Politics and the Path to Islam

Pickthall’s conversion to Islam was protracted (he had first toyed with converting during his 1894–5 trip to the Middle East¹¹), but became more likely in the period immediately prior to the First World War. His early travels to the Middle East and return to Egypt in 1907 and 1908 forged a strong emotional attachment to and intellectual and political engagement with Muslims and Islam. Moreover, Pickthall’s interest in Islam and admiration for Ottoman lands and its Muslim peoples made him a committed Turcophile who saw Turkey as the hope of the Islamic world. As Ron Geaves shows in Chapter Four of this book, it was over the issue of the Young Turks that Pickthall and Quilliam/Léon differed, though there is little evidence to suggest that their disagreement got out of hand, and they remained friends throughout their lives. The traditionalist Quilliam, who had converted in the 1880s, had always championed the Ottoman sultan-caliph, even when, during the mid-1890s, the British press and politicians launched vitriolic campaigns against the Sultan (Abdul Hamid ii, 1842–1918) in the wake of the massacre of “dissident” Armenians by Ottoman troops.¹² Quilliam would never accept the legitimacy of the Young Turk revolution which, in 1908, had deposed the Sultan. But, for the modernist Pickthall, the Young Turks promised an age of reform – in matters of education, social improvement and enhancement of the status of women – and from this he anticipated an improved and educated, modernised Islam.¹³

Alarmed at the imminent collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the first Balkan War of October 1912 to May 1913, Pickthall wrote furiously in British newspapers and journals about the integrity of the Turks and the strategic importance of their ailing Empire. He decried the British government’s distancing itself from its pledge at Berlin in 1878 to guarantee the independence of the Ottoman Empire. In November 1912, Pickthall began a series of articles in the New Age magazine entitled “The Black Crusade”, which condemned the intrigues of “Christian Powers” in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire and proclaimed the Turks, “by far the most advanced of Moslem races […] mentally capable of attaining to the highest civilisation”.¹⁴ In contrast to the views of Quilliam/Léon, Pickthall claimed in the December 1912 issue of the respectable Nineteenth Century and After journal that Turkish massacres of Christian subjects were the fault of “Abdul Hamid ii., a Sultan whom the Turks themselves deposed with ignominy. Moslems of the better sort are not bloodthirsty”.¹⁵ Writing in the Times at the beginning of 1913, Pickthall pointed to the alleged “butchery” of Muslim Macedonians by Christians, and complained about British silence over the massacres. The letter emphasised that Pickthall adhered to a Disraeli-inspired English foreign policy fearful of Russian interests threatening the territorial integrity of Turkey and, in the long term, British India: “The evident desire of our English Government to hush the matter up is causing bitter indignation […]. To persons like myself, who had imagined the promotion of good feeling between Christian and Mahomedan to be a part of England’s standing policy, it is inexplicable”.¹⁶ Days later, Pickthall travelled to Turkey to see the beleaguered capital for himself. Writing in the New Age in February 1913 on the failure of the Great Powers to permit the Turks an international commission to investigate alleged “Macedonian horrors”, he admitted that, “I am heartily ashamed of being a European and a Christian at this juncture”.¹⁷ Unsurprisingly, Pickthall returned to England four months later more politicised. He was determined to prevent the partition of the Ottoman Empire and explain to his compatriots that, if Britain did not befriend Turkey, then Germany – who made no secret of her desire for a Turkish alliance – would take the initiative.

On his return to England, and despite being based in rural Sussex (until 1916), Pickthall was drawn into the orbit of the London-based Turcophile movement which, in turn, introduced him to a few British converts to Islam. These included Quilliam, who had permanently relocated from Liverpool to London, where he was masquerading as “Professor Léon” by the time Pickthall met him in c.1913.¹⁸ Most of the other converts Pickthall knew at this time had been linked to Quilliam’s Liverpool Muslim Institute (lmi), the first Muslim missionary organisation in Britain, which had collapsed in 1908: John Yehya-en Nasr Parkinson (1874–1918), who converted in c.1901 was lmi Vice-President;¹⁹ Khalid Sheldrake, who converted in 1904 and became “London correspondent” for the lmi journal, The Crescent; and Dudley Wright, an Islamophile who had written for the Crescent and later converted to Islam. Quilliam/Léon, Parkinson, Sheldrake and Wright were also all members of Abdullah Suhrawardy’s (1870–1935) London-based Islamic Society. Suhrawardy had established the “Pan-Islamic Society” in 1903 to stem the decline of the umma (worldwide Muslim community) by pursuing broadly pan-Islamic objectives. The Society was renamed the Islamic Society in 1907 and, in 1916, it became known as the Central Islamic Society. Sheldrake was Vice-President of the Islamic Society when Pickthall first joined its meetings in c.1912.²⁰

