For some of us, books are ..................................

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

 

Good words of wisdom Salty. Yes, I try to read widely.

Currently one book I am reading is, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Etrememism by Deborah Baker. The book deals with the conversion in 1961 of a young Jewish woman to Islam. She became well know among Muslims and is still well known and widely read by them. In someways I believe she might be called the Mother of Islamic Extremists. Ironic isn't it. A Jewish American kid laying out ideas that extremists believe and use in our current days.

How can this be true? That is why I am reading the book knowingt I will disagree with her decision and her ideas. But as you said, "Know your enemy".

Cheers.

From a Chicago Tribune review:

"In The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism," Deborah Baker attempts to piece together the enigmatic transformation of "Peggy," a middle-class Jewish kid from Larchmont, New York, to Maryam, a self-exiled firebrand whose invitation to move to Pakistan grew out of her correspondence with Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, the radical political leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party and theorist of the theocratic state. How did a shy, sullen suburbanite become a true believer in Sharia justice and a zealous advocate of fundamentalist Islam, "someone who could only be herself beneath a pitch-black burqa?" How did Islam become her panacea, a remedy to all the ills she saw affecting the postwar West?

Baker, the author of a Pulitzer-nominated biography of Laura Riding and a history of the Beats in India, discovered Jameelah when she happened across her papers in the archives of the New York Public Library. Fascinated by her story, she was particularly mesmerized by Jameelah's letters to her parents reconstructing her pilgrimage. The first 24 of them document her departure from New York, on a Greek freighter bound for the Middle East, and resettlement in Pakistan. It's not surprising that Baker was hooked: the earliest missives are riveting, yet their tone is nothing like what one might expect from a budding zealot - they read like letters home from a confident exchange student as Jameelah dilates on daily life in the Maududi compound and the exciting, if challenging, adjustment to Lahore - the chore of learning Urdu, the exotic food, the heat ("far too hot for my cotton stockings and the bulky black sweaters I got at Gimbels bargain basement"). Soon, though, these letters take an odd detour; their return address is a remote Pakistani village, then an insane asylum outside Lahore, and finally, in a development that Baker calls as "surprising and impenetrable as nearly every twist and turn of her fate that preceded it," Jameelah writes her mother of her marriage to an impoverished goat-skin salesman and minor Jamaat party member who already has a wife and family.

"Quest for the Truth: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth in America (1945&[HASHTAG]#8211[/HASHTAG];1962): The Story of One Western Convert," she finds a narrative that provides clues to what led Jameelah to cross continents, what went wrong once she had done so, and why she chose to stay and to produce volume after volume of bilious prose fulminating against all things "Western."