Reading Arabia: British Orientalism in the Age of Mass Publication, 1880-1930

4 Orientalism from Within and Without

130 4 Orientalism from Within and Without Marmaduke Pickthall From Marmaduke to Muhammed Marmaduke Pickthall is a most interesting figure among British writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period punctuated by the Great War. In literature, the era was marked by the rise of what is now known as the modernist movement. Pickthall, today, is largely forgotten. Yet other modern and modernist writers are still celebrated, even though they did not achieve the same kind of commercial success and broad readership, nor gain recognition for their skill and intellect, as Pickthall did in his time To understand Pickthall’s place among writers in his time, consider the respected journals where he published reviews and serialized versions of his works during the fin de siècle period: Cornhill Magazine, Nineteenth Century, and Academy, Athenaeum. These journals held a prominent place for their educated middle- and upper-class readership .1 Cornhill Magazine also stands out because of its connection to so many well-known authors who formed the tradition of the nineteenthcentury novel. Pickthall worked hard to break with Orientalist discourse about the Arab and Muslim world. His deep roots in the discourse of British culture—the novel tradition—brought about a crisis of thought and representation. It is on this crisis that I wish to focus this chapter and, with reference to several early-twentieth-century texts by Pickthall , figure out what this crisis of thought and representation meant Orientalism from Within and Without | 131 for our author as well as for the legacy of liberal and progressive Western thought and discourse about the Arab and Muslim world. Marmaduke Pickthall was one of twelve children born to the Reverend Charles Pickthall and his wife Mary. The family had some social standing, given his father’s position in the church. But after his father died in 1881, the family experienced a great deal of financial hardship. Still, Marmaduke attended the Harrow School as a day student, where his fellow students included Winston Churchill and L. S. Amery. Following his failure to gain a position in the Levant consular service as a young adult, and at the invitation of a family acquaintance, Pickthall visited Syria for an extended stay from 1894 to 1896. Syria included modern Lebanon at that time as well as Mandate Palestine. Young Marmaduke traveled the countryside and explored the major cities of the region—Beirut, Jerusalem, and Damascus.2 He also spent a good deal of time traveling off the usual tourist routes while making friends and contacts among the local populations wherever he went. Pickthall learned Arabic and much about the culture of the region, to the outrage of his fellow countrymen, and he even shunned the company of fellow Britons, Europeans, and Christians. This was the formative experience of his life, launching him as a writer and eventually as a major figure in the Islamic world of the time. Pickthall was a moderately successful writer in the early twentieth century, specifically from 1903 to 1922. Most of his novels and short stories from this period concerned the Near East. His collections of short stories such as Pot au Feu (1911), Tales of Five Chimneys (1915), and As Others See Us (1922) also concerned the Near East to some extent. But the bulk of his oeuvre consists of the Near East novels, which include Said the Fisherman (1903), The House of Islam (1906), Children of the Nile (1908), The Valley of the Kings (1909), Veiled Women (1913), The House of War (1916), Knights of Araby (1917), and The Early Hours (1921). Oriental Encounters (1918) is an autobiographical travelogue from the same period. These works were published mostly by established houses such as Methuen, Collins, and John Murray in Britain and Knopf in the United States. Considering that Pickthall wrote approximately fourteen novels and numerous short stories as well as 132 | Reading Arabia literary reviews and journal articles on politics and culture, it is clear that he was an accomplished and prolific professional writer. However, perhaps Pickthall is a significant intellectual figure today mainly because he converted to Islam in the middle of his adult life and quickly gained an important status with the Muslim community in Britain and subsequently in the Muslim world as a whole. To identify him as a British Muslim, as Peter Clark does in the title of his biography , Marmaduke Pickthall: British Muslim, is not to diminish his...