Maryam Jameelah and the Affective Economy of Islamic Revival

This article uses Sara Ahmed’s concept of “affective economy” to explore the relationship between affect and gender in the transnational Islamic Revival in the 1960s and 1970s. It does so by examining the work of Maryam Jameelah (neé Margaret Marcus, 1934-2012), the American Jewish convert to Islam who moved to Pakistan in 1962 at the invitation of A’la Abul Mawdudi, the prominent revivalist leader and thinker. For her English-speaking audiences, Jameelah was a potent messenger for a revivalist ideology that aimed to reinvigorate an Islamic politics in opposition to Western capitalism and materialism. I argue that the affective economy of Jameelah’s writing help to explain the mobility of her ideas across national borders. Through affect, Jameelah’s writings produce a cumulative set of associations around female bodies that were intended to galvanize Muslim attachments to the umma and to draw absolute boundaries between Islam and the West.