by CHRIS LAMBIE Staff Reporter
The wife of a man charged with plotting terror strikes in Ontario grew up in Halifax as a "pretty wild child" but turned her life around when she found Islam, a close friend says.
Cheryfa MacAulay Jamal, 44, was named Sherry MacAulay when she attended Cornwallis Junior High School and Queen Elizabeth High School before dropping out in Grade 10, said Wendi Petersen, her former classmate.
"Islam was just the most amazing thing for her; it really turned her around," Ms. Petersen said.
"She had a disastrous first marriage, she had problems with drugs and alcohol, and Islam was the thing that saved her life, basically."
The two were close friends in school and reconnected about two years ago.
"We’ve been e-mailing back and forth and I’ve been in pretty regular contact with her," said Ms. Petersen, adding that Ms. Jamal "is really incredibly devout."
"She’s been horrified by . . . the violence that has been associated with Islam. She thinks it’s really awful. She’s constantly telling me that, ‘This is not what Islam is about. Islam does not support violence in any way. It’s all about peace.’ And she appears to truly believe that."
Ms. Jamal is "a peacenik Muslim," she said.
That wasn’t always the case, Ms. Petersen said.
"She dropped out of school and joined the army," the friend said.
"I’m sure she never served anywhere. But she was in the military and that’s where she met her first husband."
Ms. Jamal has two children from her first marriage and another four from her present union, Ms. Petersen said.
After her first marriage failed, she wed Qayyum Jamal, the 43-year-old Mississauga, Ont., man accused of plotting to blow up sites in southern Ontario.
"I’m sure that if there’s any truth in her husband’s involvement, this was completely beyond her knowledge," Ms. Petersen said. "I would really be surprised if she knew. I would think that he had completely hidden this whole thing from her because . . . of the deep outrage that she had when we talked about these acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims supposedly in the name of Islam."
She even changed her name from Sherry to Cheryfa because the former represents a type of alcohol, something Muslims aren’t supposed to touch, Ms. Petersen said.
"She’s someone who has found the joy in her life through dedication to this religion and who has become very kind of serene and peaceful — an incredibly cheerful woman — through motherhood and faith," Ms. Petersen said. "None of us in high school would ever have guessed that, never in a million years. She was a pretty wild child."
As a teenager, Ms. Jamal didn’t show much respect for authority and often wound up in trouble with her mother, her friend said.
"She’s changed so much from a person who was really scattered and looking for a good time, fast, to someone who . . . has gone back to university. She’s so articulate now and she’s so together. And what she’s said to me is, ‘It’s all because of the amazing power of my faith.’ "
In her youth, Sherry "was never one to do a stitch of schoolwork," Ms. Petersen said.Her parents broke up and she lived with a grandmother in Cape Breton for a while before attending Cornwallis Junior High, her friend said.
She has two older brothers, Todd and Dana, and her mother still lives in Halifax, Ms. Petersen said.
"This has just been like a bombshell," said a Cape Breton relative who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"Even though we haven’t seen each other in years, it’s still the same blood. We’re very close to her family."
The family "has no idea why this happened," the relative said.
Ms. Jamal wears a burka in public.
Six years ago, she spoke to the Toronto district school board and demanded that teachers give parents notice before teaching anything that promoted "homosexual or bisexual lifestyles or sexual promiscuity," according to an Internet version of her presentation.
In an Internet posting last year on a Muslim discussion forum, she railed against "women who go on radio and broadcast music, women who appear beautified and uncovered on television beside men."
On the same site, Ms. Jamal discussed women’s conversion to Islam as an act that removed "the veil from our eyes, ears and hearts."
Before converting, she said, she felt "helpless, having struggled for so long trying to find peace and happiness, security and stability, the correct method of how to live and behave. I remember feeling embarrassed to get on my knees to pray to God, how degrading, how juvenile I thought it was."
But in January 1994, she said, she received a wedding gift: "a translation of The Noble Qur’an."
By March of that year, "I was bugging my (first) husband to witness" the prayers a person must recite to convert to Islam, she said on the website.
Ms. Jamal added that she has "seen so much light and truth, so much logic and so many ‘Eurekas!’ while reading the Qur’an."
But life hasn’t been "a bed of roses," she said.
"Though we pray for peace and happiness, we don’t really understand yet that life is not about ease, but trial and perseverance. Most converts have so many difficulties, so many divorces, that it truly is a (withdrawal) away from our homelands, even if we only moved across the street from our families. We deny our family, our old religion, our culture, our friends, our careers, our ethnicity, our status, our image. All of it is gone when we become Muslim."
On another website, Ms. Jamal said: "I am not a Canadian first. I am a MUSLIM first, and then a Scottish descendant, seventh-generation Canadian."
Ms. Jamal went on to say she "once pinned a rose on the lapel of the then-newly elected prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau and I once represented the Canadian military in a NATO Tattoo in Stuttgart, Germany, as a drummer (in a mass band)."
Those aren’t her only claims to fame.
"My grandmother co-designed the first official Canadian tartan, the Nova Scotia tartan," she said.
(
clambie@herald.ca)
With Jocelyn Bethune
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/508784.html