Posted on 06/08/2006 7:47:04 AM PDT by fanfan
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
Cheryfa MacAulay Jamal leaves her Mississauga, Ont., home with an unidentified man. The former Halifax woman’s husband is the suspected ringleader in the alleged plan to stage a massive terrorist attack in Canada. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star)
Cheryfa MacAulay Jamal, wife of terror suspect Qayyum Jamal, arrives at a Brampton, Ont., courthouse on Tuesday.
Grade 10 picture of Sherry MacAulay from the 1979 Queen Elizabeth High School yearbook.(NATHAN DENETTE / CP)
Canada ping!
Please FReepmail me to get on or off this ping list.
Troubled people have a way of bouncing from one kind of trouble to another.
All muslims are peaceful. Until they blow someone up! She's a delusional dunce.
good to see she went from sex, drugs and rock and roll to an improved life of supporting a murderer.
PC or no PC, you can bet your sweet ass that if I were the judge, and she appeared in my court, she would have that mask taken off of her face. What BS. The Aussies are right. If they want to come here and live, then they live by our law, not islam, and if they dont like that, then Delta is ready when you are.
Depends on your definition of "turned around". She went from being wild to terrorism.
She lived with a man who is the ringleader of a massive plot, and she doesn't know ANYTHING? Or are her comments more of the lying to the infidels is acceptable? That religion is a religion of peace, but achieve that peace they must kill and rid the world of all the infidels.
Yawn....Wacked out troubled child, has bad marriage and then gets mixed up in a cult. Something new here?
Great, now if they'd just leave everyone else in peace we could all be happy.
Islamofasist enabler.
Those black sheets they wear are no different than Klan robes. Hate is hate. If the KKK said they are a religion of peace they would be tarred and feathered, and rightfully so.
But she has it ALL covered up.... thank goodness. My eyes are safe for yet another day...
Oh, goody for her. I wonder if becoming serene is a side-effect of undergoing a clitoral circumcision like so many other Muslim women have to endure?
Yoa know, the color BLACK is SUPPOSED to be soooooooo slimming... as opposed to wearing ALL white... BUT, in her case... the black cover DID NOT work... sueoeeeeeeeeeeeee,PIG, PIG, PIG!!
What an interesting thing to be searching for.
Very like the American Taliban.
My sophomore year in high school, I turned 15. That woman looks like she was twice that.
Why do '70s yearbook photos make everyone look so old?
As if the Bible wouldn't teach "the correct method of how to live and behave," if she'd paid any heed to it.
Humph.
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