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Maryum JameelahBismillah Walhamdulillah Was Salaatu Was Salaam 'ala RasulillahBrothers and Sisters Assalam o Alaikum:Here i have narrated the reflections of one of the first American Jewishwomen to accept islam. This narration below in her own words is not justa story, but the beginning of her literary mission to combat modernisminflicted on islam by so called reformers. Brothers and Sisters we allhave to be very careful to save us and other Muslims from thismenace. Maryam Jameelah has written a great number of books to combatthis, the list is at the end of this post.The depth of the writer's faith is demonstrated by one of thesignificant events of her life that when she grew certain that herfuture as a muslim was hopelessly bleak in 1961 she migrated toPakistan under the responsibility of Sayyid Maulana Maududi whereshe has taken up permanent residence at the home of her husband'sfamily in Lahore.As she has quoted the Hadith on the very first page of her book"Islam and Orientalism"" Ahwas bin hakim reported from his father that a man asked theMessenger of Allah about evils. He replied : Don't ask me evils but askme regarding good ( saying it thrice ). Then he said ; Beware ! Surelythe worst of evils is the evil of the learned and surely the best ofgood is the good of the learned. "May Allah give me and everyone hidayaAmeenWassalam------------------------------------------Quoted from her book "Islam and Modernism"------------------------------------------ Why I embraced Islam MARYUM JAMEELAH (formerly Margret Marcus)I trace the beginning of my interest in Islam when as a child of ten ,while attending a reformed Jewish "Sunday School" , I became fascinatedwith the historical relationship between the Jews an the Arabs. From myJewish textbooks, I learned that Abraham was the father of the Arabs aswell as the Jews. I read how centuries later when in medieval Europe,Christian persecution made their lives intolerable, the Jews werewelcomed in Muslim Spain and that it was the magnanimity if this sameArabic-Islamic civilization which stimulated Hebrew culture to reach itshighest peak of achievement. Totally unaware of the true nature ofZionism, i naively thought that Jews were returning to Palestine tostrengthen their close ties of kinship in religion and culture withtheir semitic cousins. Together i believed that the Jews and Arabs wouldcooperate to attain another Golden Age of culture in the Middle East.Despite my fascination with the study of Jewish history, I was extremelyunhappy at the "Sunday School". At this time i identified strongly withthe Jewish people in Europe, then suffering a horrible fate under theNazis and I was shocked that none of my class-fellows nor their parentstook their religion seriously. During the services at the synagogue, thechildren used to read comic strips hidden in their prayer books andlaugh to scorn at the rituals. The children were so noisy and disorderlythat the teachers couldn't discipline them and found it very difficultto conduct the classes. At home the atmosphere for religious observancewas scarcely more congenial. My elder sister detested the "SundaySchool" so much that my mother literally had to drag her out of bed inthe mornings and she never went without the struggle of tears and hotwords. Finally my parents were exhausted and let her quit. On the Jewishholy days instead of attending Synagogues and fasting on Yum Kipper, mysister and i were taken out of school to picnics and gay parties in finerestaurants. When my sister and i were convinced our parents howmiserable we were both at the Sunday School they joined agnostic,humanist organization known as the ETHICAL CULTURE MOVEMENT.The Ethical Culture Movement was founded late in the 19th century byFelix Adler. While studying for the rabbinate, Felix Adler grewconvinced that devotion to ethical values as relative and man-made,regarding and supernaturalism or theology as irrelevant, constituted theonly religion fit for the modern world. I attended the Ethical Culture"Sunday School" each week from the age of eleven until i graduated atfifteen. Here i grew into complete accord with the ideas of the movementad regarded all traditional, organized religions with scorn.Throughout my adolescence i remained under the influence of humanisticphilosophy