Two Women, One Faith, A Fractured Nation

I wrote this entry about two months ago.  Thinking it read like a book report, I put it aside.  However, for various reasons, I’m finding that these two women, Benazir Bhutto and Margaret Marcus, will not let me go. In their own complex way both were misfit to the time and place they were born.  While they never met, each touched the other’s life in a profound way.  The West seems to know only of Bhutto’s death and nothing of her life.  And what a life it was.  Perhaps most poignantly for me, both were willing to follow the path their faith laid before them no matter the consequences to themselves.   At times, I struggle to do this in my life. 

Last week I started reading “Playing With Fire: Pakistan At War With Itself” by Pamela Constable.  The title alone tells you it’s relevancy to my decision to publish this entry.  If I still had doubt, recent fighting between Egypt and Israel, the evolving storylines of Arab spring, and the approaching 10^th anniversary of September 11, 2001 convinced me.

You can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea. You can kill a man, but not an idea.

- Benazir Bhutto

  June 21, 1953 – December 27, 2007

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Pakistan lately, figuratively speaking.  Having recently watched Bhutto, Duane Baughman’s excellent documentary on the life of Benazir Bhutto, and read The Convert: A Tale of Extremism and Exile, Deborah Baker’s wonderful book on the transformation of Margaret Marcus into Maryam Jameelah, I often find myself reflecting on the interplay of faith, fate, and action.  How could two women, each possessing a love of the same faith and the same country, shape such opposing views of the very purpose of that faith and that country?   In a country such as ours, despite our differences, these affiliations are ties that bind.  In an Islamic republic, it seems this would be even more salient.  However, the origin of this paradox manifested by way of these commonalities may lie within the story of how these very same commonalities were acquired.

Belief was native for one, but searched for by the other.  Birth was destiny for one, but anything but for the other.  Bravery for one was the opening of her country to the best of Western ideals, but bravery for the other was leaving those same ideals behind.  Faith… fate…action.

The eldest child of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s UN representative and later its President and Prime Minter, and his wife, Nusrat, Benazir benefited from her father’s peculiar notion that “a woman is not a lesser creature”.  It was he who objected to the idea that Benazir wear a burqa as she matured, and it was he who included her in his work and taught her the lessons of leadership.  Zulfikar founded the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), and groomed Benazir to be the party leader after his time passed.  This was a highly unusual move in a Muslim country, as power would normally be left to the eldest son.  Although Benazir had two brothers, Zulfikar recognized his daughter’s strengths and consolidated political power into the child he felt would use it the most wisely and justly.

Zulfikar’s father had greatly benefited from the partitioning of India in 1947, gaining a very large tract of land in the newly created Pakistan.  In this feudal system, Zulfikar quickly realized that the benefits he reaped were often at the cost of the opportunities of others not as fortunate.  He was determined to pay back that debt and instilled in Benazir that she must do the same, always reminding her that it is because of the Pakistani field laborers that she has the chance to be educated.  During her secondary education in the West, at Harvard and subsequently at Oxford, Benazir formed numerous close friendships with American and European classmates that would last her lifetime.  She became active in the nascent feminist movement, and her father involved her in many of his diplomatic missions.  In 1972 during the peace negotiations following the India / Pakistan War, Benazir, 19, accompanied her father to India.  In an event thick with foreshadowing, she observed a powerful female leader, Indira Gandhi, president of India.  Zulfikar, representing the vanquished nation, had been so powerful in these negotiations and in his defiant stance at the UN Security Council meetings that he was swept into office as Prime Minister in 1973.

In a series of tragic and politically charged events between the late 1970’s and the late 1990’s, the Bhutto family suffered greatly.  Pakistan’s political atmosphere had always pulsed with military and religious presence, neither of which would ever claim Zulfikar as their chosen leader.  In 1977, Zulfikar was deposed by a military coup, led by General Muhammad Zhia-ul-Haq, whom Zulfikar had declared Chief of the Army in 1976 to appease the army.  He was imprisoned for two years and when he would not break he was killed.  For years Islamic fundamentalism had been gaining a strong foothold in Pakistan, and despite the fact that the Bhuttos were faithful Muslims, much of what they espoused – education for all, a path for upward mobility, the equality of girls and women, dialogue and negotiations with the West – were anathema to fundamentalists and the teachings of the madrassas.  The Bhuttos quickly became personae non grata.

As the struggle for control of the center played out during the next 28 years, Benazir would witness the murder of her two brothers and the division of her family as a result, be imprisoned and suffer a life threatening illness[1],  released and elected Prime Minister for the first time, removed from office on corruption charges (a favorite Pakistani past time and a sure way to remove a politician from office as it does not need to be proven), re-elected Prime Minister, and removed on corruption charges again.  For the safety of her children and her health, she went into self-imposed exile in Dubai in 1998.  In October 2007, she returned to Pakistan having reached an agreement with President Musharaff that the corruption charges would be withdrawn.  Leaving her children and husband in Dubai for their own safety, she explained to them that this was her road, her calling.  She firmly believed that she must fulfill the role she was born for; to restore democracy to Pakistan, even if it may be at the cost may be her own life as there were serious and credible death threats against her from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.  “Allah will provide.” she often told her children to comfort them.  As she prepared to leave Dubai for Karachi, she told the press, “I am unaware of the details of the security arrangements, but the biggest protection comes from God and God willing, all will go well”.  On December 27, 2007 she was assassinated as she was leaving a campaign rally for the PPP where she had just given a motivational and stirring address for the run up to the January 2008 elections in which she was an opposition candidate.  Al-Qaeda, whom Benazir had been openly critical of throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s, claimed responsibility for the attack, calling her “the most precious American asset”.

