198 Kökoğlu
Deleuze and Guattari argue that men are always majority and molar iden-
tities: “the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-
European-male-speaking a standard language ( Joyce’s or Ezra Pound’s
Ulysses)”.5 While men as such are molar entities, women, who are always
regarded as minority, can be both molar and molecular as it is the case with ev-
erything except men. Therefore there is becoming-woman of men, becoming-
African or -Asian of Europeans, but not the reverse. For instance, becoming
European of an Asian never exists, or it is no longer called a becoming but a
reactive, nihilistic and self-destructive movement.
Pickthall refers to the reactive and interest-ridden movement of majoritari-
anism in the East as a “sycophantic aping of the West”6 and is bitterly critical
of it in both his oriental fiction and prose. For Pickthall, that negative move-
ment is neither a desire, nor something desirable: “something which nobody
with any sense would wish to be – a European”.7 In The Valley of Kings, Mitri, an
orthodox Arab-Christian priest, advises Iskender, a native of his village pros-
elytized by Protestant missionaries, to “give up aping that which thou canst
never be”.8 Similarly, in House of War (1916), Percy is a Christian Arab who has
returned to his native land after having made some money in the United States.
His pretentious American accent and manners are ridiculed by Elsie’s British
guests. After a bad joke the guests play on Percy, Elsie’s servant Jemileh tells
him: “They cannot estimate thy height of character. Return to thy own people,
to the children of the Arabs, who respect and love thee”.9
Furthermore, there is no becoming-man of a woman, nor a rightful becoming-
woman of a woman without her undergoing an active process of moleculari-
sation. Virginia Woolf, for instance, “forbade herself ‘to speak like a woman’:
she harnessed the woman-becoming of writing all the more for this”.10 Woolf
leaves her molar identity behind and becomes a molecular woman “capable of
crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men,
of sweeping them up in that becoming”.11 Deleuze and Guattari argue that the
rise of female writers in the English novel triggered becoming-woman of male
writers, of even “the most phallocratic, such as Lawrence and Miller”.12
5 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 105.
6 M. Marmaduke Pickthall, The Cultural Side of Islam (Tinnevelley: Hilal Press, 1937), 158.
7 Marmaduke Pickthall, With the Turk in Wartime (London: J.M. Dent, 1914), 181.
8 Mamaduke Pickthall, The Valley of the Kings (London: John Murray, 1909), 265.
9 Marmaduke Pickthall, The House of War (New York: Duffield and Company, 1916), 145.
10 Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues, with Claire Parnet, trans., Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam. (London: The Athlone Press, 1987), 43.
11 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 276.
12 Ibid.