One member of the Islamic Society not connected with Quilliam’s lmi was Lady Evelyn Cobbold who, like Pickthall, had a strong emotional attachment to Muslims and Islam through early travels to the Middle East. In 1914, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and a European conflict looming, Cobbold’s admiration of Muslims and Islam developed an increasingly political dimension. Further independent study persuaded Cobbold that Islam was the religion, “most calculated to solve the world’s many perplexing problems, and to bring to humanity peace and happiness”.²¹ Pickthall and Cobbold did not meet until 1914, when they were introduced in London by a mutual friend, the former Grand Vizier (Prime Minister) of the Ottoman Empire, Ibrahim Hakki Pasha (1882–1918). Pickthall had first met Hakki in Berlin en route to Turkey the year before, when Hakki was an Ottoman Ambassador. At their first meeting, Pickthall was not impressed by the direct and rather eccentric, aristocratic Cobbold. He later told his close friend, the Turcophile Conservative mp Aubrey Herbert (1880–1923), that he “didn’t like her much”; but, at their second meeting – a “private talk” over lunch in Claridge’s Hotel (Cobbold’s favourite London haunt) in January 1915 – Pickthall was charmed and revelled in her gossip.²² In fact, they remained life-long friends: when Herbert suggested to Cobbold during the war that Pickthall’s lobbying for the Turks made him “England’s most loyal enemy”, she returned that the “‘only one thing I deplore about him […] is his absurd name’”.²³

Back in London in the autumn of 1913, Pickthall and Quilliam/Léon, alongside the radical pan-Islamic and Pan-African journalist Dusé Mohamed Ali (1866–1945) and the Turcophile Arthur Field (an atheist whom Pickthall, his great friend, described to Fremantle as, “‘in reality, a faithful servant of Allah’”²⁴), helped establish an Ottoman Committee to defend Turkish interests. By the end of 1913, the Committee had split into two organisations, both of which Pickthall joined. He briefly sat on the Ottoman Association’s Executive Committee, which comprised, “British subjects of European descent [with …] special knowledge of Turkey” and was designed to influence policy for, “maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire [and …] promot[ing] a cordial understanding between Great Britain and Turkey”.²⁵ Pickthall became much more closely involved with the second organisation, the Anglo-Ottoman Society (aos), which, in contrast to the Ottoman Association, claimed to be a popular and international formation, composed of all nationalities, Muslim and Christian, proposing “a united movement in British and Continental political and Press circles […] calling for a European defence of Turkey”.²⁶ Pickthall worked so hard for the aos that Fremantle commented that he, “did everything for it except bath the members”.²⁷ In addition to sometime aos Vice-President Quilliam/Léon, the membership included Parkinson and some of Quilliam’s Muslim family, the most active of whom was his eldest son Robert Ahmed Quilliam. In April 1914, the Society organised “A public conversazione and meeting” at the Caxton Hall, Westminster, with one of Quilliam’s daughters, Harriet Hanifa, in “conversazione” and Pickthall joining the company as a main speaker.²⁸ Other social and intellectual networks bound this small group of politically-minded converts and Turcophiles in these years. For example, Pickthall, Quilliam/Léon and another “Woking” convert, Dr Ameen Neville J. Whymant, were members of Inayat Khan’s Sufi Publishing Society. Quilliam/Léon also established the Société Internationale de Philologie, Sciences et Beaux-Arts for the “advancement and encouragement of all branches of Philology, Science, Literature, Music and the Fine Arts”,²⁹ and a London College of Physiology, which addressed the relationship between religion, spirituality and modern sciences:³⁰ Pickthall, Whymant, Parkinson, Sheldrake, Wright, Cobbold and Headley joined these organisations and took part in their lively debates and social events.

