Marmaduke pickthall biography of abraham

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That totalitarian nightmare he would not have recognised as Muslim. He frequently fasted and took communion, and insisted (to the annoyance of his chapelbound in-laws) on the truth of the Apostolic Succession. He was particularly struck by the call to prayer, the discipline of daily prayers, and the pervasive sense of peace and spirituality in Muslim life.

Quilliam had been a confidant of Abdul Hamid, ‘the Sultan’s Englishman’, his private advisor and his emissary on sensitive missions to the Balkans. Non-violence and non-co-operation seemed the most promising means by which India would emerge as a strong and free nation. God knows how I should feel if any Christian teacher dealt with a son of mine otherwise than as I now deal with you.’ […] If he had become a Muslim at that time he would pretty certainly have repented it – quite apart from the unhappiness he would have caused his mother, which would have made him unhappy – because he had not thought and learnt enough about religion to be certain of his faith.

He then returned to England, where he set up a new society for Islamic work, and delivered a series of lectures. I impressed upon the young leaders the necessity of being particularly strict in observance of the essential discipline of Islam.’

In the midst of this educational activity, he managed to find time to write. This early exposure to rigorous academic and theological training laid the foundation for his later scholarly approach to Islam and his profound respect for religious studies.

Photo: History/Universal Images Group

Discovering Islam

Pickthall’s first significant encounter with Islam occurred during his extensive travels in the Middle East and Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Unusually for a translation, it was further translated into several other languages, including Tagalog, Turkish and Portuguese.

Pickthall, now a revered religious leader in his own right, was often asked for Hanafi fatwas on difficult issues, and continued to preach. It also offered an opportunity to help his friend James Hanauer, the Anglican chaplain at Damascus, edit his anthology of Muslim, Christian and Jewish tales, Folklore of the Holy Land.

1908 brought intimations of the collapse of the old world.

In England, Pickthall campaigned vigorously on Turkey’s behalf, but could do nothing against the new Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who was, as Granville Browne commented, ‘russophile, germanophobe, and anti-Islamic.’ He wrote to a Foreign Office official demanding to know whether the new arrangements in the Balkans could be considered to further the cause of peace, and received the following reply: ‘Yes, and I’ll tell you why.

This princely state boasted a long association with British Muslims, and had been many years earlier the home of one of the most colourful characters in India: William Linnaeus Gardner (1770-1835), a convert who fought in the Nizam’s forces against the French in 1798 before setting up his own regiment of irregulars, Gardner’s Horse, and marrying his son to a niece of the Moghul emperor Akbar Shah.

In the 1920s, Hyderabad resembled a surviving fragment of Moghul brilliance, and the Nizam, the richest man in the world, was busy turning his capital into an oasis of culture and art.

By 1899, the financially-strapped young couple took a small cottage in Suffolk where Pickthall could write on a regular basis. In native dress again, he travelled through the countryside, marvelling at the mawlid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi in Tanta, and immersing himself in Arab ways. There was something remote about the whole scene, or so it appeared to me.

Turkish reform, he claimed, was a threat to Christians, and attacks on Turkish Muslims were attacks on the entire Muslim world. As with his great harem novel, Veiled Women, he was concerned to be true to his perceptions; he would document English and Oriental life as he found it, not as he or others would wish it to be.

The last straw was Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘For the Mahometans’:

‘O, may thy blood once sprinkled cry

For those who spurn Thy sprinkled blood:

Assert thy glorious Deity

Stretch out thine arm thou triune God

The Unitarian fiend expel

And chase his doctrines back to Hell.’

Pickthall thought of the Carnegie Report, which declared, of the Greek attack on Valona, that ‘in a century of repentance they could not expiate it.’ He thought of the forced conversions of the Pomaks in Bulgaria.

But Christian Jerusalem was a maze of rival shrines and liturgies, where punches were frequently thrown in churches, while the Jerusalem of Islam was gloriously united under the Dome, the physical crown of the city, and of her complex history.

1897 found him in Damascus, the silent city of lanes, hidden rose-bowers, and walnut trees. Behind the agitation was, on the one hand, the traditional British fear that, in the words of Sir Mark Sykes, ‘the collapse of the Ottoman Empire would be a frightful disaster to us.’ On the other were ranged the powers of bloodsucking French banks, Gladstonian Christian Islamophobia, and a vicious pan-Slavism bankrolled from the darker recesses of Moscow’s bureaucracy.

Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam, that undying Empire loyalist, fired off a hot broadside of polemic:

‘List, ye Czar of “Russia’s all,”

Hark!

He was appalled by the hate-filled rivalry of the sects, which, he thought, should at least be united in the land holy to their faith.