Becoming Woman and Gender Typologies 201
uses Englishness to support and save Islam, but on the contrary Islam sup-
ports and saves his Britishness as a true becoming with no personal or national
interests.
Becoming, as a noble activity suitable for the greatest authors, is the only
precondition for reading which is always selective for Deleuze and Guattari.
Becoming is not aping what is dominant, but becoming-everyone with those
who lack, or are deprived of, the power of self-expression: not on behalf of
them but together with them (immanent). Becoming in writing both leads to
an immanent symptomatology of the society we live in, and invokes the cre-
ation of a people to come. Great writers cannot resist leaving their territories,
travelling along the lines of flight, and becoming-molecular, even though it
might prove disastrous for them as is the case for Pickthall in the process of his
becoming-oriental. Pickthall’s oriental desire in writing was both the cause of
his sudden to rise to fame in Britain, and his equally rapid downfall: the first
was due to his oriental fiction, and the latter was caused by his pro-Turkish
journalism. While the Turks fought against the Powers all around Turkey, he
carried the same fight against them, including his own government with his
pen as a journalist.
Pickthall publicly declares his conversion to Islam in 1917.24 But his fictional
declaration of becoming-Turk and becoming-Muslim takes place a year before
in House of War. The novel is about young rebellious Miss Elsie Wilding, a Brit-
ish protestant missionary living alone in an orthodox Christian village in the
Ottoman Levant. She falls in love with her brother’s best friend, Mr. Fenn, a
British soldier returning home from India, who, in turn admires Islam and the
local dignified governor, Hasan Pasha, “an aged Turk accused of bloody mas-
sacre” by the prejudiced local Christians and the British missionaries. Elsie’s
missionary activities in the region lead to the killing of a Muslim boy from a
neighbouring village and a terrible fight between the Muslim and the Christian
villages. Hasan Pasha does his best to pacify the fighting groups and is very
kind to Elsie. And in order to prevent a further fight, he hides the mutilated
corpse of the child from his Muslim relatives, and pretends nothing happened
after being shot in the arm by a fanatic while leaving the region. Elsie learns
about Hasan Pasha’s injury afterwards. She also realizes that she owes him an
apology, but she does not know how to do it still accusing him of persecutions.
Fenn calms her as follows: “Just send and inquire after his health. He will quite
understand. The Turks neither offer nor expect apologies. They are too proud.
24 Peter Clark, Marmaduke Pickthall: British Muslim (London: Quartet, 1986), 1, 38.