Free The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism by Deborah Baker

asylum.
    I assumed evidence in the archive or the library would settle such questions and determine the direction of the story. But the March 12 letter was not among the letters in the Maryam Jameelah Papers. All I had was Margaret’s account of events: an account that, she now admitted, hadn’t been entirely truthful. I was thus obliged to consider, too, whether Margaret Marcus’s panic over Mawdudi’s intentions was, like her ardent religious zeal, a symptom of some deeper and more private pathos.
    Or was it that beneath the story that Margaret’s letters told, there had all along been another story, a shadow story in which Herbert and Myra’s deepest fears about their daughter and the man into whose care they sent her were realized? Was she truly in danger? Had she been dispatched to Pattoki because she had displeased Mawdudi in refusing to marry? Had party elders or a jealous wife turned him against her? Was the lifting of the ban on his party somehow related to this development?
    Perhaps Maryam had tried to argue some point about Islam with him. Mawdudi had written that for those “self-deceived” people who imagined they could get him to change his views, the “rightful place to accommodate them and their like is in an ‘asylum.’” Mawdudi also believed that women, by their very nature, posed a clear danger to the Islamic state; he traced the collapse and destruction of every great civilization to the moral decay and weakening of the social fabric that occurred when women were granted “undue freedoms.” In his view women needed to be restrained and sequestered; men needed to be vigilant “lest [they] should, like Adam himself, be lured into a life of pleasure.”
    Every narrative possibility turns on a question of character. In this case, the characters of the Mawlana Mawdudi and Maryam Jameelah. I could imagine any of these as possible scenarios, but before I could advance any further, there was one more question I was obliged to consider.
    Which one did I secretly want to be true?
    I had been in the city that morning.
    In the days that followed I waited with a friend for the phone to ring. Our children were in and out of each other’s houses more than usual. We shared meals when we could and I smoked cigarettes for the first time in years. Though we recognized the irrevocability of what had happened, I echoed her quiet certainty that there would be a phone call. But little by little the outlines of the event became sharper, and the day finally came when we could sum it all up in a sentence. The husband this woman had left behind on the 88th floor had not followed her out and would never.
    I listened to the explanation she provided her children. They had asked: Why hadn’t their father left with her? How had she been spared? Why was he dead?
    He never imagined the towers would collapse, she replied. He stayed behind to help others find a way down.
    It never occurred to me that the explanation could be that simple.
    But after the children were put to bed and she was lying alone in her room trying to sleep, how did she begin to account for what had happened? Did she ever think to ask herself the larger questions? Why this? Who were these men? In all the time we spent together I could never bring myself to raise these questions. I was in awe of her quiet composure, perhaps, or fearful of unsettling it. So when I turned, alone, to thinking about the hatred that occasioned the attacks, I didn’t doubt it was real and it was frightening but it was hard, at first, to catch hold of. The act itself was so far outside what I knew that, like many others in the city, I couldn’t bear to contemplate it for long. That was not a mark of how much we were suffering, I felt certain, but of how much suffering history had spared us.
    The city’s heart was left open in a way that left everyone dazed. In the early weeks I was swept up in an atmosphere that mixed dread and exaltation. It was months before I could bring