In May of 1961, 27-year-old Margaret Marcus took Muslim vows at Brooklyn's Islamic Mission of America. Peggy's parents—secular Jewish New Yorkers—did not oppose her decision, though they failed to understand it. A year later, Peggy, now known as Maryam Jameelah, moved to Pakistan and donned a burqa. At first she lived with the family of Abul Ala Mawdudi, founder of the Islamic revivalist movement Jamaat-e-Islami. In 1963, she became the second wife of Mohammad Yusuf Khan, eventually bearing him five children.

Chances are you don't recognize her name, but from the early 1960s to the mid '80s, Jameelah wrote dozens of books and tracts with catchy titles like Our Liberation from the Colonial Yoke and Western Imperialism Menaces Muslims. Her anti-Western writings "continue to influence the way the Islamic world thinks of the West—America in particular." So writes Deborah Baker in The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, an absorbing but odd book that bills itself a biography but reads like an epistolary novel.

Maryam Jameelah is indisputably a real person. Still living in Pakistan, she recently celebrated her 77th birthday. Nine boxes of her papers are stored in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, and many of her books are available on Amazon.com. The Convert, however, may or may not tell her real story. Muslim admirers on the web describe her as an earnest young woman who through wide reading about many religions became convinced of the truth of Islam. Her conversion caused tension in her personal life, but she persevered and became a leader first in revivalist, then in traditional Islam. Baker, by contrast, sees her as an undoubtedly brilliant but mentally ill woman whose real life has differed markedly from the persona she created in books and letters.

Maryam's story begins with three letters written in 1962 as she prepares for her new life in Pakistan. In the first, Mawdudi warmly invites Maryam to come live in his household. In the second, Maryam's father gives his blessing to his daughter's venture. A few weeks later, Maryam, writing from Pakistan, assures her parents that "for the first time in my life I feel I have finally arrived at a place I can call home."

Baker then abruptly switches to her own voice. Having stumbled across the Jameelah papers, she writes, she became interested in this woman whose every book "is framed by the story of how as a young girl growing up in Mamaroneck, New York, the daughter of secular Jewish parents, she came to reject America and embrace Islam." The rest of the book follows this pattern, alternating letters—mostly from Maryam—with Baker's personal observations.

As in many contemporary novels, the story in The Convert is nonlinear. We think we see its outlines in the opening chapters, but then Baker delves further back and the picture changes. Peggy's childhood was troubled. A late talker, hypersensitive to noise and change, she frequently acted out. Though a skilled writer from an early age, she lacked social graces. A summer camp director called her "the queerest child I have ever met," recommending that her parents take her to a psychiatrist.

As she grew older, her episodes grew more destructive. The University of Rochester sent her home. In a fit of rage, she busted up her psychiatrist's office. After she threw a tantrum in a history class, New York University asked her not to return. She could not find or keep a job, and she became too violent or, alternately, too withdrawn to live with. Eventually her parents sent her to a series of mental hospitals. The diagnosis back in the 1950s was schizophrenia, though if Baker's descriptions of Peggy/Maryam's behavior are accurate, a more likely diagnosis today might be Asperger's syndrome with comorbid bipolar disorder.

Since at least the age of 11, when she began drawing Arabs based on National Geographic photos she found in her school library, Peggy had been entranced by Arab culture. At age 14, she "began reading deeply in Arab history, poetry, and writings." As a young adult she read Muhammad Asad's The Road to Mecca, an autobiographical account of a Jewish man's conversion to Islam, dozens of times before taking her own Muslim vows.

So when her father finally insisted that she get her own apartment, it seemed natural to appeal to Mawdudi, the Islamic leader with whom she had been corresponding for several years, and to seek refuge in a Muslim country. Now that we know something of Maryam's history, however, we are unsurprised to learn that Mawdudi soon kicked her out of his house, and that the couple who took her in likewise insisted that she leave, and that once again she found herself in a mental hospital.

Baker, author of the Pulitzer-nominated biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding and A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, says she likes writing about "poets and wild-eyed visionaries who live their lives close to the bone." No wonder Maryam Jameelah appeals to her. Yet she is not entirely sure of her sources. Are Maryam's letters accurate, she wonders, or did she write or alter them for publication, "as missives to posterity, a Cinderella backstory plotted to foreshadow how her embrace of Islam had rescued her from America"? Clearly some of Mawdudi's letters have been edited—can anything in Jameelah's archive be trusted?

For that matter, is Baker's own account reliable? At the end of the book, in "A Note on Methodology," Baker explains what I suspected after noticing that all the letters seemed to be written in the same voice: "The Convert is fundamentally a work of nonfiction. However, … the actual and imaginary letters of Maryam Jameelah do not appear here as she wrote them." Baker explains:

I … asked Maryam if I could write her story as if she were writing once again to her family. Having her voice pass through my own, perhaps I might understand her better. I wanted her blessing to use the correspondence in her archive, the doctored and make-believe letters as well as the real ones, to quote and paraphrase and arrange as I saw fit.

Jameelah consented.

So in the end, we learn that, though The Convert appears to be based on actual letters, it is actually composed of invented letters, which themselves are based on edited and make-believe letters written by ideologues and propagandists, one of whom was clearly mentally ill and possibly suffering from paranoia and/or delusions. Don't say you weren't warned.

If, however, you're willing to live with the uncertainties in Deborah Baker's presentation of Maryam Jameelah's story, it's a fascinating tale. Make of it what you will.

LaVonne Neff blogs at neffreview.blogspot.com and at livelydust.blogspot.com.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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