until, after i began to mature intellectually and atheism nolonger satisfied me, I began a renewed search for my identity. For atime i joined a bahai group in New York called the "The caravan of Eastand West" under the leadership of a persian by the name of Mirza AhmedSohrab (D.1958) who told me that he had been the secretary of AbdulBaha, one of the founders of the Bahai. Initially i was attracted to theBahai because of its Islamic origin and its preaching about the onenessof the mankind, but when I discovered how miserably they had failed toimplement this ideal, I left them a year later bitterly disillusioned.When i was eighteen years old, I became a member of the local branch ofthe religious Zionist youth movement known as the Mizrachi Hatzair, butwhen i found out what the real nature of Zionism was, which madehostility between Jews and Arabs irreconcilable, I left several monthslater in disgust. When I was twenty and a student in New York University, one of my elective courses was "Judaism in Islam". My professor, RabbiAbraham Issac Katsh, the head of the Department of Hebrew Studies there,he spared no efforts to convince his students -- all Jews many of whomaspired to become Rabbis-- that Islam was derived from Judaism. Ourtextbook, written by him * took each verse from the Quran ,painstakingly tracing it to its alleged Jewish source. Although his realaim was to prove to his students the superiority of Judaism over Islam,he convinced me diametrically the opposite. I was repelled by thesub-ordination of the Hereafter, so vividly ported in the Holy Quran,to the alleged divine right of the Jews to Palestine. The Jewish God inthe Old Testament and in the Jewish prayer book appeared to me distortedand degraded into some kind of real estate agent ! The fusion ofParochial nationalism with religion, I thought had spirituallyimpoverished Judaism beyond redemption. The rigid exclusiveness ofJudaism I felt had a great deal of connection with the persecutions theJews have suffered throughout their history. I reflected that perhapsthese tragedies wouldn't have happened if the jews had competedvigorously with other faiths for converts. I soon discovered thatZionism was merely a combination of the racist, tribalistic Judaism withmodern secular nationalism. Zionism was further discredited in my eyeswhen i learnt that few if any of the leaders of the Zionism wereobservant Jews and that perhaps nowhere is orthodox, traditional Judaismregarded with such intense contempt as in Israel. When i found nearlyall important Jewish leaders in America uncritical supporters of Zionismwho felt not the slightest twinge of conscience because of the terribleinjustice inflicted on the Palestinian Arabs, i could no longer considermyself a Jew at heart.One morning in November 1954, Professor Katsh during his lecture, arguedwith irrefutable logic that the monotheism taught my Moses (PBUH) andtheDivine laws related to him at Sinai were indispensable as the basis forall higher ethical values.If morals were purely man-made as the EthicalCulture and other agnostic and atheistic philosophies taught then theycould be changed at will according to mere whim, convenience orcircumstance. The result would be utter chaos leading to individual andcollective ruin. Belief in the Hereafter as the Rabbis in the Talmudtaught, argued Prof. Katsh. was not mere wishful thinking but a moralnecessity. Only those he said who firmly believed that each of us willbe summoned by God on judgment Day to render a complete account of ourlife and rewarded or punished accordingly, will possess theself-discipline to sacrifice transitory pleasures and endure hardshipsand sacrifice to attain lasting good. While Prof. Katsh was lecturingthus, i was comparing in my mind what i had read in the Old Testamentand the Talmud with what was taught in the Quran and Hadith and findingJudaism so defective , I was converted to Islam.Although i wanted to become a Muslim as far back as in 1954, my familymanaged to argue me out of it. I was warned that Islam would complicatemy life because it is not like Judaism and Christianity, part of theAmerican scene. I was told that Islam would alienate me from my familyand isolate me from the community. At that time my faith wasn'tsufficiently strong to withstand these pressures. Partly as the resultof my inner turmoil, I