Important Figures - Maryam Jameelah
What is This?
This is the first in what will, inshāʾ Allāh, be a series of articles dedicated to raising awareness within the Muslim community about Muslim figures that are relatively obscure. These articles will be brief, as they aim to light a spark that will encourage readers to do more research on their own time.
Introduction
Maryam Jameelah was a German-Jewish convert to Islam from New York. Her books have been a great source of inspiration and knowledge for me personally, and I firmly believe that every young Muslim growing up in the West should familiarize themselves with her works.
The following is an excerpt from pages 33-34 of her book Islam and Modernism:
As the leadership in Europe and America has always been cognisant of Islam as a potent rival in world affairs, generations of their orientalists have studied Islam in relation to their needs and aims.
Since materialist philosophies originating from Western Europe now pose the greatest threat to the survival of the Islamic way of life in every Muslim country, is it not equally essential for some of our ulema to become Occidentalists and study European literature, history, religions, and philosophies in order to produce superior works of scholarship from the Islamic viewpoint?
She is a relatively obscure figure today, with many of her books having gone out of print.
- They have been preserved in PDF form, and a quick search should be enough to pull them up. Links to some of them can be found on the book list page.
Her work centered on modernist attempts to reform Islam, Western civilization, and the intersection of these two fields. She came into contact with Maulana Maududi (another figure who will be covered on this blog inshāʾ Allāh) shortly after her conversion and moved to Pakistan after just a year of exchanging letters with him.
Diving Deeper
If you wish to know more about her story, look up Islam and Modernism and read the section entitled “Why I Embraced Islam” (p. vii-xiii).
If you wish to begin reading her literature, I recommend starting with Modern Technology and the Dehumanization of Man. It is an excellent introduction to her style and is quite brief, being approximately 60 pages in total.