Pickthall, Muslims of South Asia 29
(wmm) – with over-lapping objectives, activities, patronage and memberships.
Increasingly, they began to participate in all of these organisations to varying
degrees. Their shared motives for supporting the short and long-term future
of the Ottoman Empire brought them together to interact politically and so-
cially, and to develop appreciation of each other’s reasons for doing so. They
collaborated in organising pro-Ottoman protest meetings, public debates and
lectures; numerous resolutions and memorials were passed to the Foreign
and India Offices; letters were sent to national newspapers and journals; pam-
phlets and books were published highlighting Turkish attributes and warning
against Russia’s malign designs. The aos supported by South Asian Muslims
in London but run almost single-handedly by Pickthall provided him with an
opportunity to write and speak critically on British attitudes and policies to-
wards Turkey’s “progressive” Muslims. But from the amount of “public ridicule
and private abuse”20 that he received, Pickthall must have known that he was
“defending an unpopular cause”. All the same, he asserted that in being critical
he was actually being, at heart, patriotic:
As an Englishmen who has the interests of the Muhammedan at heart,
I am a pro-Turk until the balance is adjusted. Any sentimentality [...]
I may have felt or betrayed when writing of the Turks, is for the British
Empire, which some men deride. I confess that I cannot see England in a
mean and, at the same time, ruinous course of policy without emotion of
a most decided kind.21As this reflection suggests, it would appear that Pickthall wanted to sustain
the Young Turks fundamentally because he considered a strong Turkey to be
in Britain’s best interests. At a meeting of the Ottoman Association that the
Islamic Review reported in February 1914, he demanded, seething with anger,
to know why England did not enable Turkey to do the work that was neces-
sary to maintain her integrity; why “we” did not “secure to Turkey fair finan-
cial treatment, which is all she needed to become again the strongest bulwark
of our Indian Empire”. He lamented a greatly missed opportunity: “the Young
Turks had remained fanatically pro-British. England virtually had the offer of
a virtual protectorate of the whole of the Ottoman Empire [... if only Britain
would] return to the old, solid, Oriental policy on the past principle of the
integrity of Turkey”. 22
20 The Near East, 6,133 (1913), 75.
21 The Near East, 6,137 (1913), 233.
22 Islamic Review, February 1914, 63.