Pickthall’s main focus and business, however, was political. As he explained in the letters pages of the Near East, he and other Turcophiles at this time were, “defending an unpopular cause. [We] have had to fear, and have encountered, public ridicule and private abuse”.³¹ The aos gave Pickthall the platform to write and speak out publicly against British policy and attitudes towards “progressive Turkey” and its Muslims. But, despite their efforts, Pickthall and other Turcophiles were unable to persuade the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey (1862–1933), to keep the peace with Turkey or encourage Turkish neutrality and independence in 1914. This traumatised Pickthall, who felt that Christian Europe had neglected and abused Turkey, and he was furious that little was done to prevent her from turning to Germany. Pickthall still did not rush into adopting Islam, but he began to abandon Christianity when, he felt, Christianity had failed and abandoned him. Writing in the 1930s, Fremantle suggested that Pickthall converted to Islam in December 1914 as, “a protest against the hysterical hate preached in the name of the Christ he had served and loved so long”.³² However, though he edged towards Islam at the beginning of the war, Pickthall resisted conversion. As he told Herbert, Cobbold tried but failed to get him to publicly convert during their lunch at Claridge’s in January 1915 (she proposed using two bemused waiters as witnesses).³³

After Turkey entered the war, Pickthall led a hugely ambitious pro-Turk public campaign to win hearts and minds in Whitehall and beyond, and secure a separate peace agreement with Turkey. His efforts were generally channelled through the aos and Islamic Society/Central Islamic Society, which organised protest meetings, public debates and lectures; forwarded countless resolutions to the Foreign and India Offices; sent letters to national newspapers and journals; and published articles, pamphlets and books promoting the merits of the Turks and warning of the pernicious influence and ambitions of Russia.

Despite wartime censorship and an increasingly anti-Turk and anti-Muslim sentiment in British society during David Lloyd George’s (1863–1945) premiership from 1916 until 1922, Pickthall lobbied furiously through the aos and alongside a few Muslim converts, especially Sheldrake, Robert Ahmed Quilliam and Parkinson.³⁴ In the months before his conversion, he became more avowedly Pan-Islamic. Pickthall wrote in the New York Times in 1916, for example, that Pan-Islam – “the conscious effort for united progress made by educated Moslems” – was the “cornerstone” of “Disraeli’s great constructive Eastern policy”. For Pickthall, Pan-Islam was, “the most hopeful movement of our day, deserving the support of all enlightened people, and particularly the British Government, since a British Government inspired it in the first place”.³⁵ Pickthall inevitably met other pan-Islamic, mainly Indian, Muslims during his regular trips to London. Importantly, these included the lawyer and Muslim missionary, Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din (1870–1932), who had arrived in Britain from India in 1912. Kamal-ud-Din was a convert to the Ahmadiyya, an unorthodox Muslim sect founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (c.1835–1908). Following a series of visions that drew upon the Islamic belief that a Messiah and a Mahdi would come to lead Muslims against the unbelievers, Ahmad had personally assumed both roles. In 1889, he inaugurated the Ahmadiyyat (Ahmadiyya community) by accepting the allegiance of his first followers – namely those who affirmed standard matters of Islamic belief and swore specific allegiance to Ahmad.³⁶

The Woking Muslim Mission and Conversion to Islam

Once in England, Kamal-ud-Din abandoned his legal career and took it upon himself to promote a fairer hearing of Islam through propaganda written and inspired by Ahmad. In doing so, Kamal-ud-Din was keen to downplay the differences between Ahmadi and orthodox Islam. His main vehicle for this was the public lecture hall and, from February 1913, the publication of a monthly journal, the Muslim India and Islamic Review (renamed Islamic Review and Muslim India in February 1914). Kamal-ud-Din quickly realised the value of propagating Islam through the example of “native” converts and therefore early contributors to the Islamic Review included Quilliam/Léon, Parkinson, Sheldrake and Wright. In August 1913, Kamal-ud-Din moved from London to nearby Woking in Surrey to take charge of Britain’s first purpose-built mosque (1888–89), which had fallen into a state of disrepair. Kamal-ud-Din quickly established the mosque and adjoining buildings as a centre of education, support for Muslims and missionary activity, formally constituting it as the “Woking Muslim Mission” during the war. He converted several white Britons to Islam, most notably, in November 1913, Lord Headley, whose conversion was reported in newspapers throughout Britain and the Empire.³⁷

