MOST contemporary Muslims only encounter Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall through his explanatory translation The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an. His important role as an early Muslim convert and his extensive and uneven oeuvre as a novelist have been almost forgotten, even though he wrote 25 books between 1900 and 1930. Two early novels, All Fools (1900) and Saïd the Fisherman (1903), and two short stories ‘Karàkter’ (1911) and ‘Between Ourselves’ (1922), especially merit a closer look, as they bookend his 1917 conversion and depict Muslims in Britain.

Marmaduke was born in 1875 and grew up in Suffolk and London. He passed an unhappy few years at Harrow, where one contemporary was Winston Churchill. While he had a flair for languages, his poor numeracy prevented him from entering conventional careers. Instead, Pickthall spent two formative years learning Arabic and travelling around Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. There he was tempted to convert to Islam, but a Damascene religious leader told him to wait until he was older, so he delayed his declaration of faith.

In 1896, his mother persuaded him to come home. Settling back into British life, Pickthall now saw his country through Arab eyes, in an instance of self-othering that would prove fertile for his fiction. He began working to establish himself as a writer of short stories, novels, and, increasingly, political essays. In 1907, he rekindled his love affair with the Middle East, going to Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey. Unlike his peers, he wore local dress, studied other languages, and tried to understand people whose worldview was different from his own.

During World War I, Pickthall was more on the side of Turkey than Britain. Because of their shared Turkophilia, he started making alliances with British Muslims, most of them from India. In 1917 he became a convert to Islam at the age of 42. After the War, Pickthall moved his political interests from Turkey to India; he spent the last 15 years of his life in Hyderabad, working for the Nizam and as a journalist. He returned to England in 1935 where he died a year later and was buried in Brookwood’s Muslim cemetery near Woking.

All Fools exhibits its author’s scattergun contempt for his characters and lack of artistic control over his material. However, the novel is worth mentioning because of its London setting and the appearance of a religiously indeterminate Indian character, “Brown Geegee” (a bastardisation of Baronji). Brown Geegee’s is a racist portrayal of a ‘comedy’ Indian who cannot speak English properly. The young Pickthall turns almost as negative an eye on his countrymen, possibly due to his new sense of alienation on arriving ‘home’ after a charmed stay in the Arab world. Moreover, while he has good insight into Arabs’ perspectives, he has not yet developed sympathy for Indians, resulting in this sad caricature.

Remarkably, Pickthall soon followed up this flop with his sophisticated second novel, Saïd the Fisherman, an Englishman’s attempt to represent an insider’s view of Islam and the Arab world. This is probably the first Anglophone novel to describe the life story of a Muslim (the titular Saïd), at least part of which is set in Britain.

Saïd is a rogue whose sins in Syria eventually catch up with him. He flees retribution by stowing away on a boat bound for London. On arrival, he is drugged, robbed, and beaten. Eating from the gutters, tormented by homesickness, he eventually suffers mental collapse. Moved by Saïd’s plight, a missionary working in his psychiatric hospital sends him home, where he is killed in the 1882 Alexandria riots. Free indirect discourse references to “the horror” and “the noiseless horror” suggest that Pickthall had read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published four years earlier in 1899. In this novel, however, the horror glowers from the centre of empire rather than at its dark margins.

Saïd the Fisherman represents Pickthall’s serious attempt, before his conversion, to portray the centrality of Islam to the everyday life of ordinary rather than saintly Muslims. Listening to the engines throbbing on his steamship to England, Saïd personifies the sound as “an imprisoned jinni toiling with bitter sobs.” Britons’ racist treatment of him once in London makes him long for the company of fellow Muslims. He finds it difficult to accept English speech, with its failure to evoke the name of God.

Pickthall compassionately portrays the migrant’s experience of disorientation in the West. Saïd is dazzled by the traffic and street lights, bemused by people’s unfriendliness, and deafened by the city’s roar. Far from Indian diasporic author Kamala Markandaya’s idea that the migrant has productive “double vision” and can gaze through the eyes of both hostland and homeland, Saïd is almost sightless in dull, colourless Britain. His vision only returns amidst the Arab world’s sunshine: “scales seemed to fall from his eyes so that he saw distinctly.”

Pickthall’s two stories have in common an interest in Arabs who come to Britain, and how their initial mimicry of the British is transformed by racism and ill-treatment into rebelliousness. In ‘Karàkter’ an Egyptian farmer petitions the local British official to help him send his 14-year-old son Ahmed to the best school in the colonial centre. He wants Ahmed to learn “karàkter,” of which the English alone are said to possess the secret. Ahmed acclimatises after an initial torpor in Britain and overcomes the abuse he initially faces at public school. When he returns to Egypt for a governmental job, Ahmed joshes his English master as though the two were equals. The master, who until then had been friendly, damns him for his insolence. Ahmed feels mortified and resigns his post to become a nationalist. The story concludes with his father’s lament that the “karàkter” he wanted Ahmed to learn has been his undoing.

‘Between Ourselves’ concerns a tale Sir Charles Duclay, an Orientalist and one of Egypt’s rulers, tells some companions to illustrate the hypocrisy of British rule. In his story, Abbâs, a young Egyptian, tells Duclay of his admiration for British rule and promises support. However, Arabic newspapers publish a poisonous and untrue article about Abbâs. He believes that British libel law will help recuperate his reputation, but Duclay “expounds to him the real nature of the British Occupation and its history; how we were there for our own ends, and not the good of Egypt.”

Thus undeceived, Abbâs travels to London. There he becomes an anti-imperialist speaker and “Representative of the Egyptian nation.” Yet some rivals reignite the slander against Abbâs and, disillusioned with Britain, he goes into exile in Paris, becomes a terrorist, and is finally imprisoned.

For most of his career, Pickthall is a perceptive chronicler of the disorientation of the Muslim migrant in Britain. Unfortunately, he is pessimistic about the possibility of reorientation. All Fools’ Brown Geegee is simply a figure of fun, Saïd flees to Egypt after only a short time in England where he is killed, while the short stories’ disorientated characters are ‘mimic men’ who try but fail to rebel. For all his fine qualities as an author, Pickthall does not seem capable of imagining for any of his characters the empowerment that he himself seems to have found in in-betweenness.