1875–1936 · England; Ottoman Near East; British India (Bombay, Hyderabad) · Novelist, journalist, translator of the Qur'an, educationist, editor
Marmaduke William Pickthall was born in London on 7 April 1875, the son of an Anglican clergyman from Suffolk. He left Harrow early, and in 1894 he went to Palestine. Over about two years in Palestine, Syria and Egypt he learned colloquial Arabic and got to know everyday life in the Ottoman Arab provinces. That experience shaped his fiction. Saïd the Fisherman (1903) made his name, and he followed it with novels and stories of Muslim life in the Levant, Egypt, Yemen and Turkey, including The House of Islam, The Children of the Nile, Veiled Women, Knights of Araby and The Early Hours, as well as the travel memoir Oriental Encounters (1918).
He stayed in Istanbul in 1913, and from 1912 he wrote in The New Age and elsewhere in defence of the Ottoman Empire; With the Turk in Wartime (1914) comes from that period. In November 1917 he publicly declared his Islam in London. He then worked with the Woking Muslim Mission, editing the Islamic Review and leading prayers and sermons.
In 1920 he went to India to edit the Bombay Chronicle, a nationalist paper that backed the Khilafat cause. He then entered the education service of the Nizam of Hyderabad. His Madras lectures were published as The Cultural Side of Islam (1927), and from 1927 he edited the quarterly Islamic Culture. With the Nizam’s backing he revised his English rendering of the Qur’an with scholars in Cairo. It appeared in 1930 as The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, an explanatory version that does not claim to replace the Arabic, and it became one of the most widely used English translations.
Pickthall returned to England in 1935. He died at St Ives, Cornwall, on 19 May 1936 and was buried at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.