Marmaduke Pickthall Reinstated: What Canon?

By Ebtisam A. Sadiq, Naela H. Danish and Afra S. Al-Shiban

Marmaduke Pickthall was a prolific British novelist, essayist, journalist, and short story writer who was positively received by his contemporaries for his fictional oeuvre, but is hardly known in the current literary world. Despite his obvious talents, Pickthall was unfortunately ignored when the English literary canon was formed in the mid-twentieth century. Today, he is only remembered for his conversion to Islam, his Turkish sympathies, and his translation of the Holy Quran to English in 1930.

Ebtisam A. Sadiq, Naela H. Danish, and Afra S. Al-Shiban rely on extensive research of nineteenth-century British literature with the hope of reintroducing Pickthall to the literary world. In comprehensive analysis that includes the forgotten authors Eastern novels, Western tales, and collections of short stories, the researchers utilize contemporary theories of criticismparticularly postcolonialism, modern realist traditions, and feminismto scrutinize and highlight the nature of his contribution to English literature. Included are examinations of Pickthalls affiliation or withdrawal from literary traditions like Victorianism and Modernism and what exactly determines his canonical status.

Marmaduke Pickthall Reinstated shares research and examinations of a forgotten authors literary works with the intent that they finally find a long overdue place in mainstream English literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Sep 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781482880342

Ebtisam A. Sadiq

Ebtisam A. Sadiq, Naela H. Danish, and Afra S. Al-Shiban are dedicated literature scholars educated in Western universities. They currently work and reside in Saudi Arabia.

Book preview

CONTENTS

Reviews

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1    From Victorianism to Postcolonialism

2    Pickthall: The Precursor of Modern Realism

3    From the Prude to the Wanton: Marmaduke Pickthall’s Gallery of Women

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Contributors

To the memory of Marmaduke Pickthall,

dead but not forgotten

REVIEWS

Professor Ebtisam Sadiq and her colleagues Naela Danish and Afra Al Shiban have produced a most important book, the first focusing on the fiction of Marmaduke Pickthall, an early twentieth century British Muslim convert and translator of the Holy Koran. Pickthall is presented as an innovative novelist generations ahead of his time. His work is assessed in the context of modern feminist and post-colonial theories, but he is also seen in the light of his own contemporaries – many of whom recognised his unique talent. His tales located in the Near East are better known than those dealing with English themes, but the authors also evaluate the latter, noting his modern realism, his attention to detail and his social range of characters.

The authors make a strong case for Pickthall, whose reputation was for many years in eclipse, being part of the literary canon – embracing Islam and being a dissident in the First World Wars had not helped that reputation. Over eighty years ago E M Forster praised Pickthall as a writer who has not yet come into his own. With this book, perhaps that time has come. His life and work make him a writer of universal significance for the twenty-first century.

PETER CLARK

2016

Peter Clark is the author of Marmaduke Pickthall: British Muslim, first published 1986, reissued 2016.

‘This new book by Professor Ebtisam Ali Sadiq is a fascinating read and does much to enrich our thinking about my great great uncle, Marmaduke Pickthall and his extraordinary life’s work and contribution.’

Sarah Pickthall

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The primary author of the book, Ebtisam Sadiq, would like to present her appreciation to the Deanship of Academic Research at King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, Riyadh and its Humanities Research Center for supporting the publication of this book, which will be used in graduate courses in the department of English Language and Literature.

She would also like to thank the University of Northampton in the United Kingdom and Professor Janet Wilson for helping with primary and secondary sources at the early stages of the research.

INTRODUCTION

British novelist, essayist, journalist, and short story writer Marmaduke Pickthall (1875–1936), had a career that spanned the late Victorian, the Edwardian, and the Georgian periods; World War I; and beyond into the 1920s. Despite this fact, he is only remembered today for his conversion to Islam, his Turkish sympathies, and his translation of the Holy Qur’an in 1930. Seldom is he discussed for his literary output, although he wrote profusely and produced over thirteen novels, two travelogues, and three volumes of short stories. Consequently, the interest in Marmaduke Pickthall Reinstated is to view Pickthall not so much as a Muslim scholar or a Turkish supporter, but as a novelist and short story writer who engaged Eastern and Western characters and settings in his fictional works.

