Becoming Woman and Gender Typologies 207
to England in the hope of meeting young beautiful English women and enjoy-
ing free love: “His dreams were all of fair women languishing in a chastened
gloom”.51 When he lands in Liverpool he runs after the first woman he sees like
a mad dog. After some countless winter days and nights in Liverpool streets
alone, Saïd opens his eyes in a hospital room and soon he meets his fate by
becoming completely insane. The word “fisherman” in the title of the novel
seems to be a euphemism for a womanizer since we never see Saïd fishing at
sea and the only time he is on board he is dreaming of a school of women.
Pickthall’s oriental female characters have a strong resistance to the separa-
tion of sexes, hence tripartite typology introduced above is not applicable to
them. A different typology is suggested for oriental women according to their
submissiveness, dominance, or equality in their relationships with the other
sex. This tripartite typology is best seen in Early Hours, Pickthall’s last novel
which is about Turkey. The novel also depicts humanitarian and universal
Islamic ideals synthesised into the Turkish way of life as experienced by Pick-
thall in his visit to Istanbul in early 1913.
In Istanbul, there were also two important persons to initiate Pickthall into
becoming-Turk. The first one was Fraülein Eckermann, who “had become a
Turk to all intents and purposes”52 and with whom Pickthall was lodged in
her large kiosk at Erenkoy. She is the Misket Hanum of With the Turk in War-
time. She introduces Pickthall to her circle of friends consisting of mostly
Turkish women whom he finds “more energetic than the men” (enthusiastic
becoming-Turk of an old-fashioned Arab): “I was often told that my ideas were
too old-fashioned, and asked to recognise the great advance the Turks had
made upon the ways of my beloved Arabs”.53 And the second person was the
Turco-Egyptian prince Saïd Halim Pasha, the foreign minister of Turkey at that
time, and later the grand vizier (political and intellectual priming for becom-
ing-Muslim). An interesting coincidence about these two people is that they in
fact come out of Pickthall’s recently published novel Veiled Women. Both Saïd
Halim and Fraülein Eckermann offer positive resolutions for the symptoms
of oriental decadence presented in that novel. The former is a strong-minded
Turco-Egyptian pasha and revivalist Muslim although educated in Switzer-
land, and he is monogamously married like most other Turkish men. And the
latter is a surprisingly happy and successful convert living alone but “sworn to
wed a Turk” one day.54 Meeting these two people has a big influence on both
51 Marmaduke Pickthall, Saïd the Fisherman (London: Methuen, 1903), 273.
52 Pickthall, With the Turk in Wartime, 24.
53 Ibid., 91.
54 Ibid., 92.