The number of converts swelled sufficiently during 1914 for Kamal-ud-Din to establish a British Muslim Society under the Presidency of Headley, with Parkinson his Vice-President and Sheldrake the Hon. Secretary. The wmm and British Muslim Society met regularly at Woking and in London. Closer than ever to conversion to Islam, Pickthall first joined meetings at the Mission’s “London Muslim Prayer House” in Lindsay Hall, Notting Hill Gate in c.1916. Pickthall’s deep study and experience of Islam was evident in his first article for an explicitly Muslim journal, Kamal-ud-Din’s Islamic Review, which he submitted in late 1916. The article, entitled “The Prophet’s Gratitude”, set out the virtues of the Prophet Muhammad, who, “unlike all other prophets, whose proper likeness is concealed from us in mists of reverence, […] is a clear historical character”. Correcting popular misconceptions about Muhammad, Pickthall elaborated on his humanity and reverence for women.³⁸ The article was published in the January 1917 issue of the Islamic Review. On the 6th of January, he accompanied Kamal-ud-Din to the Central Islamic Society’s annual “Prophet’s Birthday Celebration”, held at the grand and fashionable Hotel Cecil in central London. Following prayers recited by Kamal-ud-Din, Pickthall addressed the audience with another short account and defence of Muhammad’s life and character, admitting that, “I have come to love him as one loves a friend”, and also arguing that the Quran “remains a wonder of the world”. Crucially for Pickthall, Muhammad “preached the brotherhood of all believers”. The theme of “brotherhood” was central to both Pickthall’s and Kamal-ud-Din’s interpretation of Islam. The address was immediately published in the Islamic Review and also translated into Urdu for republication as a booklet by the office of the Ahmadi magazine Ishaat Islam in Lahore.³⁹

In June 1917, Pickthall delivered his first Central Islamic Society lecture, on “The Muslim Interests in Palestine”, again in the company of Kamal-ud-Din and undoubtedly several British Muslims.⁴⁰ The following month Kamal-ud-Din republished Pickthall’s influential “Islam and Progress” essays in the Islamic Review (the series had originally been written for the New Age and, in French, for La Revue Politique Internationale).⁴¹ The essays confirmed Pickthall’s position as a leading commentator and interpreter of Islam in Britain: he was at ease quoting the hadith (report of the sayings/doings of Muhammad), sunna (custom, or practice, of Muhammad and the early Muslim community) and Quran (in both Arabic and English), and also cited other Islamic scholars (the first “Islam and Progress” essay offers a rare example of Pickthall quoting another British Muslim – in this case, “Professor Léon” in the context of a discussion about “Oriental folk-lore”⁴²). By September 1917, the wmm had republished Pickthall’s “Islam and Progress” in booklet form for wider distribution.

Sectarianism

Like many British converts (Quilliam/Léon included), Pickthall identified as an orthodox Sunni Muslim of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence. This was typical of the early “Woking” converts because Kamal-ud-Din and his missionaries always downplayed the differences between Ahmadi and orthodox Islam and, in contrast to the Christian Church from which most British converts came, promoted the Mission as non-sectarian and apolitical.⁴⁷ The converts were offered a liberal, modernist Islam; they pledged their allegiance to Muhammad and all other prophets including Jesus, and converted to Islam rather than the Ahmadiyya/Ahmadiyyat. After Kamal-ud-Din’s death in 1933, Pickthall wrote that he “differed from him on some matters”,⁴⁸ but he had a deep respect for Kamal-ud-Din and was generally tolerant of the Lahori Ahmadiyya who ran the wmm. The only known photograph depicting Pickthall at Woking is a group portrait in which he sits next to Kamal-ud-Din and is surrounded by Lahori missionaries.⁴⁹ He was so at ease with these Muslims and trusted by Kamal-ud-Din that, when the latter left England for India due to ill-health in early 1919, Pickthall was effectively given control of the wmm. Pickthall was appointed acting imam and editor of the Islamic Review until Kamal-ud-Din’s successor, Maulana Sadr-ud-Din (d.1981), arrived in England in the autumn.

