Muslim Identity on the Suburban Frontier: The American-Jewish Context of Maryam Jameelah’s Conversion to Islam

In 1989, nearly thirty years after she left the United States, Maryam Jameelah (1934–2012), published the first part of a two-volume memoir that recounted the unlikely story of a middle-class American Jew from Westchester, New York who moved to Pakistan and embraced the cause of conservative Islam. The first volume, entitled Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America (1945–1962): The Story of One Western Convert’s Quest for Truth, consisted of some two dozen letters that Jameelah—formerly Margaret Marcus, or Peggy as she was known to her family and friends—had supposedly written between the ages of eleven and twenty-eight. Taken together, the letters tell the story of the first three decades of a life marked by social isolation, mental anguish, and cultural displacement, which were overcome through Jameelah’s turn to Islam. This epistolary memoir traces the author’s singular path from a troubled childhood and youth in suburban America to Lahore, Pakistan, where she found her true home.¹

Although Jameelah cuts a highly idiosyncratic figure in the landscape of American-Jewish history, her religious identity is very much a product of the postwar era. Her relevance to the American-Jewish experience consists in the fact that her conversion to Islam was a response to the same religious, cultural, and social challenges faced by other members of her generation. In the memoir, Jameelah’s conversion to Islam parallels and competes with other, more common paths toward the reclamation of an ethnic Jewish identity. Jameelah presents her conversion as an alternative to other contemporary Jewish political and cultural movements, such as Orthodox and Zionist groups, which she joined in her youth. Revealed in her memoir is an intricate and ongoing dialogue with alternative American-Jewish identities that emerged in the wake of World War II.

The apocryphal letters recount Peggy’s discontent with the Marcus family’s assimilated, all-American lifestyle and her different attempts to fill the spiritual void left by their religious indifference. Before converting to Islam Peggy develops an interest in Orthodox Judaism. She tries joining the Young Women’s Jewish Association in New York, and attends the meetings of a Zionist organization as well as a youth group at an Orthodox synagogue in Mamaroneck. After her brief flirtation with Judaism, Peggy experiments with the Baha’i faith, but abandons it soon after. Summarizing her unsuccessful quest for religious and communal belonging, she writes:

Although I had just entered my nineteenth year, it seemed to me as if my life had already come to an end. I was discouraged, exhausted, depressed and in despair at having met with nothing but one rebuff after another whenever I tried to find my place in society. I was simply adrift at sea, not knowing what to do next or where to go. Neither reformed Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, Ethical Culture or Baha’i could console me in my plight.²

In her late teens and early twenties, Peggy undergoes intensive psychological treatment, and meets a slew of analysts at her parents’ behest. She is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spends 1957 to 1959 in mental institutions.³ Upon her release, Peggy returns to live with her parents, but their already strained relationship soon reaches a breaking point, when Peggy vociferously attacks her parents for their support of Israel. After this argument Herbert Marcus asks his daughter to leave the house and demands that she begin supporting herself. Once she leaves her parents’ home Peggy officially converts to Islam and begins corresponding with leading Muslim intellectuals around the world. Her correspondents include the Pakistani cleric Maulana Maududi and Said Ramadan, father of Tariq Ramadan and son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.⁴ Sensing a kindred spirit in Jameelah, Maududi invites her to live with him and his family in Pakistan. Lacking any viable options in the United States Jameelah accepts his offer and moves to Lahore in 1961.⁵

In 1963, after her release from another stint in a mental institution, Jameelah marries one of...