114 Sherif
In spite of his discontent with the Islamic activists in London, Pickthall had not
severed all contact. He provided the Islamic Information Bureau’s The Muslim
Standard (previously Islamic News) with an extensive obituary note on Saïd
Halim Pasha in December 1921, which referred to British “brutality” towards in-
terned Ottoman leaders after the Great War, and noted, “Halim was a steadfast
adherent of what the Western detractors of the East call ‘Pan-Islamism’, and
what we, the Mussulmans, call ‘Islamic solidarity or fraternity’”.20
Pickthall’s address at the Parsi Assembly Hall, quoted at the outset of this
chapter, took place a few months later. The warm reception from the cosmo-
politan Bombay audience showed that they had taken him to their bosom,
and he reciprocated. His politics were now located within various overlapping
circles: the Indian Muslim Khilafat movement, the Hindu-Muslim alliance in
the Non-cooperation movement, the “Asiatic” anti-colonialist revival and a
Muslim internationalism. He was a unifying figure and much in demand at
meetings across India.21 Pickthall had celebrity status and did not disappoint,
participating in public meetings clad in “the white Gandhi dress, with the
Khilafat badge” on his cap. 22
*
Pickthall’s “extremism” did not go unnoticed in London. The well-respected
writer on “Eastern” matters, Valentine Chirol, complained in a letter to The
Times of London:
I have before me the latest file of the Bombay Chronicle, the leading or-
gan of Indian extremism, Hindu and Muhammedan, and now under the
editorship of a fervent convert to Islam, Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall. [...]
The leading articles are [...] vehement denunciations of Lord Curzon and
of British policy, and constant glorification of the Turks, and incidentally
of the Bolsheviks.2320 The Muslim Standard, 22 December 1921.
21 For example in July 1922 Pickthall presided over the Sind Khilafat Conference, remarking,
“I know there are some people who think it wrong for Muslims to accept the leadership
of a Hindu. But I think that a Hindu saint who lives upon a higher plane is a better guide
for Muslims than a Muslim sinner who lives upon a lower plane, for upon the higher
plane there is but one law for Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews or any man and that law
is the divine law revealed in the Qur’an-e Sharif ” – see Afzal Iqbal’s The life and times of
Mohamed Ali (Lahore: Institute of Islamic Culture, 1973), 290–91.
22 Fremantle, Loyal Enemy, 366.
23 The Times, 27 January 1923, letter entitled “The Turks and Lausanne”.