Whilst Pickthall tolerated the liberal Lahori Ahmadis, he was critical of their rivals, the Qadiani Ahmadis, who in 1914 had broken away from the Lahoris by declaring Mirza Ghulam Ahmad a prophet and claiming that his successors would also have the gift of prophecy.⁵⁰ For Pickthall, the conservative Qadianis were too far removed from the mainstream of Islam. Most contemporaries agreed with Pickthall, though Quilliam/Léon and Sheldrake were more sympathetic to the diversity of Islam to be found on British shores and anxious to avoid the sectarianism they had found in Christianity. Sheldrake also had a troubled relationship with Kamal-ud-Din and the wmm, eventually breaking away permanently in 1926 to establish his own Western Islamic Association.⁵¹ Quilliam/Léon became a patron of Sheldrake’s new organisation. It is not clear if Pickthall was asked, and although he did not join the wia, he remained friends with Sheldrake and, as is related below, they continued to meet in London. Meanwhile, whilst Pickthall stayed away, both Quilliam/Léon and Sheldrake visited the Qadiani mosque, which was formally opened in Southfields (south London) in 1926.⁵² Conversely, Pickthall welcomed the efforts of the “London Mosque Fund” Trustees, among them his good friend from the aos, the former Governor of Bombay Lord Lamington (1860–1940), to build “a fitting Mosque in the Metropolis of the British Empire”.⁵³ In the 1930s, the Trustees sought patronage from Pickthall’s then employer, the Nizam of Hyderabad, Asaf Jah vii (1886–1967), for the building of a mosque and religious school in the East End, to be named after the late Anglophile judge and Muslim leader, Syed Ameer Ali (1849–1928). Although he was based in India in this period, Pickthall became Hon. Secretary to the Board of Management of the “Amir Ali Mosque, London” in 1931.⁵⁴ Pickthall corresponded with the Trustees, apologising for the constant delays with decisions from Hyderabad (in fact, the donation was never given) and deeply regretting the impact it would have on the “many poor Moslems” in the deprived East End.⁵⁵ He also discussed this with Sheldrake who had visited the area (perhaps on Pickthall’s behalf) in 1932 and was proposed (but not accepted, for reasons unknown) as a member of the London Mosque Fund Committee.⁵⁶

Pickthall was characteristically humble as acting imam in 1919, which cemented his position in the British Muslim community. He told fellow Muslims during one of his “Friday Sermons” that, “There is no reason why I should lead your prayer to-day more than any other member of this congregation, except that I possess more Arabic than some of you, and that I have been chosen to act as your Imam during the illness of a much more worthy man”.⁶¹ But he was also bold in his mission, seizing every opportunity to emphasise and expand his thoughts regarding Muslim modernisation and revival: “The course of our Jehad is clearly indicated: first for the healing, re-uniting and uplifting of the Muslim brotherhood, so as to set a great example to the world, and secondly by that means to spread Islam throughout the world”.⁶²

The Interwar Years

When Sadr-ud-Din assumed responsibility for the wmm in August 1919, Pickthall continued to visit the London Muslim Prayer House and, occasionally, Woking mosque, but he was free to concentrate on his campaigning for Turkey. Encouraged by Pickthall’s leadership and freed by wartime censorship, a few more British Muslims connected with the wmm were drawn to the Turkish cause in 1919 than had been the case during the war. Pickthall had shown them that the peace negotiations involved the future of the (Ottoman) caliphate, which was integral to the umma and therefore deeply affected all Muslims. For its part, the British government and press sought to convince the millions of Muslims within the Empire that they were not duty-bound to owe allegiance to the Ottoman caliphate. However, following a massacre of peaceful protestors campaigning against the Raj by British soldiers in Amritsar in April 1919, the Khilafat Movement (1919–24) was established to maintain the authority of the caliph at Constantinople and Muslim control of the holy places of Islam, and also end British rule in India. In October 1919, “a large congregation” assembled at the London Muslim Prayer House on the day appointed by the All-India Muslim Conference in Lucknow the previous month, to pray for the preservation of the Ottoman sultan-caliph, or “Khalifa”.⁶³ Chairing the subsequent meeting, Pickthall passionately argued that attempts by Christians to persuade Muslims that the caliphate should be hereditary in Muhammad’s family (that is, pass to a leader more suitable from the Western point of view) were uncalled for, and “roused very angry feelings in the Muslim world […]. The question of the Khilafat is no concern of Christians any more than it is the concern of Muslims to decide who shall be Pope of Rome. The Muslim world as a whole accepts the Ottoman Sultan as its Khalifah with enthusiasm and impassioned sympathy”.⁶⁴ Encouraged by two pan-Islamists, Mushir Hussain Kidwai (1878–1937) and the Central Islamic Society President, Mirza Hashim Ispahani, Pickthall formed the “Islamic Information Bureau”, to collect and circulate up-to-date, “true information about Turkey and other Muslim matters”. Pickthall secured the support of Sheldrake as Assistant Secretary, and Cobbold donated a generous £50 towards publication costs for the Bureau’s pro-Turkish bulletin, Muslim Outlook, which Pickthall edited.⁶⁵

