. If
any one chooses to ask me how I came to know this, I can only reply
my personal life experience was sufficient to convince me. My
adherence to the Islamic faith is thus a calm, cool but very
intense conviction. I have, I believe, always been a Muslim at
heart by temperament, even before I knew there was such a thing as
Islam. My conversion was mainly a formality, involving no radical
change in my heart at all but rather only making official what I
had been thinking and yearning for many years.
