The Meaning of Faith: The Story of Marmaduke Pickthall
Marmaduke Pickthall
42 years old, from United Kingdom
Previous Religion: Christianity
My Life Before Islam
Marmaduke William Pickthall was born in London on April 7, 1875, the son of an Anglican clergyman. An educated, bookish boy who attended Harrow alongside the future Winston Churchill, he was drawn from a young age to the languages and cultures of the East. He first traveled to the Near East as an eighteen-year-old, where he was enchanted by the people of Palestine and Syria and quickly learned Arabic, coming so close to conversion that a Muslim scholar in Damascus, considering him too young, gently advised him to wait. He returned to England and made his name as a novelist and journalist, writing powerfully about the Muslim societies he had come to love.
The Moment of Guidance
For two decades Pickthall studied the East and wrote on its behalf, publishing admired novels such as "Saïd the Fisherman" and defending the Ottoman Empire against the hostility of the European press. He saw Islam not through the eye of a distant observer but from within, and he grew convinced that its teachings were true and well suited to the needs of the modern world. As the First World War drew to a close, and after delivering a lecture on Islam and progress in London in November 1917, he could no longer restrain what he had known in his heart for years. He was ready to declare publicly the faith he had long come to believe.
Reflections
In November 1917, on the night he delivered that lecture in London, Marmaduke Pickthall publicly declared his acceptance of Islam, announcing his conversion in dramatic fashion before the Muslim Literary Society. He began immediately to serve the small Muslim community of the capital, acting as imam at the Woking Mosque, translating passages of the Qur'an for his sermons, and editing Muslim periodicals. In 1920 he sailed for India with his wife, first editing a newspaper in Bombay and then entering the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad, where he worked as a school principal and a scholar. He adopted the name Muhammad and embraced a new life of service to Islam.
Pickthall's greatest gift to the English-speaking world was his translation of the meaning of the Qur'an, published in 1930 as "The Meaning of the Glorious Koran" and authorized by Al-Azhar University. Previously the Qur'an had been misrepresented in English; Pickthall insisted that only a believer who revered it as the word of God could present it fairly. He completed the work within the State of Hyderabad, with the patronage of the Nizam and the resources of his own Arabic scholarship, and generations of readers across the world have recited his rendering. He died in 1936 in England and is buried in the Muslim cemetery at Brookwood, near the grave of his fellow translator Abdullah Yusuf Ali.