200 Kökoğlu
Sheykh of the Umayyad Mosque at Damascus at the age of nineteen he tells
him about his desire to become a Muslim; the Sheykh advises him not to hurry
and wait till he is older and gives him the parable of reconciliation: “Observe
this fire. There is a shapely flame, the light that shines around us, and when
I put my hand out, there is the heat as well. [...] How many things? You answer
three in one, I answer one. We both are right”.18
From then on Pickthall will detest the fanaticism of the missionaries in the
Orient contrasting it with the exemplary tolerance of his Muslim Sheykh. Fre-
mantle tells us two important people to initiate Pickthall into oriental life and
becoming-Arab at the age of eighteen: Mr. Hanauer, the English chaplain with
an oriental mind in Jaffa, and the dragoman Suleyman. Mr. Hanauer “changed
the whole of life for him”, “rescued him, in fact; and, moreover, blessed his
half-ashamedly admitted desire to get to know the natives and fraternize with
them”.19 And Suleyman “helped him to throw off the Englishman, and put on
the Oriental”.20 The influences of both are deeply visible in Pickthall’s oriental
fiction.
Pickthall’s actual becoming-Muslim is a silent one in December 1914, a
month after Turkey’s entry into the Great War on the side of Germany when
fanaticism against Islam and Turks peaks in the church. Fremantle writes:
“His profession of this faith was a witness, a protest against the hysterical hate
preached”21 in the church harking back to a new crusade against Islam. Fre-
mantle’s “protest” theory is motivated by immanent or absolute justice which
is universal and accords with the following words of Muhammad which Pick-
thall likes quoting later: “He who sides with his tribe in injustice is not one of
us; nor is he one of us who gathers men together for a purpose of oppression;
nor is he one of us who dies while assisting his tribe in tyranny”.22
In terms of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari explain this immanent type of
deterritorialisation with their “shame” theory after Nietzsche. That is, Pickthall
cannot bear the shame of being a Christian as such any longer. But he never
betrays Englishness. He reterritorialises himself on a different type of English-
ness, which he calls, in political terms, the Disraelian notion which inspires
a “pan-Islamic progressive movement”.23 Englishness alone is insufficient to
define Pickthall’s patriotism which stands for Muslim English: Pickthall never
18 Quoted in Ibid., 81.
19 Ibid., 37.
20 Ibid., 40.
21 Ibid., 252.
22 M. Marmaduke Pickthall, War and Religion (Woking: Basheer Muslim Library, 1919), 37.
23 Quoted in Fremantle, Loyal Enemy, 287.