The early reception of Pickthall’s literary works was very positive, but he was ignored when the literary canon was formed. Between his death in 1936 and 1986, for almost fifty years, Pickthall was totally overlooked as an English writer and, up to the present time, as a noteworthy literary figure. This drop from fame is worth investigating. As a late nineteenth-century figure, Pickthall lived to become a contemporary of prominent modernists like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence and a friend to many of them. Such contemporaneity and friendships do not make him a high modernist. Nor do his Victorian literary leanings make him an exact writer of that age. The present study argues that Pickthall does not entirely belong to the late Victorian tradition or to the early modernist move where historical chronology finds him. He retains some Victorian elements and some Modernist attributes in his oeuvre but veers away from both traditions. His innovation takes him ahead of his time by more than eighty years and makes him a late twentieth-century writer. Pickthall will prove, upon closer scrutiny, to be an innovator in the Victorian literary tradition, a precursor of postcolonialism and of modern realism, as well as a progressive feminist who participated in the Victorian women question from a late twentieth-century feminist perspective. Therefore, the current study, which is initially inspired by the disparity between early enthusiastic reception and subsequent neglect, will also address both the traditional and innovative sides of his fiction. In the process, it is geared toward winning for Pickthall his due place as a prominent literary figure in literary history.

Positive reception of Pickthall by his contemporaries is evident in comments such as those put forth by H. G. Wells, who wrote to him, I wish that I could feel as certain about my own work as I do of yours, that it will be alive and interesting to people fifty years from now.¹ In particular, his Eastern novels received the highest acclaim in his oeuvre. Said the Fisherman (1903), the first in the series, is celebrated by Edward Granville Browne, a contemporary Orientalist, for its accurate portrayal of Arab life.² Anne Fremantle, Pickthall’s biographer, reports how the book was translated into French, German, and Danish, did very well in America, and by 1927 had gone into fourteen editions.³ His second Eastern novel, The House of Islam (1906), is highly appreciated, despite its author’s qualms, by Anne Fremantle as a grave book …entirely free from the somewhat childish and chirping facetiousness which here and there blemishes all his other works.⁴ Forster similarly believes that, in this novel, Pickthall drops the frivolity which often disfigures him and which has hindered him from reaching certain audiences, and he dons a robe of grave beauty.⁵

Forster also cites The Children of the Nile (1908), Pickthall’s third Eastern novel, as proof that he is a writer of much merit but finds that his most charming novel is about an Oriental Christian, implying thus a reference to Pickthall’s Valley of the Kings (1909).⁶ Furthermore, the favorable reception of Veiled Women (1913) prompted Pickthall to write to his wife, "The Times review of Veiled Women was quite unexpectedly good, the book being put down as a serious ‘study’ rather than a novel.⁷ Fremantle also writes of the success of The House of War (1916), for although it was entirely alien to British war-time propaganda, it was highly praised and widely read."⁸ She additionally assesses Knights of Araby (1917) as perhaps the best of all his books and one of the great historical novels of the century.⁹ Forster admiringly quotes The Early Hours (1921) to sum up Pickthall’s ability to depict a unique spiritual attitude in which Love could only be an appendage in Paradise.¹⁰

In brief, Pickthall’s Eastern novels captured the attention, appraisal, and admiration of his contemporaries. Fremantle sums up the attitude when she quotes a Morning Post critic who affirms, Mr. Pickthall’s novels as a whole constitute the most important contribution to our knowledge of the Muslim East which has been made in any country in this century.¹¹ Such high acclaim is arrested in its development. Apart from the early favorable remarks that his Eastern novels received, Pickthall’s literary oeuvre lies neglected outside the canon of English literature. For one thing, he is never included in university curricula, a criterion that John Guillory deems an efficient way to understand how works are preserved, reproduced and disseminated over successive generations and centuries.¹² Nor has Pickthall been handled by serious scholarly research in the field of literary criticism in the course of the past century. The sporadic availability of some of his novels in print and the several websites launched by surviving relatives and some enthusiastic Muslim scholars have not generated canonical engagement of his works. Only of late is interest in the author revived by three scholars, though it comes along biographical, sociological, and political lines that do not do justice to Pickthall’s literary capacity nor to his contribution to the stream of English literature.¹³ Indeed, if anything, the revival attempts the opposite end of confirming his ineligibility for canonization, a matter that underscores the call for the present study. The three scholars who developed interest in Pickthall are Peter Clark (1986), Geoffrey Nash (2005), and Andrew C. Long (2014).

Clark’s personal interest in Pickthall, which developed during a diplomatic mission in Damascus, produced a seminal book, Marmaduke Pickthall: British Muslim. Though genuinely scholarly and indispensable to a study of Pickthall’s work, this book is not what we can precisely call a literary study. It usefully classifies the novelist’s oeuvre into the Near Eastern Fiction and Tales of England and Europe.¹⁴ It also provides Notes on Pickthall’s Publication, which is a list of titles of the author’s works, a valuable compilation that names some twenty-five publications, including all his literary pieces and short story collections. No less important is the bibliographic section of the book, A Marmaduke Pickthall Bibliography, an extensive scholarly record that crowns Clark’s pivotal study. Rich, as it is with insightful remarks on Pickthall’s personal life, political views, and fictional output, Clark’s fundamental work does not venture into the domain of literary traditions, which I, as first author of the current book, feel is imperative to the process of instating the forgotten novelist in the English canon where he stopped short of entering.

Geoffrey Nash’s book, From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East, 1830–1926, is a sociopolitical work that investigates imperial interests and entanglements in the East during the nineteenth and early twentieth century and includes Pickthall in the group of Western travelers selected for analysis. But Nash seems to hold an unfavorable opinion of Pickthall when he claims that he was neither a great thinker of his time nor an influential one.¹⁵ Nevertheless, he finds Pickthall’s presence of no small significance for the direction of his study.¹⁶ Nash’s book is pertinent to ours in that it attempts to explain Pickthall’s drop from fame, though it does so by justifying rather than challenging the exclusion. He affirms that Pickthall’s choice of the Turks as the vanguard for a revolutionised Islam was his unquestionable disqualification from that gambit of fame.¹⁷ This claim might partly help explain Pickthall’s absence from the canon, but is insufficient because it does not attempt to question historical records. Instead, Nash labels the author’s opposition to Britain’s Turkish policy and his open advocacy of a separate peace with Turkey as a strange streak of dissidence and so profound a dislocation of a Victorian gentleman.¹⁸ As to the question of why Pickthall drops from the canon, Nash answers by implying that he does not deserve to be canonized. Nash’s stance will be challenged later on in the discussion of the two novels that he selected to support his critique of Pickthall, namely The Children of the Nile and The Early Hours.

Andrew C. Long, in Reading Arabia: British Orientalism in the Age of Mass Publication, 1880–1930, tackles East-West relationships from a professed postcolonial perspective that cannot be left unchallenged, either. He attributes Pickthall’s fall from fame to several reasons, the most pertinent of which to the present study is his interest in the masses. In an aesthetically elitist manner, reminiscent of Harold Bloom’s stance in The Western Canon, Long affirms that the modern canon, formed in mid-twentieth century, solely embraced the alienated artist outside the fallen consciousness of the masses.¹⁹ This assessment is very much in keeping with Harold Bloom’s exclusively aesthetic criterion, which opposes the engagement of moral values or social change in literary objectives and criticism, as it means, to Bloom, the death of the canon.²⁰ However, there is a significant difference between the two critics. While Bloom unconditionally objects to an opening up of the canon, Long’s stance is more equivocal. Bloom bluntly condemns the fashion in …schools and colleges, where all aesthetic and most intellectual standards are being abandoned in the name of social harmony and the remedying of historical injustice.²¹ Long, on the other hand, accepts the opening up of the canon but remains selective in his compliance. Facing the inevitable fact that Pickthall’s sympathetic allegiance with the Eastern people and their dominant religious affiliation would inexorably grant the novelist a significant position in the postcolonial paradigm, Long proves no less elitist than Bloom and the old canon. He finds Pickthall’s definition of Islamic culture confrontational because it proposes that Islam is in fact more British or Western than Britain or the West.²² Long denounces Pickthall for endorsing the wrong type of mass, the Eastern instead of the European one. To support his argument, the critic nebulously brings up what he believes to be a failing example of a contemporary American journalist, Thomas Friedman, who is, presumably, unsuccessful because of his liberal leanings toward the Arabs and Muslims in a manner evocative of Pickthall’s. Readers are expected to accept the shift in argument and concede that Pickthall, like Friedman, is being prejudiced, ignorant, neocolonial, and self-righteous in his dealing with the East instead of, or in addition to, his being confrontational with the West and has, therefore, failed in his postcolonial call.²³ The end result of Long’s reasoning leaves Pickthall disfavored by both East and West and denies him entry into both Modernism and postcolonialism.

Both forms of denial will be challenged in the current study. The first chapter will claim that Pickthall’s interest in the politics of the Eastern mass qualifies him for membership in the postcolonial paradigm. His case does not fit into the pattern that Long critiques of some Westerner who might move to the Middle East, live in an ‘authentic’ neighborhood or village, speak the language and then imagines he knows it best.²⁴ Pickthall’s case is one of gradual absorption of Islam’s values and, ultimately, of total ideological evolution and identification with the Eastern world. The actual effect of Long’s argument is that the masses are losing their freedom of speech in his colonial stance, not in Pickthall’s work. The first chapter of our study finds Pickthall at the heart of postcolonial discourse as an early literary contributor to its paradigm. The second chapter recognizes him a precursor to modern realism, and the third discovers him as an active proponent of feminism.

Prior to these writers’ interest in Pickthall, a cursory reference to him occurs in Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1978). It classifies him as one of the minor writers of exotic fiction in his concern with picturesque characters, before dismissing him altogether from the discussion.²⁵ A closer scrutiny of Pickthall’s work would, probably, have lent Said a different perspective of the author’s literary affiliation and a more modified view of how the East is assessed in the Orientalist discourse of the West. The truth is that Pickthall is as far from the picturesque and the exotic streams of writing as a realist could be. He is also a sincere lover of the Arabs and an ardent admirer of the Muslim world; he writes about the East as an insider even before his embracement of Islam. This significant variation on the types that Said has selected for his book would open another course of investigation of East-West relationships, as this study intends to do.

Our main intention in this book is to revive interest in Pickthall’s literary works and ensure that they find their due place in the mainstream of English literature, from which they seem to have been excluded after a promising start. We will do this in relation to three types of his writings—Eastern novels, Western tales, and short stories. His travelogues will not be included because they belong to a different category that has its own set of rules in critical assessment. Moreover, the biographical matter they contain turns up in his novels in a manner more suited to the present objective of finding the rightful place for Pickthall in the literary sphere. The three types of critical assessments of the author’s oeuvre will be divided into three chapters in the study. The first will engage Pickthall’s Eastern novels in a discussion that would highlight the author’s postcolonial sympathies. The second will investigate his Western tales to demonstrate his contribution to the modern realist tradition. The third will involve his short story collections in an assessment of his feminist perspective.

The chapter on Pickthall’s Eastern novels, entitled From Victorianism to Postcolonialism, has its starting point in the author’s preliminary orientation in the Victorian literary tradition and his interesting innovation that takes him to the domain of postcolonial discourse. Pickthall is a late nineteenth-century writer who retains elements of Victorian humanist concern in choice of subject matter, realism in literary representation, and an objective attitude toward artifact. Human beings, both Eastern and Western, in multifarious social, cultural, and religious contexts are Pickthall’s objects of attention. A realistic depiction of his characters and their world is a ruling principle, and an objective act of narration is the author’s medium of representation. In his Eastern novels, Pickthall is influenced by these Victorian elements when portraying the Arab and Muslim world, though his sympathies mark him as an evolved Victorian, a rightfully postcolonial literary figure.

The Victorian literary tradition that recognizes some ‘natural’ relationship between the real world and its fictional representation²⁶ has to acknowledge Pickthall’s commitment to realism, even if his humanist concerns drive him to other peoples and worlds outside of England and Europe. Though shifting to the Near East, the author manages to sustain the element of realism in narration. He writes as an insider in the Arab and Muslim world, one who has been present on the culturally remote setting and is capable of avoiding, all the while, the pitfall of blind fascination or what E. M. Forster calls the exotic fallacy.²⁷ According to Forster, Pickthall understands the East and does not sentimentalize about it because he is part of it.²⁸ Forster even argues that it is the West not the East that has to be explained in Pickthall’s novels.²⁹ His portrayal of the Arab and Muslim world at a historic juncture of cultural decline and of Western political intervention in Eastern affairs remains faithful to these facts. His honest critique of the social and economic trouble of the East and Western political meddling unavoidably involves exposure of anomalies on both the Eastern and Western sides. Significantly, such exposure does not entail an absolute negation of positive human and cultural attributes. Pickthall is highly appreciative of the Near Eastern culture, its communal spirit, warmth, and generosity. He perceives such positive traits as residues of a high faith—Islam—that Eastern peoples have unconsciously neglected. The culture has its only hope, he affirms, in a return to such faith. In the presence of the European disruptive influence, recovery becomes a difficult task. Britain’s imperialist intervention in the Near East thwarts a culture already complicated by its religious and racial multiplicity. Similarly, his critique of the Western influence in the region is not absolute. Pickthall can appreciate the Englishman as an individual with honesty and integrity, regardless of how the English political and religious institutions are belying this fact.

