80 Geaves
Quilliam would often refer to the millet system in the Ottoman Empire as
being the prime example of Muslim universalism and tolerance carried out in
state policy and organisation. Pickthall would appear to be referring to this tol-
erance when he writes in a letter to his wife, “there I was this morning with my
guide, a native Christian, visiting their most holy sanctuaries and shrines, and
crowds of soldiers everywhere also sightseeing, everyone received with smiles
and nice remarks”.26 We hear similar outrage expressed in his views towards
Christian responses to the insurgencies to that of Quilliam’s defence of the
Ottomans and anti-Christian rhetoric. Fremantle in her biography describes
Pickthall’s situation at the church which he attended in Sussex and the atti-
tudes that he encountered:
In the little Sussex church where [he] worshipped, the Bulgarian advance
was compared with that of Christian souls assailing Paradise, the Turks as
Satan. Remembering turbans set low to cover scars where ears had been,
remembering the full horror of the Carnegie Commission’s (1914) report
on Muslim areas devastated and their populations destroyed entirely by
Christian men, Marmaduke felt unable to rise when Wesley’s hymn was
sung.27Potential Differences
It is possible to argue that Abdullah Quilliam’s loyalty to the Ottoman Empire
was first and foremost religious whereas Pickthall’s, at least until his conver-
sion, was cultural. In Quilliam’s reading of Muslim history, the only legitimate
successors of the caliphate were the Ottoman sultans and all true Sunni Mus-
lims owed allegiance to Abdul Hamid, the Sultan, as the current Caliph of
Islam. To represent and serve the caliph was not only an honour, but a duty be-
holden upon all Sunni Muslims. He was always clear that his personal loyalty
to the Sultan had nothing to do with fealty to the Turkish Empire, but was an
aspect of being a true Muslim.28 For Abdullah Quilliam, there was only one
way to achieve this unity of the Muslim world, which was for all Sunni Muslims
to come together and profess loyalty to the successors of the historic caliphate
that had been established after the death of the Prophet.
26 Pickthall, Letters.
27 Anne Fremantle, Loyal Enemy (London: Hutchinson, 1938), 227.
28 Geaves, Islam in Victorian, 207.