Marmaduke Pickthall

Marmaduke Pickthall

Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (born April 7, 1875 as Marmaduke William Pickthall in Harrow , †  May 19, 1936 in St. Ives ) was an English writer and Islamic scholar , who was known for his translation of the Koran into English .

Family and early years

Marmaduke Pickthall was born to Mary O'Brien and her husband, the Anglican priest Reverend Charles Grayson Pickthall, into a well-off, middle-class English family that traced its roots back to a knight of William the Conqueror named Roger de Poictu. The mother was a daughter of Admiral Henry O'Brien, who had made a name for himself during the Napoleonic Wars . His grandfather was also a priest and two of his stepsisters were nuns. When Pickthall was five years old, his father died and the family moved to London from Woodbridge , where the father had been pastor . He was a sickly, shy child and suffered from bronchitis . He later attended Harrow School , which he left after six years of school.

Turning to the East

Marmaduke Pickthall traveled to Europe with his mother and discovered his talent for languages. On his return he applied for the diplomatic service, but failed the entrance exam. So he accepted an invitation from Thomas Dowling , a friend of his mother's, who went to Palestine as an Anglican bishop in the hope of learning other languages ​​in order to be accepted into the diplomatic service. For two years he traveled through Egypt and Palestine, soon spoke fluent Arabic , was fascinated by the country and its people and adopted local behavior (go native) . When his mother heard of this development in 1896, she ordered him back home. He married in England and moved to Switzerland with his wife in 1898 . His first story in the Middle East played, The Word of an Englishman , was published in the same year. In 1899 the couple moved to a small house in Suffolk for financial reasons . Then Pickthall wrote a new book every year. In 1910 he returned to Cairo for the first time after his previous trip, as a guest of a British official.

Upon his return, Pickthall began working for The New Age magazine until he went to India in 1920 . His first articles dealt with Egypt, but when the First Balkan War broke out between Serbia , Bulgaria and Greece on the one hand and the Ottoman Empire in 1912 , he focused his energies on defending the Ottoman Empire. He wrote a series of articles called The Black Crusade , which New Age publishers later put out as a flyer. In these articles, Pickthall condemned Christians for comparing the Turks to Satan and for publicly approving Bulgarian massacres of Muslims . At the end of 1912 he traveled to Turkey himself to get his own picture of the events there.

His political stance during World War I was nuanced and difficult. Marmaduke Pickthall was a patriotic Tory who opposed war between his homeland and the Ottoman Empire. He campaigned for Turkish neutrality and independence. On the other hand, he praised the British government for its behavior in Egypt. In later years he criticized British imperialism in India while continuing to approve of that in Egypt. These internal tensions became evident in his articles and novels.

When the First World War broke out , Pickthall declared his general willingness to join the army as long as he did not have to fight the Turks. When news of the Armenian genocide reached Britain in 1915 , Pickthall questioned this information, claiming that the fault was not to be found solely with the Turkish government. His articles during this period emphasized four points: adherence to traditional English foreign policy, a warning about Russian foreign policy, rejection of the idea that the Christians in the Balkans should be supported by the British on religious grounds, and his enthusiasm for the Achievements of the Turks and the impending renewal of the Islamic world.

Convert to Islam

Before the World War, Pickthall was still a practicing Anglican. However, he was increasingly disappointed with the actions of Christians, especially with the activities of missionaries . As the war progressed, Pickthall felt torn between his loyalties between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire, as can be seen in his works. After a series of lectures on Islam and progress at the Muslim Literary Society in Notting Hill in November 1917, Pickthall publicly declared his conversion to Islam . He took the name Muhammad and quickly became an important figure in the Islamic community in Britain. In the absence of Khwaja Kamal ud-Din , the founder, he was involved in the Woking Muslim Mission .

From 1919 Mohammed Pickthall worked for the Islamic Information Bureau . In 1920 he went to India with his wife to work as editor of the Bombay Chronicle and became an Indian nationalist who dressed like a local. In India he completed his translation The Meaning of the Glorious Koran . The translation was authorized by Al-Azhar University in Cairo and praised as a "great literary achievement" in the Times Literary Supplement . In 1924, he lost his post as editor-in-chief of the Bombay Chronicle because the newspaper allegedly misreported a demonstration in which people were killed. The Nizam of Hyderabad , Asaf Jah VII , offered him a position as director of a boys' school. In addition, Pickthall founded the magazine Islamic Culture in 1927 .

In 1935, a year before his death, Pickthall returned to England and died in St. Ives. He was buried in the Muslim section of Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.

Since Pickthall was friends with the writer EM Forster , it was assumed that he served as a model for the character of Richard Fielding in his 1924 book In Search of India .

Publications (selection)

• Said the Fisherman (1903) (German: gloss, love and death of the fisherman Sai͏̈d . Munich. A. Langen 1926)
• Enid (1904)
• Brendle (1905)
• The House of Islam (1906)
• The Myopes (1907)
• Children of the Nile (1908)
• The Valley of the Kings (1909)
• Pot au Feu (1911)
• Larkmeadow (1912)
• The House at War (1913)
• With the Turk in Wartime (1914)
• Tales from Five Chimneys (1915)
• Veiled Women (1916)
• Knights of Araby (1917)
• Oriental Encounters (1918)
• Sir Limpidus (1919)
• The Early Hours (1921)
• The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation (1930)

See also

• Islam in the UK

Web links

• Literature by and about Marmaduke Pickthall in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Literature by and about Marmaduke Pickthall in the catalog of the German National Library
• Koran translation by Marmaduke Pickthall on al-quran.info
• Marmaduke Pickthall on wokingmuslim.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In other sources, Woodbridge in Suffolk is given as the place of birth . See: Archived copy ( Memento of the original dated November 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Marmaduke Pickthall on masud.co.uk
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Converts: Marmaduke Pickthall on thetruecall.com ( Memento of the original dated November 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ wokingmuslim.org
5. ^ Dennis G. Hurst: America on the Cusp of God's Grace . IUniverse , 2010, pp. 155–156 (Retrieved September 7, 2013).