Margaret Marcus was born into a loving, upper middle class, secular but culturally Jewish family in New York in 1934.   Early on her parents recognized that while Margaret was “unusually bright”, she was also very sensitive to her surroundings, almost nervously so.  Her parents indulged her precociousness, and Margaret’s intellect flourished as a result of her autodidacticism.  She read voraciously, and was particularly attracted to music and painting.  She loved Christmas and her family “celebrated” Christmas so she could enjoy it.  She had no concept of her Jewish heritage or any real grounding in religion until some children on the playground took to throwing stones at her and calling her “Christ killer”.  Flummoxed, she turned to her parents for answers and they sent her to temple and to Hebrew school.  Margaret was enthralled by stories of ancient Judea and her ancestry, and yet the more she learned the more questions she had.  Initially, she was excited at the prospect of the creation of Israel, feeling the Jews and the Arabs would live side by side in peace.  However, she began to realize that picture may not be quite as rosy as she thought.  She was upset by what she viewed as the forced movement and marginalization of Arabs for Israel to be created.

Just as the news of the Nazi atrocities and the Final Solution began to sink into the American consciousness, Margaret became fiercely interested in Arab culture and politics.  As you can imagine, this was unusual for a 14 year old Jewish girl in Larchmont, NY in 1948.  As she grew older, she identified strongly with the Palestinian cause and tried to dissuade her parents from supporting Israel.  Attempts at conversation with her father about it often ended in desperate, hysterical arguments as he stood his ground while trying to calm her.  When Margaret felt, she felt deeply.  Her parents tried to convince her that the Arabs were “abusive toward women”, and were “a dirty, low people.”  At times, Margaret was swayed, and she would destroy paintings she had done of Arab scenes.  But more often she was resolute.  “Are you not the ones who taught me it is wrong to be prejudice?” she earnestly inquired of her parents.

During her teen years, Margaret studied Islam, first through her own reading, and later at small mosque in Brooklyn.  Her new found passions and commitments heightened the tensions in the house as did her erratic behavior, but Margaret had found the spiritual community she had been looking for.  By her own account, Margaret’s had been a bookish, friendless existence.  The friends she had as a young girl faded away as she entered adolescence, and it is only later in her story that we begin to understand why.  Her need to belong would take an even more consequential turn, as she began a correspondence with the Pakistani Abul Ala Mawdudi, the leading figure in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.  Their relationship grew through the letters, and Mawdudi was impressed by Margaret’s knowledge and her intellect.  Hoping to provide her with a spiritual home as well as take advantage of the fact that she was a Western Jewish woman who chose to live as a Muslim Pakistani (imagine the publicity!), he invited her to live with his family as an adopted daughter.  Margaret made her full conversion to Islam at the age of 27, and moved to Lahore to live with Mawdudi and his family.  She was a celebrity when she arrived in Pakistan, and did several interviews on why she chose to live in Pakistan.   Taking the name Maryam Jameelah after her conversion, she continued her writing.  Although she continued a warm and generous correspondence with her parents in the United States, she became the voice of Islam’s argument with the West.  From 1960’s through the 1990’s this American Jewish woman turned militant Islamic ideologue published several books and pamphlets condemning the West and urging young Muslims to be martyrs and “freedom fighters” against the West and secular Muslims.  In the Islamic world, her word is revered and her fame knows no bounds.  One of her and Mawdudi’s followers was a young Pakistani man named Muhammad Zhia-ul-Haq.  Remember him?   In fact, several leaders of the Pakistani army and the IIS, Pakistan’s intelligence service, were followers. 

Margaret Marcus cum Maryam Jameelah was obviously brilliant, but she paid a price for that brilliance.  She suffered from schizophrenia, and was hospitalized in the United States and in Pakistan.  Deborah Baker, the author, traveled to Pakistan to meet Jameelah.  Baker, a New Yorker, witnessed the 9/11 attacks and lost people she knew in the attack on the World Trade Center.  Along with the reader, she wondered what Jameelah felt as she watched people she helped to incite attack her home city (although Jameelah vehemently denies this was her intention).  In the book’s most riveting scene, as she mentally prepared to confront her, Baker was taken aback as Jameelah recounted how she had been assaulted by some neighborhood boys when she was in her early teens.  How much of her religious zeal was the product of her illness and confusion over the rape is not quantifiable, but how much of her search for conformity was done to quiet and control her mind?  Did she turn to a religion that contains strict sexual mores and the separation of the sexes as a way to deal with her pain, confusion, and guilt about the rape?  Do these two women have a “Jesus and Judas” element to their cosmic relationship?

Why do we turn to religion?  Is it not a cause of guilt, but an absolver of guilt?  Is it to put order to our own internal chaos, or is it, as I believe it should be, to cause external chaos?   Co-opted by the power structure, organized religions have long forgotten the revolutionary spark and incendiary nature of their prophets.  After meeting these women, I have more questions than answers.

        

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[1] Mark Siegel, a journalist and Benazir’s co-author and friend, spoke with General Muhammad Zhia-ul-Haq,
and Zhia said to Siegel, “The greatest mistake I have ever made in my life was to allow your friend to live.”
According to Siegel, when he related the story to Benazir, she looked at him and “with out any emotion,
she said, “‘He’s right.’”.