- physdesc
-
{"format"=>"simple", "value"=>"2.1 linear feet (8 containers)"}
- unitid
-
{"value"=>"MssCol 1545", "type"=>"local_call"}
{"value"=>"1545", "type"=>"local_mss"}
- unitdate
-
{"value"=>"1945-2005", "type"=>"inclusive", "normal"=>"1945/2005"}
- date_inclusive_start
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1945
- date_inclusive_end
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2005
- keydate
-
1945
- unittitle
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{"value"=>"Maryam Jameelah papers"}
- repository
-
{"value"=>"The <span class=\"corpname\">New York Public Library. Manuscripts and Archives Division.</span> <div class=\"address\"> <span class=\"addressline\">Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, New York, New York 10018-2788</span></div>"}
- abstract
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{"value"=>"The Maryam Jameelah Papers include the correspondence, fiction, and academic writings of Maryam Jameelah, (nee Margaret Marcus), an American Jew who, after her conversion to Islam, emigrated to Pakistan and resides there still. Her correspondence and writings tell of her troubled youth, her interest in Palestinian life and literature, her sympathy for displaced Palestinians after the formation of modern Israel, her correspondence with Pakistani mentor Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maudoodi, her conversion to Islam, and her subsequent emigration and life in Pakistan. Later essays include book reviews of other Islamic authors and essays discussing Islamic life and culture."}
- prefercite
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{"value"=>"<p>Maryam Jameelah Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.</p>"}
- origination
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{"value"=>"Maryam Jameelah, 1934-", "type"=>"persname"}
- bioghist
-
{"value"=>"<p>Maryam Jameelah (b.1934) was born Margaret Marcus, the younger of two daughters of German-Jewish parents, in New Rochelle, New York. She grew up in Larchmont, New York. She attended public schools, joined the Girl Scouts, studied music, art, modern and social dancing, and attended summer camp each summer between 1940-1947. She was sent to religious instruction at a liberal Reform synagogue and at the Westchester Ethical Culture Society in New Rochelle between 1943-1949.</p> <p>She became interested in the Arab world in the late 1940s during the creation of the state of Israel. While those around her celebrated the founding of a Jewish nation after the horrors of World War II, her sympathies were decidedly for the Palestinians, who by this same action were displaced from their own homes. She began to study Arab history, poetry, and writings. This sympathy would have profound ramifications throughout the rest of her life.</p> <p>While Marcus appears to have led an average suburban childhood, a letter from her mother recalls that she didn't enjoy playing in group games, that she never felt accepted by peers, was often the object of teasing and ridicule at school, and that she was very sensitive to noise. Marcus proved to be a superior student, and artistically talented, but she was also described as \"sensitive\", \"high-strung,\" and as having \"eccentric habits\" by both school officials and summer camp administrators. As a teen Marcus had no interest in the things most teenage girls do - fashion, make-up, dating, and the social scene of peers. She had few friends through high school.</p> <p>School officials suggested she be sent to the local Child Guidance Clinic, and in 1947 Marcus began the first prolonged experience of weekly therapy sessions which continued until 1950. Marcus was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Psychiatric problems and therapy sessions continued to be a part of her life, on and off, for many years, including two years of institutionalization in New York and later, for several months in Pakistan.</p> <p>Marcus graduated from high school in June of 1952 and though she was accepted to the University of Rochester for the Fall of 1952, she returned home shortly after the first semester began, due to \"nervous breakdown.\" In the spring of 1953 she began attending New York University, where she studied from 1953 to 1956, being forced to leave before obtaining her college degree, again attributed to \"nervous breakdown\".</p> <p>Despite this, her parents insisted she occupy her time constructively and develop some skills to help support herself as an adult. She studied drawing at the Art Students League in NYC the fall of 1952, and attended the Berlitz School of Languages to study advanced French conversation after her expulsion from NYU. She volunteered as a clerical worker and took touch-typing classes in White Plains upon returning home from two years of hospitalization in 1959.</p> <p>In March, 1953 Marcus wrote to her sister Betty describing herself as \"a total misfit,\" saying, \"I know and care nothing about business or anything commercial, couldn't tolerate a single day of the monotonous routine of office or factory. So now I find myself absolutely unemployable?I can't find any respectable place anywhere.\" At the age of nineteen she felt that life was over, she was discouraged, exhausted, depressed, and despairing.