Pickthall’s Islamic Politics 123
Halim Pasha was interned in harsh conditions in Malta and then allowed to live
in Rome, where he was killed by Armenian assassins in 1921. Though he died
before the Turkish Assembly’s decisions to sweep away the old order, he was
seeking a way out for a reconfigured Islamic polity after the recent debacles:
No doubt considerable and urgent changes will have to be brought
about in the legislation of the Empire, if it is to survive in the struggle for
existence. But these changes should not consist of a renunciation of the
main concepts of Islamism, but their adaptation to the modern condi-
tions of life [...] The despotic regimes which in truth succeeded the era of
freedom of discourse practiced under the reign of the first four Caliphs
[...] were a violation of the letter and the spirit of Islam.59Pickthall also expressed similar hopes in an article in Islamic Review published
in November 1923 – the period after the abolishment of the office of Ottoman
sultan, but not yet the caliphate:
[But] now, thank Allah, we have been given a great opportunity of revival
and reform. The Khilafat of Islam is now no longer identified with a mili-
tary despotism, nor with the political ambitions of a certain country. It is
for us, the Muslims of the world, to make it once more what it ought to
be, the standard of Islam [...] showing mankind the only way of human
progress.60Pickthall acknowledged his intellectual debt to Halim Pasha in the Madras
lectures – though with no hint to their troubled past:
[He was] a man acquainted with the thought of England, France
and Germany, as well as with the teaching of the Qur’an and the Holy
Prophet, and the commentaries of the learned on that teaching. He was
thus well qualified to advise the Muslim world as to its future policy,
and his advice was not Auropalaşmaq (Europeanise) but Islamlaşmaq
(Islamise).6159 L’Empire Ottoman et la Guerre Mondiale (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2000), 101. Translated from
the French by the author. This essay by Halim Pasha was written shortly prior to his death.
60 Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, “The True Khilafat”, The Islamic Review, xi, 11 (Novem-
ber 1923), 391.
61 Pickthall, Cultural Side of Islam, 130.