interesting story of Jewish woman who converted to Islam

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Interview with Maryam Jameelah
http://jews-for-allah.org/Jewish-Converts-to-Islam/Maryam-Jameelah.htm

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Also read Maryam Jameelah’s Open Letter to Her Parents in which she
invites her mother and father to embrace the one true religion at
http://convertstoislam.org/MaryamJameelah-
JewishMusliminvitingparents.htm

http://jews-for-allah.org/Jewish-Converts-to-Islam/Maryam-Jameelah.htm

[Islamabad]

JazakAllah!