Jameelah grew up as Margret Marcus in a non-observant Jewish family in New York City, became Muslim in 1961, moved to Pakistan, and over the years wrote many books and articles on Islam. In Howe’s view, she was “a leading voice of the global Islamic Revival.” More specifically, her “writings contributed to an affective economy that connected Muslims to broad civilizational imperatives and transnational religious belonging.”
Jameelah’s life is well documented, and Howe follows previous scholarship in stressing the importance of Abul A‘la Mawdudi in her conversion and socialization into Islam. Howe also mentions two other influences: Sayyid Qutb, who she read as a tennager, and Traditionalism. She quotes a paragraph in which Jameelah criticizes modernity in what are indeed very Traditionalist terms.
Further evidence is provided by an earlier article, Zohaib Ahmad, “Aspects of Maryam Jameelah’s Post-Conversion Understanding of Islam,” Islamic Studies 58:1 (2019), pp. 33–49. According to Ahmad, Jameelah corresponded at length with Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and had most of his works in her private library. Nasr introduced her to the works of other Traditionalists, and wrote that her writings “have always been strongly anti-modern, were close to the new ‘fundamentalist’ perspective in many ways but… more recently she has come to embrace the traditional point of view.” Jameelah’s review of Martin Lings’s The Eleventh Hour in the Pakistani journal The Iqbal Review generally approved Lings’s perspectives, and even came close to endorsing his perennialism: “It is astonishing that fundamentalists regard as anathema any suggestion that some of the spiritual truths of Islam may also be found in other traditions.” According to Howe, Jameelah was always something of a perennialist in practice: “Her Jewish inheritances and chosen Muslim identity inextricably informed one another.”
My thanks to Balal Khan for drawing my attention to Howe’s biography and Ahmad’s article.
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