Abdullah Quilliam (Henri De Léon) and Marmaduke Pickthall 75
champion, accommodating them in the mosque when they were homeless,
attending them in hospital when they were ill with fevers contracted at sea or
offering them a full Muslim funeral with appropriate rites when their cause
was hopeless.7 In addition to funerals the Sheikh was pilloried in the British
media for his willingness to carry out weddings in the mosque between Eng-
lish women and Muslim men. Quilliam was also known to Muslim students
studying in Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge. They visited him and he helped
Cambridge Muslim students to establish the first Islamic Society in Britain.8
Through his activities Quilliam was able to bring together the various con-
stituents of the nineteenth-century Muslim presence in Britain and draw upon
the resources of the mosque in Liverpool to create a hub around which these
often itinerant Muslim presences could cohere. But he also effectively utilized
the possibility of the global reach brought about by the Victorian communica-
tions revolution to network and assist fledgling Muslim communities trying to
establish themselves in Canada, usa, Australia, and South Africa.
Marmaduke Pickthall declared his conversion to Islam after a lecture on
“ Islam and Progress” delivered on the 29th November 1917, to the Muslim
Literary Society in Notting Hill, West London.9 Similar to Abdullah Quilliam,
his background was Christian, but Pickthall was High Church Anglican, his fa-
ther a Priest, whereas Quilliam’s heritage was non-conformist. The madness of
the First World War seemed to have fueled Pickthall’s loss of faith but there is
no doubt that his interests in the East began earlier. His parents had groomed
him for Foreign Office service and on his failure to secure a position sought a
backdoor entry through the Consular Service, hoping that learning the lan-
guage and customs of the Levant region would prevail. He departed for Egypt
in 1894, on route to Palestine and his diaries would demonstrate a young man
already enamored with the exoticism of the East rather than the possibility of
employment. He writes that on arrival in Cairo, “the European ceased to inter-
est me”.10 Like Quilliam, his introduction to Muslim culture and Islam would
develop in the territories of the Ottomans. In Egypt he travelled alone avoid-
ing Europeans and then went on to learn Arabic in Palestine, accompanied
by an Arab servant, with whom he took the opportunity to plunge himself
into local life. His writings on this period of his life, reveal his disillusionment
with European society, especially Christian exclusivism combined together
7 Geaves, Islam in Victorian, 71, 152ff.
8 Ibid., 101.
9 Peter Clark, Marmaduke Pickthall: British Muslim (London: Quartet), 38.
10 Marmaduke Pickthall, Oriental Encounters: Palestine and Syria (1894-5-6) (London: Collins,
1918), 2.