الكاتب: MARYAM JAMEELAH

Maryam Jameelab was born in 1934 in New York at the height of the Great Depression - a fourth-generation American of GermanJewish origin. She was reared in Westchester, one of the most prosperous and populated suburbs of New York and received a thoroughly secular American education at the local public schools. Always an above-average student, she soon became a passionate intellectual and insatiable bibliophile, hardly ever without a book in hand, her readings extending far beyond the requirements of the school curriculum. As she entered adolescence, she became intensely serious-minded, scorning all frivolities, which is very rare for an otherwise attractive young girl. Her main interests were religion, philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology and biology. The school and local community public libraries and later, the New York Public Library, became "her second home." If it is a precedent followed by Islamic history that great reformers appear in every age to struggle for therevival of Islam, then certainly Badee-u-Zaman Said Nursi of Turkey was such a Mujaddid presented by Allah to the Muslims to combat the evils of the notoricus regime of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Decades have passed since the death of the Dictator but the strength of Nursi's following is still growing fast. ·Despite all obstacles, the disciplined follower~ of Badee-u-Zaman are devoting their utmost to bring about an Islamic renaissance by peaceful means, working hard in literary, educational and other fields of endeavour.