Pickthall, Islam and the Modern World

Introduction: Pickthall, Islam and the Modern World Geoffrey P. Nash The present volume, a commissioned collection of essays from specialists in the field of British Muslim studies, was originally intended as a commemora- tion of two of the important anniversaries connected to one of its outstanding figures – Marmaduke Pickthall. 2016 marks the eightieth anniversary of his death and the thirtieth since the publication of Peter Clark’s groundbreaking study: Marmaduke Pickthall: British Muslim. The present volume owes much to this biography’s pioneering scholarship. While not serving as a blueprint its divisions – the arrival of a writer, Pickthall and Turkey, Pickthall and Islam, servant of Islam, Quran translator, writer of fiction – could not but exert a salient influence over the topics addressed in these pages. Peter Clark’s work also includes a bibliography of Pickthall’s writings that has proved invaluable to later scholars. As we have seen in his “Foreword” to the present volume, his work was preceded by Anne Fremantle’s pioneer biography of Pickthall, a tome that remains a mine of information for Pickthall scholars. This is especially the case given that he left behind him no personal papers. However the broader topic of Pickthall’s place among British Muslims of the early twentieth century had to wait until Jamie Gilham’s masterful Loyal Enemies: British Converts to Islam, 1850–1950 was published in 2014. Gilham’s study confirms that Pickthall’s exploits did not occur in a vacuum. For a long time he was an obscure fig- ure known chiefly as an English translator of the Quran. Gilham focuses the Muslim community which he joined as a convert during the First World War quickly becoming an important representative of a new form of “British” Islam. Nowadays he is increasingly in the spotlight along with such contemporaries in the British Muslim community as Abdullah Quilliam, Lord Headley, Lady Evelyn Cobbold, Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din and Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Pickthall’s putative status as a “loyal enemy” in relation to British foreign policy in the Muslim world, and his mission in the field of political journalism as a passion- ate advocate of Turkey has received a lot of attention too. However, there is still a great deal more to say about him. This volume therefore has two main focuses. Firstly, there is Pickthall himself, a standout Muslim convert, and the factors behind his conversion to Islam, how they were inflected by his personality, background and the context of the period in which he lived. Second, but equally important is Pickthall’s broader significance as a Muslim in the world © geoffrey p. nash, ��7 | doi �0.��63/97890043�7597_00� This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc-by-nc License. Geoffrey P. Nash - 9789004327597 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 10:10:47AM via free access <UN> 2 Nash of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, variously designated as the period of late colonialism, the modern liberal age, or a turning point in the longer engagement between the Islamicate world and Western Christendom/ the secular West. Pickthall was born in Suffolk in 1875; aged five on the death of his clergy- man father he moved with his family to London. After Harrow, he attempted unsuccessfully to pass the Foreign Office exam. Still under eighteen, seeking a consular job in Palestine, he travelled to Egypt and Jerusalem with introduc- tions to European residents and missionaries who he shocked by donning Arab clothing and travelling around Palestine with local guides. His partially fictionalised account of this adventure, Oriental Encounters, was published in 1918. In Damascus he was tempted to convert to Islam but returned to England and married Muriel Smith in September 1896. Adopting a writing career, Pickthall’ s most successful piece of oriental fiction Said the Fisherman was published by Methuen in 1903; The House of Islam (1906) and Children of the Nile (1908) followed. The same year the latter was published Pickthall welcomed the Young Turk revolution and when the Balkan Wars broke out in 1912 he em- barked upon a journalistic crusade on Turkey’s behalf that led to a four-month sojourn in Istanbul in the spring of 1913. With the Turk in War Time appeared on the eve of the outbreak of the Great War, during which Pickthall maintained his pro-Turk position by calling for a separate peace with Turkey. Also during this period he drew ever closer to faith in Islam eventually making public dec- laration of this in November 1917. He now entered the London and Woking Muslim community, acting as Imam and preaching Friday sermons. After the war he continued to invest in Muslim causes and was invited by leaders of the Khilafat movement to come to India and edit the Bombay Chronicle. He arrived there in 1920 and continued the paper’s nationalist position; collaborating with Gandhi he addressed large meetings