became so ill that i had to discontinue collegelong before it was any time for me to graduate so that i never earnedany diploma. For the next two years i remained at home under privatemedical care, steadily growing worse. in desperation from 1957-1959, myparents confined me both to private and public hospitals where i vowedthat if i ever recovered sufficiently to be discharged i would embraceIslam.After i was allowed to return home, I investigated all the opportunitiesto meet Muslims in New York City and it was my good fortune to make theacquaintance of some of the finest men and women anyone could ever hopeto meet. I also began to write articles for Muslim magazines and carryon an extensive correspondence with Muslim leaders all over the world. Icorresponded with the late Sheikh Abrahimi, the leader of the ulema inAlgeria, Dr, Muhammad El-Bahay of Al-Azhar, Dr. Mahmud F Hoballah , thenthe director of the Islamic center in Washington D.C., Dr. Hameedullahof Paris, Dr. Said Ramadan, the director of the islamic center ofGeneva, and Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maudoodi.Even before i formally embraced Islam, i found the integrity of thefaith in the contemporary world greatly threatened by the so-calledmodernist movement which aimed at adulterating its teachings withman-made philosophies and reforms. I was convinced that had thesemodernizes had their way , nothing of the original would be left ! As achild I had witnessed with my own eyes in my own family how the liberalshad mutilated what had once been a Divinely revealed faith. Having beenborn a Jew and reared in a Jewish family ,i had seen how futile was theattempt to reconcile religion with atheistic environment. "ReformedJudaism" not only failed to check the cultural assimilation of the Jewsi knew but actively encouraged the process. As a result they had becomeJews by label only. None had any religion worthy of the name. Throughoutmy childhood, the intellectual dishonesty, hypocrisy and superficialityof "reformed" Judaism was a vivid experience. Even at that early age iknew that such a watered down, half-hearted compromise could never hopeto retain the loyalty of its members, much less their children. Howdismayed i was when i found among the muslims, the same threat! Howshocked i was when i found certain scholars and some political leaderswithin the Muslim community guilty of the identical sins for which theGod in our Holy Quran has vehemently denounced the Jews! Convinced thatGod wouldn't spare us from calamity and doom us to the same fate theJews have suffered unless we sincerely repented and changed our ways, Ivowed that i would devote all my literary struggle to combating thismenace 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 veryown ideas. i hope your feeling will be the same when you have theopportunity to learn Urdu and study my books. And that despite the factthere has been no previous acquaintance between you and me, this mutualsympathy and unanimity in thought has resulted directly from the factthat both of us have derived our inspiration from one and the samesource-- Islam "-------------MARYUM JAMEELAH's BOOKS-1. ISLAM VERSUS THE WEST2. ISLAM AND MODERNISM3. ISLAM IN THEORY AND PRACTICE4. ISLAM VERSUS AHL AL KITAB PAST AND PRESENT5. AHMAD KHALIL6. ISLAM AND ORIENTALISM7. WESTERN CIVILIZATION CONDEMNED BY ITSELF8. CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN MAULANA MAUDOODI AND MARYUM JAMEELAH9. ISLAM AND WESTERN SOCIETY10. A MANIFESTO OF THE ISLAMIC MOVEMENT11. IS WESTERN CIVILIZATION UNIVERSAL12 WHO IS MAUDOODI ?13 WHY I EMBRACED ISLAM14 ISLAM AND THE MUSLIM WOMAN TODAY15 ISLAM AND SOCIAL HABITS16 ISLAMIC CULTURE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE17 THREE GREAT ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS IN THE ARAB WORLD OF THE RECENT PAST18 SHAIKH HASAN AL BANNA AND IKHWAN AL MUSLIMUN19 A GREAT ISLAMIC MOVEMENT IN TURKEY20 TWO MUJAHIDIN OF THE RECENT PAST AND THEIR STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM AGAINST FOREIGN RULE21 THE GENERATION GAP ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES22 WESTERNIZATION VERSUS MUSLIMS23 WESTERNIZATION AND HUMAN WELFARE24 MODERN TECHNOLOGY AND THE DEHUMANIZATION OF MAN25 ISLAM AND MODERN MAN Back to Homepage on Islam ... |
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