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A Tale of Exile and Extremism
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A spellbinding story of renunciation, conversion, and radicalism
"Deborah Baker's astonishing book reads like a detective story but is also a work of enormous beauty and understanding. She has explored the most difficult of subjects in an evocative and original way, powerfully conjuring a bygone, albeit simpler era when an argument between Islam and the West first arose fifty years ago. The Convert is the most brilliant and moving book written about Islam and the West since 9/11."
—Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos
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Price: $23.00 USD
“[A] stellar biography that doubles as a mediation on the
fraught relationship between America and the Muslim world. . . . [The Convert] is a cogent,
thought-provoking look at a radical life and its rippling consequences.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“With remarkable even-handedness, Deborah Baker reveals
the terrible costs of belonging exacted by two very different, battling
cultures. Sweeping books on the big wars can’t do what this focused gaze on a
single misfit so vividly accomplishes.”
—Kiran Desai,
author of The Inheritance of Loss
What drives a young woman raised in a postwar New York
City suburb to convert to Islam, abandon her country and Jewish faith, and
embrace a life of exile in Pakistan? The
Convert tells the story of how Margaret Marcus of Larchmont became Maryam
Jameelah of Lahore, one of the most trenchant and celebrated voices of Islam’s
argument with the West.
A cache of Maryam’s letters to
her parents in the archives of the New York Public Library sends acclaimed
biographer Deborah Baker (In Extremis:
The Life of Laura Riding) on her own odyssey into the labyrinthine heart of
twentieth-century century Islam. Casting a shadow over these letters is the
mysterious figure of Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, both Maryam’s adoptive father
and the man who laid the intellectual foundations for militant Islam.
As she assembles the pieces of
a singularly perplexing life, Baker finds herself captive to questions raised
by Maryam’s journey. Is her story just another bleak chapter in a so-called
clash of civilizations? Or does it signify something else entirely? And is the
life depicted in Maryam’s letters home and in her books an honest reflection of
the one she lived?
Listen to Deborah Baker discuss The Convert on The Takeaway:
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