Abdullah Quilliam (Henri De Léon) and Marmaduke Pickthall 83
the Woking Muslim Mission (wmm). In 1914 he joined the newly created
Anglo- Ottoman Society, and organization established to promote Turkey, the
Ottoman Empire and the caliphate. Quilliam and Pickthall were both prime
movers in the establishment of the society, helping to create the Ottoman
Committee in 1912. Each was to hold high office in the Anglo-Ottoman Society,
functioning either as President, Vice-President or Secretary, presumably unit-
ed with each other in the aim to “maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Em-
pire” and to promote “cordial understanding between Britain and Turkey”. 34
The aos called for “a European defence of Turkey”35 seeking to promote the
old Disraeli-inspired foreign policy of forty years before that argued that Brit-
ain’s interests lay in protecting the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Rus-
sian expansion.
The First World War
However, it was all to no avail. British coldness towards the Ottomans had re-
sulted in Turkey drawing much closer to Germany. Although both men could
argue that the British needed to cultivate the Turks to prevent this happening,
by 1914 with the declaration of war it was too late. During the war years it be-
came much harder for British Muslims to defend the Turks or the Ottomans
without risking the attention of the security forces or accusations of betrayal
from the media. To “go Turk” had been a euphemism since the seventeenth
century for conversion to Islam, associating the act of becoming Muslim with
offering allegiance to another rival power. As pointed out by Nabil Matar, even
in the seventeenth century the act of conversion was linked to a renunciation
of all that defined “Englishness” as well as an affront to Protestantism.36 Dur-
ing the period of the war when Turkey allied to Germany, there was a real risk
of accusations of treachery and public disapprobation. In some ways, the shift
of attention from Liverpool to Woking spared the British converts from the
worst of public disapproval. Whereas Quilliam’s community in Liverpool had
looked towards the Ottomans, especially the caliph, as the spiritual leadership
34 The Near East 6, 142 (1914), 391.
35 Ibid., 475.
36 Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
66–7, 71. Matar is referring to the repatriation of converts from the Ottoman Empire be-
tween 1670–1734.