</p> <p>Her failure to fit in and her desire to find respectability pushed her to search for her Jewish roots in order to find a frame of reference and identity for adult life. During the winter of 1952-53 she made a concerted effort to embrace Orthodox Judaism, visiting meetings at the local YWHA, the Orthodox Synagogue in Mamaroneck, and even by attending a meeting of a Zionist youth group, the Mizrachi Hatzair. But in all these experiences she found what she considered disagreeable, unlikable people, who often rejected her outright due to her liberal, non-kosher background. At the single Mizrachi Hatzair meeting she attended she was horrified by the pro-Israeli propaganda film and what she felt was the total misrepresentation of the Arab. She never returned.</p> <p>She was drawn to the Bahai art and cultural center because they claimed to promote international understanding. She joined in their pen-friend program and corresponded with many young people around the world. But her search for friends her own age locally was not helped by her involvement in the center; mostly she found \"old eccentrics\" in this organization.</p> <p>During her teens her support of the Arab culture led her to write a novel titled <span class=\"title\">Ahmad Khalil: the Story of a Palestinian Refugee and his Family,</span>in which she hoped to reveal the true hardships and cruelty with which the Palestinians were forced to live. She created a series of pencil sketches and colored drawings to illustrate the book. In summer of 1954, she was invited to display several of these works in an exhibit at the Bahai center's Caravan of East and West Art Gallery, which she was very proud to do.</p> <p>During the exhibit she fell into a conversation about some of her drawings with a Jewish visitor. When he found out she was a Jew who sympathized with the Arabs, he \"denounced her as a traitor to her race even more than the 'goyim' (gentiles). This rejection, coupled with her earlier experiences, caused her to write to her sister, \"No people I have ever encountered are more intolerant, bigoted and narrow-minded than the disagreeable Jews I have had the misfortune to meet and that is why I find it impossible to identify myself as one of them.\"</p> <p>During the fall 1954 semester at NYU, Marcus sat for a class titled, \"Judaism in Islam,\" taught by a Jewish professor whose goal was to demonstrate the Jewish influence on Islam. Throughout this time, in fact from 1952, Marcus had been reading and studying the Islamic holy text, the Quran. She credits this class with convincing her of the superiority of Islam to Judaism. She states, \"Judaism retains its tribal nationalistic character. Because Judaism is still in essence a tribe, it is a closed society?the Holy Prophet?directed his message to the whole human race? therefore Islam is a truly universal, cosmopolitan faith?He [Allah] would never restrict His Truth to a single people. Truth by its nature must be universal!\"</p> <p>Marcus had found her path. She met other Muslims at the campus of New York University and began to spend time in the Arabic neighborhoods of New York, attending mosque and learning the five daily prayers that are part of Islamic practice. On May 24, 1961 she formally professed her desire to live as a Muslim before the community of the Islamic Mission of America, in Brooklyn, New York, and her name was changed to Maryam Jameelah. She began writing articles on Islamic culture and life, publishing her first book, Islam versus the West, in Lahore, Pakistan in January of 1962.</p> <p>She emigrated to Lahore, Pakistan in May, 1962 after much thought on her part and the encouragement of Pakistani mentor Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maudoodi, an Islamic scholar and writer with whom she had been corresponding with between 1960 and 1962. Maudoodi invited her to live with his family if she wished to emigrate. Considering her ongoing conflicts with her family, her lack of comfort with American culture, and her need to find a way to support herself as her parents planned retirement and informed her they would no longer be able to support her, this invitation solidified her decision. She would emigrate to a Muslim culture - Pakistan. About one year after arriving in her new country, Jameelah suffered another \"nervous breakdown\" and spent a few months in a Lahore, Pakistan mental hospital.</p> <p>Jameelah married fifteen months after emigrating, becoming the second wife of Mohammed Yusuf Khan, a local political figure and leader in the Jama'at-e-Islami, a local political organization, in Lahore, Pakistan. She bore five children between 1964 and 1972, three girls, the first dying in infancy, and two boys. She has continued writing and is the author of more than thirty books on Islamic history and culture. Jameelah still lives in Lahore, Pakistan.</p>"}
- scopecontent
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{"value"=>"<p>The Maryam Jameelah Papers, (1945-2000, 2.1 LF), includes correspondence (published and unpublished), manuscripts, bibliographies, chronologies, speeches, questionnaires, published articles, photographs, videocassettes, and artwork. Through her own correspondence to her parents and other family members, her Pakistani mentor, Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maudoodi, particularly those found in <span class=\"title\">Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America 1945-1962,</span>Jameelah provides her readers with a candid view of her life as a young girl struggling with identity, and finding herself at odds with the culture around her. Except for one letter from her mother, published in the beginning of the <span class=\"title\">Memoirs?</span>correspondence from her parents, sister, and other family members are not found in these records</p>"}