and played his part in what has been described as the largest Muslim-Hindu agitation against British rule since the 1857 Mutiny. When the newspaper lost a government-instigated court case and received a huge fine Pickthall resigned, but he soon found employment as an educator and later editor of the journal Islamic Culture in the “native” state of Hyderabad ruled by the Muslim Nizam. Under the prince’s patronage he found time to complete a ground breaking English translation of the Quran, published in 1930. Pickthall retired from service in Hyderabad in 1935, returned to England, and died the following year. He is buried in the Muslim cemetery at Brookwood, Surrey. This volume probes different facets of Pickthall’s life, personality and career, and in addition places him with respect to his own time. It was as a fiction writer, who between 1900 and 1922 wrote three volumes of short stories, fourteen Geoffrey P. Nash - 9789004327597 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 10:10:47AM via free access <UN> Introduction 3 novels and one fictionalised memoir, that he first became known.1 His journal- ist’s career, which began around 1908, consisted for several years of publishing unsigned reviews of volumes of fiction and travel writing, often with eastern subjects, before exploding into life over a foreign policy issue: Turkey’s perilous position in the first Balkan War that broke out in 1912. Suddenly, he became fix- ated on a distinct current of his time, a subject in which Islam played a major role. However, the journalism that arose out of Pickthall’s personal interest in eastern politics cannot easily be disentwined from his earlier experiences as a traveller, which also provided the aliment for his oriental fiction. His contribu- tion to the genre of travel writing, long viewed as a sub-set of both fictional and journalistic writing, is nonetheless significant when viewed as part of the canon of western travel literature on the East. All these aspects were progres- sively infused by his engagement with the cultures of belief of those Muslims he interfaced with and his growing personal interest in and eventual commit- ment to faith in Islam. His renditions into English of verses from the Quran, begun before his conversion and carried on for a decade after, until he consid- ered publishing a complete English version of the holy book, was the product of innate linguistic abilities joined to his faith-interest, and until recently was marked by posterity as the major achievement of his life. Placing Pickthall in the context of his time requires inquiry into his connec- tions to movements contributing to new developments in Islam both in Britain and the wider world, and exploration of his various depictions of Muslim iden- tity within colonial and anti-colonial contexts. It was frequently reiterated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century how Britain was the first among empires as far as ruling the largest Muslim population was concerned. “As the ‘great Muhammadan Power’” she “could not be seen to act against the interests of Islam”.2 Recent research has emphasised the commonalities in the treat- ment of their Muslim populations by the respective European empires. David Motadel’s introduction to Islam and the European Empires stresses the ways in which Muslims were integrated into the colonial state, often by actively employing existing Islamic structures.3 However the British, alongside offi- cials in the French, Russian and Dutch colonial administrations regarded the hajj with suspicion as a means of spreading pan-Islamic ideas which brought home by pilgrims had the potential to prove subversive. The danger that some 1 He resumed fiction writing very much on a part time basis in India during the last fifteen years of his life, producing several short stories and an unpublished novel. 2 John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 296. 3 David Motadel, ed., Islam and the European Empires (Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, 2014). Geoffrey P. Nash - 9789004327597 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 10:10:47AM via free access <UN> 4 Nash imperialist administrators believed Islam constituted to India could create a paranoiac fear of Muslim “fanaticism” that in the Victorian period was fed by the Mutiny, the reverses in Afghanistan, continuing problems on the North- West frontier and Gordon’s fate at Khartoum. In the great late-Victorian battles over the fate of the Ottoman Empire Conservatives and Liberals took it for granted that the last significant Muslim power was on the way out; in broader terms, “British opinion, whether sympathetic or not, tended to regard Islam as a culture of decline”.4 However, besides Britain’s and other European empires’ policies towards the Muslim world, the colonial context with respect to Muslims coming to Europe and establishing new intellectual networks has also exercised recent scholarship.

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