Notably, both during and after the war, Pickthall failed to persuade the influential Lord Headley to campaign for Turkey. Headley was a staunchly conservative, jingoistic Briton who, though undoubtedly affected by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, had little patience for what were seen by some in Whitehall as disloyal and treacherous activities on behalf of the Turks (Kidwai and, to a lesser extent, Pickthall were both singled out as suspects in this period).⁶⁶ Pickthall soon fell out with Kidwai, resigned from the Bureau and, as if to prove his loyalty, in December 1919 was a signatory alongside Cobbold, the respectable Aga Khan (Mohammed Shah, 1877–1957) and others of a patriotic letter to the British Prime Minister warning him of the dangers of Russia. The letter, which was reprinted in the Islamic Review, urged for “a policy towards Turkey that would lead to appeasement” and thereby placate Indian Muslims.⁶⁷

Émigré and Twilight Years

Pickthall contributed occasional articles to the Islamic Review from India until 1925, when his last, “The Essential Fact of Revelation”, an essay on the authenticity and reasoning of the Quran, was published.⁸³ It is unsurprising that Pickthall’s contributions ended at this point: after leaving the Bombay Chronicle in 1924, he moved to Hyderabad, where he eventually completed an English edition of the Quran and became editor of the monthly Islamic Culture, a scholarly journal produced under the Nizam’s patronage. It was as a friend and editor that Cobbold sent him a copy of her new book, Pilgrimage to Mecca – an account of her 1933 hajj – upon its publication in 1934. Curiously, whilst Cobbold quoted from Pickthall’s The Cultural Side of Islam (on the equality of Islam and his criticism of the system of purdah⁸⁴), she did not reference his edition of the Quran, published in 1930. It is notable that, due to the nature of the surviving sources for the British Muslim community, which are generally missionary-focused, there are no documented critical responses from within to Pickthall the man or his work for Islam (his lectures, sermons, essays). One observation, not necessarily implying criticism, is that Cobbold was rare amongst the many contemporaries who wrote about Islam in the Islamic Review to quote Pickthall in their writings. David/Dawud Cowan, who converted at Woking in 1931 at the age of sixteen, went on to become a distinguished Arabic scholar. Reflecting on Pickthall late in life, he admitted that Pickthall’s edition of the Quran was “a good translation, but all translations are faulty”.⁸⁵

It seems odd that, for such an influential and trusted figure, Pickthall’s death warranted just three pages in the Islamic Review for August 1936.⁹⁵ This might be partly attributed to the fact that Pickthall was physically absent from Britain during most of the final fifteen years of his life. Moreover, his death followed those of other key members of the Woking community – what may be termed the “old guard” – in the early 1930s: Quilliam/Léon died in 1932, Kamal-ud-Din in 1933 and Headley in 1935. Parkinson had died in 1918 and, as we have seen, Sheldrake left the wmm in the 1920s. His other good friend, Cobbold, wrote occasional books but was not a contributor to the Islamic Review, and his brother, Rudolf, made his last contribution to the Islamic Review in 1933 (ironically, an obituary of Kamal-ud-Din).⁹⁶

*

Alas, there appear to be no published tributes to Pickthall from British Muslim converts, but it is clear that he was considered and widely embraced within the community as a respected thinker, tutor and mentor. As E.E. Speight (a non-Muslim) wrote shortly after Pickthall’s death, “He went through life as a teacher of the rarest and most memorable type, a radiating personality who magnetically drew to himself as to a fountain-head of the truest, most helpful religion, all sorts and conditions of hearts and minds needing guidance in perplexity, consolation in the darkness of doubt, or solace in self-abasement”.⁹⁷ Pickthall was humane and modest, and admitted his own personal weaknesses (he famously struggled to quit smoking during Ramadan⁹⁸). He was and remains central to the history of British Islam. It is appropriate that Pickthall’s body was interred close to two other leading figures of early British Islam – Quilliam and Lord Headley – in the Muslim burial ground at Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking.