Marmaduke Pickthall - A Brief Biography

Marmaduke Pickthall - A Brief Biography

By Shaykh Abdal-Hakim Murad

Before we consider the life-story of the British Muslim and Koranic translator Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, it is as well to recall that aspect of the practice of every believer without which there are only ashes: holiness of life. In the case of Pickthall, this was a luminous, steadily progressing reality which impressed all who came into contact with him. Even his unbelieving first biographer, Anne Fremantle, opined that �had he changed from evangelical or even from high-church Anglicanism to the Roman faith, doubtless the machinery of sanctification would have by now been set to work.� He was a man of discreet charity, the extent of whose generosity was only discovered after his death. He turned down lucrative and prestigious speaking tours and the pleasures of travel in favor of his last and, in his eyes, greatest project, acting as headmaster to Muslim boys in Hyderabad. He witnessed the dismemberment of his beloved Ottoman Caliphate while rejecting bitterness and calls for violent revenge, convinced that Allah�s verdict was just, and that in the circumstances of the age, Islam�s victory would come through changing an unjust world from within. Above all, he was a man who constantly kept Allah and His providence in mind.

Pickthall�s humility did not prevent him from taking a rightful pride in his ancestry, which he could trace back to a knight of William the Conqueror�s day, Sir Roger de Poictu, from whom his odd surname derives. The family, long settled in Cumberland, came south in Dutch William�s time, and Pickthall�s father Charles, an Anglican parson, was appointed to a living near Woodbridge in Suffolk. Charles� wife, whom he married late in life, was Mary O�Brien, who despite her Irish name was a staunchly nonconformist daughter of Admiral Donat Henry O�Brien, a hero of the same Napoleonic war which brought Shaykh Abdullah Quilliam�s grandfather fame as master of Victory at Trafalgar. O�Brien, immortalized by Marryat in Masterman Ready, passed on some of his heroic impulses to his grandson Marmaduke, who throughout his life championed a rather ...

Download and/or read the whole article from Seasons Journal