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 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 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 the morning of the attacks.
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 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 myself to leave the city limits. How much longer would it take to circumnavigate the question of what had happened and why, to take its complete measure? Ten years? Twenty? The meanings already being worked out of the event from Washington were incomprehensible and, I foolishly imagined, beside the point.
But the details kept coming. Once I began to hear about the men in the planes, I couldn’t stop imagining them waiting their turn at the ticket counter, fingering their box cutters and their awful purpose. The unfolding accounts of the horror on the planes and inside the buildings, the calm expressions of love that poured into phones and message machines, were unbearable to fathom. At a certain point there was no disguising my revulsion.
The hatred when it came seemed as if it had always been there. I turned it over and over, rattled but also subtly empowered by the clarity of it. Yet, like the dread that preceded the hatred, this also subsided. Only after I stumbled across the Jameelah archive did the questions that haunted me during those days begin to flare up once again. At a certain point I realized that this was something I could do. I would find better answers than the hasty ones we managed to put together in those days. I would find answers more lasting than the easy ones provided for us.
By then of course years had passed. By then the American proxy wars on the Muslim world Maryam Jameelah had written about had become cataclysmic and genuine, no more so than in the aftermath of the attacks. My country now became directly and irretrievably responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Muslims. That is how, I learned, our new enemies imagined we thought of them. Not by their ethnicities or nationalities or family names, but by their religious beliefs. And this, a war on Muslims, had been our plan all along, they insisted, conveniently refusing to credit the motivations of those behind the attacks. And yet were they entirely wrong? There was now reason to wonder. Had Maryam grasped something about America that I had missed? Had Mawdudi? As the years wore on, their war dead made up in numbers what they lacked in novelty, immediate impact, and intimate proximity. Yet these escalating figures20,000, 50,000, 100,000, and morerendered in simple, disposable newsprint, never seemed to register in quite the same way as the Technicolor ones we had suffered.
As with the attacks on the city, however, questions touching on the guilt or innocence of the dead were largely beside the point. Either they were all innocent and we were all guilty or
we
were all innocent and
they
were all guilty. We shared our enemies’ faith in the power of violent spectacle, in shock and awe. In kidnappings and secret prisons. Did we take after them, or did they take after us? A few voices entertained lingering doubts over our leaders’ rationale for the war; most seemed readily appeased by the bland promises of liberation from tyranny. I imagined my growing sense of shame and alarm equaled that felt by those families who, in the wake of the attacks, had sat quiet and thunderstruck in their homes, hoping against hope that their coreligionists had not been behind them.
I saw, too, how long-standing legal protections ordinary Americans considered their due might simply disappear. Surveillance could become a free-for-all. Language, too, had become a game; just how far could the leaders we heard from in those days take words from their meanings? The Patriot Act? Homeland security? Total Information Awareness? In this new season every mention of the word
terror
had the power to make cowards or bigots or dupes of reasonable people. The word
freedom
summoned righteous legions at home while elsewhere rage and cynicism proliferated. Maryam’s question echoed in my head: Suppose the American government decided to abandon its Constitution and the Bill of Rights and put in their place a police state so as to better defend itself. Would not sovereignty be meaningless after we lost our very
raison d’etre
? I began to think that something essential in the entire project of my country had come undone.
I couldn’t help but ask, how much had my trust in America been a cipher for a deeper and more lasting set of beliefs? How much of what I considered right and wrong was predicated on being a citizen of a well-armed country? I was exiled to a state of devastation and doubt. This was my new nationality.
The discovery of the archive had become the crooked key to understanding how all this had come about. Here there would be an explanation. Who were these nineteen men? Who were we? Who was their God? Who was ours? It hadn’t escaped my notice that Maryam’s letters also gave me the chance to peer in the window of the house of the aging leader who first issued the call for global jihad. Did Margaret live to see the attacks? What did she make of them? Did she watch the city she had once known so well fall to pieces? Had she changed her mind about the evils of the West or did she remain resolute? Would she defend the indefensible? What could she tell me?
“There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity,” Susan Sontag once wrote. “The truths we respect are those born of affliction.” It wasn’t that I hadn’t questioned Maryam’s reason. Rather, I looked to her for the outsider’s crucial insight, a blind seer’s clarifying truth. I found in her story a secret history that would challenge those we had been telling ourselves. The wars we were selling.
I couldn’t shake the sense, too, that the new wars were being waged by the same flinty eyed men whose aggressive intentions, a scant generation before, were focused elsewhere. “America is allegedly determined to bestow upon Viet Nam a truly free democratic society,” Maryam Jameelah wrote in 1969. “But while buckets of crocodile tears are shed by officials in Washington over Viet Nam’s backwardness and miserable living standards, four million are slain.”i These same men had watched that war unfold from lowly government desks and decades later thought they could do better. They wanted a different ending and would stop at nothing to get it. Where others were inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, the shock of this fact kept me nailed squarely in place. That war, too, was painted as a war between freedom and tyranny. “They hate our freedom,” the speechwriters now wrote, picking up where the earlier litanies had left off.
Like the young Margaret, I began to feel maladjusted, to harbor grudges. I kept a blacklist of those who had written in measured, manly tones about the unpleasant necessity, the sober duty, of choosing this war. Not the war against those who had attacked us, but a fatter, easier, and far more profitable target: conveniently Muslim, as if that were a bonus. In those long years I veered toward shrillness, oppressed by people talking about children and real estate. Friends became strangers. And when conversation turned to the war (and only then, it seemed, because it was going so badly), the general tone was either complacent or meekly despairing. Every day I raked the news for a story that would open everyone’s eyes. But even the most outrageous accounts of torture and mendacity were fleeting distractions. Something more final was required. An unnamed thought lodged inside me like a swallowed curse, a thought heretical and traitorous. By then my widowed friend had left for a new neighborhood; her children grew older in different schools. I lost track of her.
Once in a while I would stop spinning and remember I wasn’t always like this. But still I wanted to know: by what mechanism did America and the world’s Muslims suddenly become each other’s evil caricature? Metaphor? Narrative? Racist propaganda? In moments of clarity, it seemed to me that whichever side of this war one was on had nothing to do with who believed in divine revelation or who had the most righteous cause. Nor did it have to do with who was Muslim and who was Jewish or Christian. Rather, it seemed simply that neither side really wanted this train to stop, with the possible exception of those families actually on board. And no one knew in what direction it was headed. This was the drill on both sides: Let the drama play out, then commemorate the heroes and the martyrs.
It was really a very simple story, I thought bitterly, as I returned with relief to the letters in the marble library. By then I knew that the answers to my questions weren’t all to be found there. By then I knew I would go to Lahore.
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