14 Nash
Turkey, which although these did not precisely define their allegiances to Islam,
underpinned their respective conceptions of its place in the modern world.
They were united in their disquiet at the direction British foreign policy had
taken, in reality since the Congress of Berlin in 1878, progressively dismantling
Britain’s previous protection of the Ottoman Empire. Quilliam ran effectively a
one-man campaign against this, becoming the Sultan’s most conspicuous ally
in England while Pickthall was still a young man travelling around the Levant.
The latter caught up in 1912 when he started his own pro-Ottoman agitation
in journals like The Nineteenth Century and After and New Age. According to
Mohammad Seddon, Pickthall “understood nationalism (qawmiyyah) as being
distinctly un-Islamic and, unlike his modernising Turkish reformer allies, saw
Islam, and not nationality, as the prime marker of Muslim identity”. However,
Geaves suggests whereas Quilliam supported the caliphate as an article of his
Sunni faith Pickthall’s support for Turkey at this stage was mainly cultural.
Quilliam blamed the Young Turks for steering Turkey into the arms of the
Axis powers in 1914 and this held him aloof from Pickthall’s continuing public
stance in favour of a separate peace with Turkey.
Turkey had overwhelmingly been the focus, and with the evaporation of
the Young Turk project Pickthall channelled his reformist political dream
through his novelist’s imagination in The Early Hours (1921), “present[ing] the
case for the Young Turks that [he] had been making for the previous eight years
elsewhere”.28 There was a danger that the trauma of the defeat of Turkey would
sour the last two decades of his life if his bitter invective against the Arme-
nians at the time is anything to go by. When Pickthall had failed to convince
Britain, with its perceived tradition of toleration and fair play and – as he had
so frequently argued in the past – its imperial disposition to protect Muslim
peoples, what purchase could his pro-Turk idea carry with the newly emerging
(albeit limited) United States presence in the Middle East? A 1919 article in New
Age titled “America and the Near East” presents the views of two Americans,
a missionary and a vice-consul general. Both have experienced living in the
region, in Anatolia and Syria respectively. The missionary presents the prog-
nosis that: “‘Barbarism and fanaticism will retreat before the inexorable ad-
vance of civilisation’(!)”. As for the consul, Pickthall writes: “I cannot share in
Major Powell’s enthusiasm for the notion of a Constantinople, ‘neither Turkish
nor Teuton, but a free city under the Stars and Stripes,’ if these two articles
are typical of American understanding of the problems of the Near East. For
28 Clark, Marmaduke Pickthall, 104.