Pickthall, Muslims of South Asia 37
the Kingdom of Hejaz or the Holy Places of Islam (Mecca and Medina) by in-
sinuating that “our ally King [Sharif ] Hussein [then ruler of the Hijaz and key
British ally] is a venal traitor [...]; set[s] the Arabs at variance [...]; suggests
that we have violated the holy territories [... and] goes in for pure Turcophilism
[love of the Turks]”. Pickthall’s writings, according to one contemporary intel-
ligence report was “a masterpiece of enemy propaganda”.49
Three months later, Pickthall again courted controversy when in a challenging
piece published in the radical anti-war newspaper The Workers’ Dreadnought he
accused “our present rulers” of attempting to “pit the Arabic-speaking Muslims
against the Turkish-speaking Muslims” on “our false ideal of nationality and
patriotism”. In his view, “the great division in Islam is that between Progres-
sive and Reactionary; and we at present are supporting the reactionaries”
[i.e. the Grand Sharif of Mecca Hussain]. Then, in concert with South Asian
Muslims, when the British government set out the proposal to create a Jewish
state in Palestine under the tutelage of a Christian power, Pickthall once more
intervened likening this taking of territory from the Muslim government to
“a world-disaster”.50
After the First World War ended, with the Ottoman Empire defeated, the
tension between competing loyalties should have ended, at least in theory.
But it did not thanks to the continuing uncertainty over the ultimate fate of
the Ottoman sultan-caliph – an outcome in which Britain played a key role.
Pickthall now joined other British Muslims to call on the government for a
sympathetic hearing for and response to Turkey, pleading for the preservation
of the Ottoman caliphate and opposing the hereditary Arab alternative that
was being mooted by Britain: the latter, British Muslims insisted, ran the risk
of rousing very angry feelings in the Muslim world and so would not be in
Britain’s best interests. This controversy thus kept alive the question of loy-
alty long after the war had ended because Muslims who argued Turkey’s case
seemed to be continuing to support strongly and energetically, particularly in
India through the Khilafat Movement (1919–24), the state that had so recently
been Britain’s explicit, and defeated, enemy. Pickthall, alongside a number of
prominent Indian Muslims, was in the vanguard of this campaign in London;
he was considered as troublesome enough by the British authorities to be kept
under surveillance – along with the so-called “Woking Mosque gang”, a net-
work of agitators connected in various ways with the long-established mosque,
49 Eastern Report xvli (1917), FO395/144, 239516, 238406, tna.
50 M. Pickthall, Muslim Interests in Palestine (Woking/London: Central Islamic Society, 1917),
1; Islamic Review, August 1917, 319–22.