{"value"=>"<p class='list-head'>The Maryam Jameelah papers are arranged in four series:</p>\n<ul class='arrangement series-descriptions'>\n<li><div class='series-title'><a href='/mss/1545#c183040'>Series 1. Correspondence and Non-fiction Writings</a></div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>This series contains primarily letters to Jameelah's parents and family members over most of her life in the United States (1945-1961) and in Pakistan (1963-1999), (Box 1, folders 1-6; Box 2, folder 1). Whether or not all letters written during this period are included here is unknown; the bulk of the earliest correspondence to family members is published as a book, <span class=\"title\">Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America, 1945-1962.</span>This material is an important element to understanding Jameelah's search for \"her place in society,\" the development of her interest in Islam, and her decision to leave her homeland for Pakistan (Box 2, folder 1). It is unknown how much, if any, of this material is edited</p> <p>Also included in this series are examples of some of her more recently published works on Islamic culture and reviews of other books (Box 1, folder 3), bibliographies of her works, with addenda, and a chronology of her life, which proves to be very enlightening in understanding the course of events in her life, (Box 2, folders 5, 6, and 7). Augmenting this is the collection of her correspondence with Maulana Maudoodi, her mentor in Lahore, Pakistan (Box 2, folder 2). These letters also document well Marcus' mindset, values, and circumstances before her move to Pakistan. They are in English, as the Maulana's secretary translated them for Jameelah, but the Arabic originals are included.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/mss/1545#c183056'>Series 2. \"Ahmad Khalil...\" Manuscripts and Illustrations</a></div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>The collection includes three unpublished versions of Jameelah's novel of a Palestinian refugee family. The first copy is hand written in a bound book, the second two are typescripts. An separate epilogue for the story was written in 1995, and added to each copy</p> <p>The illustrations for the story are in a disassembled scrapbook, which includes black and white pencil sketches and color drawings, (between approximately 3x2\" and 8x10\" in size, Box 4) and a box of oversized pencil sketches (approximately 11x14\" and larger, box 5). Additional illustrations were made later by Ms. Jameelah and bound in a scrapbook entitled, <span class=\"title\">My Art Work from Childhood to Maturity, 1938-1957.</span> (Box 6)</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/mss/1545#c183063'>Series 3. Photographs</a></div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>The photographs consist of color snapshots of family members on special occasions such as the weddings of both sons and the engagement party of her youngest daughter. Also includes photographs of Mohammed Yosuf Khan's first wife, Shafqa Khanum and her children and family members, photographs of Jameelah in the early years of her life in Pakistan (black and white) and the visits of sons Khalid and Haider with family in the U.S.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/mss/1545#c183079'>Series 4. Videocassettes</a></div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Includes two videocassette tapes. The first is of an interview with Maryam Jameelah at the Jama'at-e-Islami Headquarters, Mansoore, Pakistan. Zaki-id-din Sahib, Director of Islamic Circle of North America interviews Jameelah on how and why she left America, her conversation to Islam, and her life in Pakistan. Her husband and two sons are with her, but only husband, Mohammed Yusuf Khan adds any comment. The sound track is difficult to hear.</p> <p>The second was made when Marya Khunum and Haider Farouq Khan and his wife visited grandfather Herbert Marcus the U.S. The tape shows a long visit with grandfather Marcus, and visits to Mamaroneck and Larchmont places of interest to the Marcus family, including the school and synagogue Jameelah attended as a child.</p></div></li></ul>\n", "type"=>"arrangement"}
- acqinfo
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{"value"=>"<p>Gift of Maryam Jameelah, <date>1965 -</date></p>"}
- arrangement
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{"value"=>"Series I: Correspondence and non-fiction writings; Series II: Ahmad Khalil: the Story of a Palestinian Refugee and His Family; Series III: Photographs; Series IV: Video recordings, 1986, 1993", "supress_display"=>true}
- altformavail
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{"value"=>"<p>The bulk of Jameelah's letters to family members have been published in her memoirs under the titles Quest for the Truth: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America, 1945-1962; and Memories of Childhood and Youth in America, 1945-1962</p>"}
{"value"=>"<p>Editions of correspondence with Syed Abul 'Ala Maudoodi published as Maudoodi, Syed Abul 'Ala, Correspondence between Maulana Maudoodi and Maryam Jameela; available in the Asian and Middle Eastern Division, New York Public Library</p>"}
{"value"=>"<p>First published edition of Ahmad Khalil available in the General Research Division, New York Public Library; JFC 76-3010</p>"}
- langmaterial_code
-
ara
eng
- langmaterial
-
{"value"=>"Letters from Maudoodi in Arabic with English translations"}
- processinfo
-
{"value"=>"<p>Processed and machine-readable finding aid created by Catherine Lakenwood.</p>"}
- date_start
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1945
- date_end
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2005