A Voice for Islam: The Story of Maryam Jameelah
Maryam Jameelah
27 years old, from United States
Previous Religion: Judaism
My Life Before Islam
Maryam Jameelah was born Margret Marcus on May 23, 1934, in New Rochelle, New York, into a Jewish family of German descent. Her parents were not observant, but she was drawn to questions of faith from an early age and explored Reform and Orthodox Judaism, Ethical Culture, and the Bahá'í faith during her teenage years, finding none of them satisfying. At New York University she read the Qur'an for the first time and studied the influence of Judaism on Islam, and she was deeply inspired by Muhammad Asad's book "The Road to Mecca", the account of an intellectual's journey from Judaism to Islam. She came to feel that modern Western society answered neither her spiritual questions nor her longing for meaning.
The Moment of Guidance
Illness and hospital stays interrupted her studies, but after returning home she devoted herself to reading and to the Islamic organizations of New York. She began a long correspondence with Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, the great Islamic thinker and founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami movement in Pakistan. The Qur'an and the teachings she encountered convinced her that Islam offered the truth and the framework for life that she had been seeking, and that its vision of God's unity answered the questions that had troubled her for years. Her search, which had begun in childhood, now had a clear direction, and she prepared her heart for the step she knew she must take.
Reflections
On May 24, 1961, at the age of twenty-seven, Margret Marcus embraced Islam at the Islamic Mission of America in Brooklyn and took the name Maryam Jameelah. In 1962, accepting Maulana Maududi's invitation, she emigrated to Pakistan, where she lived at first with his family and then married Muhammad Yusuf Khan, a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, with whom she raised five children in Lahore. She described those early years in Pakistan as the formative period of her life, when she matured and began her life's work as a writer in defense of Islam. She never returned to America, and Pakistan became her home for the rest of her life.
Maryam Jameelah authored more than thirty books on Islamic culture and history and on the critique of Western secularism, including "Islam and Modernism" and "Western Civilization Condemned by Itself". Her works were translated into Urdu, Turkish, Persian, and other languages and were read across the Muslim world. She is remembered as one of the most prominent female voices of Islamic revival in the twentieth century, a defender of traditional Islam against the pressures of modernization. Scholars and readers continue to study her writings, which remain a reference point in Islamic intellectual life. She died in Lahore on October 31, 2012, after more than half a century of service to the faith she had found.