In his Victorian leaning, Pickthall embraces the element of objectivity in artistic presentation, in addition to realistic depiction of people and cultures. He primarily uses the omniscient voice in narration, a significant act of departure from the Romantic subjectivity in art. A major event in the author’s life is his conversion to Islam. His eight Eastern novels deal with this theme in a masterfully subtle manner that avoids personal reference to the event and, rather, depends on an omniscient depiction of the cultural setting in which the faith has operated for so long and on a detached objective tracing of its effect on the inhabitants. When his ideologically oriented, cultural scrutiny reaches conviction, it is other Western characters who convert to the faith inside his novels, not the disconnected author. If omniscience is contested as a godlike attitude toward art in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, a novella that Anne Humpherys appreciates for its undermin[ing] of the omniscient authority of fiction,³⁰ Pickthall successfully avoids the hegemonic fallacy implied in usage of the omniscient voice by allowing his characters to speak inside his neutral narrative milieu. In a manner akin to the dramatic monologue of the Victorian age, his characters voice their own concerns while his narrator remains nonjudgmental and disengaged. It is such objectivity, indeed, that challenges, sometimes, full grasp of the author’s intention. Clark, for example, believes that Pickthall is often explaining and expounding Islam to Western readers in terms of Western perception.³¹ Indeed, the case is more intricate than this. In his early Eastern novels, Pickthall examines Islam and Muslim culture to make a personal decision. Later on, following his conversion, he explains both faith and culture to the uninformed Western readers. His explanation does not hide Eastern anomalies. Nor does it fall short of exposing Western political and religious intervention in the lives of the Eastern peoples. Such balance indicates a notable capacity for objectivity, in addition to its honest concern with realism.

Pickthall’s realistic and objective depiction of both East and West is not solely governed by a wish for conversion. He develops a tireless desire to reconcile the two worlds into a wide, universal, humanist context. It surfaces in his Eastern novels and takes the form of a lifelong quest of possible venues where East and West can meet. An honest inspection of both positive and negative attributes of the people and culture in each world is the path he tracks. His realistic delineation of moral degeneration and economic decline in Near Eastern cultures does not preclude genuine appreciation of Islamic ideology and sincere celebration of model Muslim figures. Similarly, his realistic depiction of the West, through which he critiques and subverts its political and religious institutions and the supercilious attitude of its people toward the Eastern populace, does not waver his trust in the integrity of Western individuals and, in particular, the Englishman. Pickthall’s postcolonial discourse takes this intricate turn of celebrating the positive attributes of both Eastern and Western cultures and highlighting how such positivity can be geared toward reconciliation, despite drawbacks on both sides.

To relegate an author to postcoloniality equally entails a hint at the concept and the manner in which he relates to its paradigm. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin recognize that the term post-colonial is resonant with all the ambiguity and complexity of the many different cultural experiences it implicates, and that it addresses all aspects of the colonial process from the beginning of colonial contact.³² In particular, the post in postcolonial discourse is underscored when definition of the term is attempted. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman indicate that the term postcolonial could either mean being chronologically subsequent to the second term in the relationship or having somehow superseded that term.³³ They find the first to be reasonably uncontentious: the era of formal colonial control is over, apart from aberrations such as the Falkland/Malvinas.³⁴ However, if temporal succession is not a particular problem, they point out, suppression may still be.³⁵ Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin further suggest that postcolonial critics and theorist should consider the full implication of restricting the meaning of the term to ‘after colonialism’ or ‘after independence,’ for [a]ll post-colonial societies are still subject in one way or another to overt or subtle forms of neo-colonial domination as independence has not solved this problem yet.³⁶ Pickthall’s postcolonial position definitely does not involve an after-independence era in the Near East because colonization of the Eastern world was still underway at his