202 Kökoğlu
They never even plead their case before the world. The native Christians make
the most of theirs. Always remember that when you hear Turks accused”.25
Through his oriental novels before House of War, Pickthall makes two
critically important diagnoses about the causes of the decline of Islam and
Western aversion to it as he summarises later that:
[T]he majority of professed Muslims are ignorant and superstitious
to-day, accepting a vast mass of legends and absurd beliefs [...]26
The conduct and condition of the Muslims now is a very bad advertise-
ment for the teaching of Islam. It is not astonishing if people, seeing it,
should turn away and think Islam to blame for their abasement.27Finally, Pickthall condemns the social degradation of women in some Muslim
countries as “a libel on Islam” and proclaims that: “The historical truth is this:
that the Prophet of Islam is the greatest feminist the world has ever known”. 28
Pickthall’s version of Islam, and his interpretation of marriage and relations
of the sexes in Islam, as will be examined in detail in the next section, is post-
romantic, anachronistic and highly original.
Becoming-woman and Deconstructing the Western View of
Marriage and Love
In the same way that Deleuze and Guattari criticise Western romances
beginning from the medieval romance between Tristan and Isolde as being
inflicted with the passional regime and Christian ideals, Pickthall criticises the
Christian view of original sin and marriage as “a sacrament involving bondage
of the woman to the man”29 and all romance in Western literature, claiming
that “the romance is an illusion”:
Take modern European literature – the most widely read – and you will
find the object of man’s life on earth depicted as the love of woman – in
the ideal form as the love of one woman, the elect [...] When that one25 Pickthall, House of War, 303 – 4.
26 M. Marmaduke Pickthall, The Cultural Side of Islam, 14.
27 Ibid., 20–21.
28 Ibid., 148.
29 Ibid., 147.