Maryam Jameelah and the Global Muslim Imagination

The life and work of an American Jewish convert to Islam who became a leading voice of the global Islamic Revival, explored through the lens of emotion in transnational religious identity

Maryam Jameelah (1934–2012)—born Margaret Marcus in White Plains, New York—followed an unlikely journey, from comfortable suburban childhood to influential voice of the twentieth-century global Islamic Revival. Jameelah’s more than twenty books and pamphlets, translated into a dozen languages, were notable for their unrelenting critique of modernity and arguments for the superiority of Islam in opposition to the West. In this exploration of her life and work, Justine Howe shows how Jameelah harnessed negative emotions—what Howe calls an “antimodern affect”—to call attention to what she saw as the catastrophes wrought by materialism and secularism. For Jameelah, galvanizing these emotions formed the basis of global Muslim solidarity that could be mobilized for a reinvigorated Islamic future.

Tracing Jameelah’s successive incarnations—from Reform Jew to highly mobile spiritual seeker and finally to fervent Muslim polemicist—Howe analyzes how women, gender, and family became the central nodes of Jameelah’s vision. Projecting herself as an embodiment of Muslim femininity as she pursued a career as a public intellectual, Jameelah subverted the very boundaries and prescriptions she sought to impose on others. Howe’s exploration of the multivalent threads that animated Jameelah’s religious imagination reveals unexpected entanglements of American Judaism, global Islam, feminism, and anticolonialism.