"Zainab Al-Ghazali""Zainab Al-Ghazali was born in 1917 in a middle class family of farmers in a village named Maitin in Egypt. She was brought up in a deep routed religious atmosphere. At the age of twenty she laid down the foundation of Jamiat Al-Sayyidat-ul-Muslimeen, an organisation for the welfare of the women especially the poor, orphans and the underprivileged.
She was greatly inspired by the performance of Ikhwaan Al-Muslimoon (Muslim Brotherhood) in the Jihad in Palestine during the regime of Farooque. She came close to Imam Hassan Al Banna, the founder of the Ikhwaan and was greatly inspired by their other leaders like Imam Sayyed Qutb, Hasan Al Huzaibi and Abdul Fattah Ismail.
In February 1964 an attempt on her life was made by a car accident during the evil and wicked regime of Egyptian President Jamal Abdul Nasser who was bent on breaking the back of the Ikhwaan using all possible methods.
She was arrested on Friday 20th August 1965 by the same regime and imprisoned for a term of six years on a false charge of conspiring to assassinate Nasser with the leaders of the Ikhwaan. Day after day, for six years, Nasser's secret police tried to break her. They would hang her by her arms and flog her constantly.
They used to cast her in a room full of starving mad dogs. There would be urine and faeces in what little disgusting food they gave her. She was forced to sit, as if in prayer, in water up to her neck for many days at a stretch on numerous occasions without any movement and then they flogged her soft swollen body again.
Every time she was taken to the prison hospital, in an attempt to keep her alive so that they could prolong her torture, the doctors would say that she would not survive another beating. However, the police would beat her again. Alhamdulillah, she survived and was released in August 1971. Zainab Al-Ghazali is still alive today and ironically, she outlived Nasser and his animalistic torturers. The evil forces of satan could not hinder her from the path of truth i.e. Islam.
Nasser and his men indeed succeeded in breaking the bones of the true, strong Muslims, but they never broke the Muslims' will or their trust in Allah. Zainab Al-Ghazali was only strengthened by the tests Allah put upon her. Verily, Allah tests those whom He loves so that they may be elevated.
Maryam Jameelah
Maryam Jameelah was born Margaret Marcus to a Jewish family in New Rochelle, NY, on May 23, 1934. She grew up in a secular environment, but at the age of nineteen, while a student at New York University, she developed a keen interest in religion.Unable to find spiritual guidance in her immediate environment, she looked to other faiths. Her search brought her into contact with an array of spiritual orders, religious cults, and world religions; she became acquainted with Islam around 1954. She was then greatly impressed by Marmaduke Pickthall’s The Meaning of the Glorious Koran and by the works of Muhammad Asad, himself a convert from Judaism to Islam. Jameelah cites Asad’s The Road to Mecca and Islam at Crossroads as critical influences on her decision to become a Muslim.
Through her readings in Islam she developed a bond with the religion and became a vocal spokesperson for the faith, defending Muslim beliefs against Western criticism and championing such Muslim causes as that of the Palestinians. Her views created much tension in her personal life, but she continued to pursue her cause.
She embraced Islam in New York on May 24, 1961, and soon after began to write for the Muslim Digest of Durban, South Africa. Her articles outlined a pristine view of Islam and sought to establish the truth of the religion through debates with critics. Through the journal, Jameelah became acquainted with the works of Mawlana Sayyid Abu Ala Mawdudi, the founder of the Jamaati Islami (Islamic Party) of Pakistan, who was also a contributor to the journal.
Jameelah was impressed by Mawdudi’s views and began to correspond with him. Their letters between 1960 and 1962, later published in a volume entitled Correspondences between Maulana Mawdoodi and Maryam Jameelah, discussed a variety of issues from the discourse between Islam and the West, to Jameelah’s personal spiritual concerns.
Jameelah traveled to Pakistan in 1962 on Mawdudi’s advice and joined his household in Lahore. She soon married Muhammad Yusuf Khan, as his second wife.
Since settling in Pakistan, she has written an impressive number of books, which adumbrated the Jamaati Islami’s ideology in a systematic fashion. Although she never formally joined the party, she became one of its chief ideologists.
Jameelah has been particularly concerned with the debate between Islam and the West, an important, albeit not central, aspect of Mawdudi’s thought.
Her significance, however, does not lie in the force of her observations, but in the manner in which she articulates an internally consistent paradigm for revivalism’s rejection of the West. In this regard, her influence far exceeds the boundaries of the Jamaati Islami and has been important in the development of the Muslim world.
The logic of her discursive approach has recently led Jameelah away from revivalism and the Jamaati Islami. Increasingly aware of revivalism’s own borrowing from the West, she has distanced herself from the revivalist exegesis and has even criticized her mentor Mawdudi for his assimilation of modern concepts into Jamaati Islami’s ideology. Her writings in recent years embody this change in orientation and reveal the influence of traditional Islam.
