The Enigmatic Pickthall

Marmaduke Pickthall: British Muslim by Peter Clark (published 1987 by Quartet Books, London) is a great read if you can get your hands on it. Most people only know that Pickthall converted to Islam and translated the Qur'an unless they have stumbled upon a collection of his essays called Cultural Side of Islam or sometimes, Islamic Culture. (He also wrote a wonderful novel called Sayeed the Fisherman which I highly recommend.)

In British Muslim, Peter Clark confesses becoming obsessed with Pickthall, who became an "invisible presence" in his home or three years. That seems like an amazingly short period of time to write a research book like this. His sources were mainly out of print periodicals as well as personal letters.

Pickthall wrote extensively as a journalist, and Clark had to locate old editions of Islamic Culture, once published in Hyderbad, and the periodical Islamic Review from Woking, England, as well as New Age of London.

British Muslim describes an erudite, personable and self-thinking man not cowed by popular opinion. We learn that if not for his political ideas deemed dangerous in official circles, Pickthall's "talents as a linguist and as an authority on Syria, Palestine, and Egypt could have been used." Indeed it was because he had a reputation for being a "rabid Turkophile" (i.e. a friend to Turkish people and someone who enjoyed Turkish culture and language) that he was not offered the job with the Arab Bureau in Cairo, then under British rule, that subsequently went to T.E. Lawrence. Thus are world events swayed.

The greatest work of his life, for which so many English speaking Muslims are indebted to him, was not without turmoil. The translation of the "meaning" of the Qur'an (a distinction he always insisted upon) began around 1927, although as early as 1919 when he was acting imam in London, he used to translate passages, piecemeal, for the sake of Friday sermons. His was the first translation of the Qur'an made by a Muslim! At the time he began, Pickthall was teaching in the Nizamate of Hyderbad, an offshoot of the Moghal Empire which had "evaded absorption in the British Empire." The Nizam gave Pickthall special leave of absence on full pay for two years in order to complete the translation. Pickthall decided he should also procure approval from the ulama of al-Azhar in Cairo. he spent three months in Egypt, from November of 1929. and met some leading Egyptian writers, among whom was Taha Hussein, a blind blind professor of Arabic at the secular university of Cairo.

Hussein seemed to derive delight in annoying Pickthall and throwing obstacles in his way.Pickthall quickly saw through his opponent and later would write about " a certain scholar with a mania for the last Paris models in the way of thought. . . [and whose' taste foreign ideas includes half-baked or wholly unbaked theories concerning the Arabic language, history and Islam."

The Egyptian trip was a failure. King Fuad, who was then toying with the idea of becoming the Caliph, did not support the notion of Pickthall's translation and the 'ulama were thrown in a flutter when it came out. They finally pronounced Pickthall's translation "unfit to be authorized." Ha. Pickthall's translation is still with us today, pronounced by some native Arabic speakers as the closest translation of any. May God bless him!

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Libraries and Learning in the Muslim World

    Most people who are even mildly interested in Muslim literature have no doubt read that the free lending library system originated in the Muslim world. All of the great cities of the Islamic world possessed wonderful libraries. At one time there were seventy public libraries in Muslim Spain, and one of Cairo's universities alone had 1,600,000 books on all conceivable subjects. It has also been reported that the Crustaders burned a library of 3 million books in Triploi, Lebanon (Tilfah;IX:112).
     Along with all these manuscripts went a zeal for learning that impacted the whole of society. An educated slave, male or female, was far more costly than an uneducated slave. Compare that fact to the law enacted in America's South during the 19th century, forbidding slaves to learn how to read. (Slaves in the Muslim world had many other rights, almost equivalent to citizens, and their emancipation was encouraged if not explicitly ordered in the Qu'ran, for more reasons than I can name here.)
     The traveler Ibn Jubair (540 A.H./1145 C.E. -- 614 A.H./1217 C.E.) reported seeing thirty colleges in Baghdad alone, each institution possessing thousands of students. Cairo at one time had 74 colleges, while Damascus had 73 and the city of Granada in Muslim Spain used to count 120 elementary schools without inclusion of its establishments of higher education. Colleges were often contained in mosques, as the traditional centers of learning.
     However, some colleges were established independent of mosques, like the lanugage schools founded in Baghdad under the Abbasid reign. These schools were necessary in order to satisfy the great demand for translators(Tilfah, 116).

_________________

Tilfah, Khair-Allah. I am the Arab. (Beirut: Arabian Printing Corporation, 1979). Talal Eshmawi, Translator.

In The Footsteps of the Prophet by Tariq Ramadan

                For most people in modernity, free time during the day feels like it’s constantly decreasing, and it feels very fateful that such a version of the Muhammad (Peace be upon him)’s Prophetic biography should be available in In The Footsteps of the Prophet by Tariq Ramadan.

                Unlike it’s predecessors this version feels very concise, short even, but not without focusing on the most important aspects of the Prophet (Peace be upon him)’s life that is still more than ever relevant to our modern times and the coming future. Throughout the book, from beginning to end, Ramadan tries to analyze, and show us how (although prophetic) a man’s life is one whole work of art that only by passing the different stages and events do Divine lessons take root in the heart and are we ready at the end of this worldly life for the return back to God.

                Ramadan again and again refers to God as Muhammad’s divine and loving Teacher Rabb, protector, so much to the point that one begins to lose conception of Muhammad as this independent character and more as a relative personality that manifests God’s intervention in the created world for it’s own salvation through Him, and it’s ability to find Him still in the direst of times, and as a living example that all human beings can use with a universal level of relativity to transcend age, race, gender, and time.

                As with most seerahs (Islamic biographies of the Prophet Muhammad’s life) Ramadan starts out with the Prophet (Peace be upon him)’s childhood, and then progresses chronologically through the book, although sometimes taking pauses in different chapters to reflect on the less dramatic events and times of the prophet’s life that are more relevant to what most Muslims deal with until today.

                Even a few a questions are left to the reader to conclude on his or her own, and this contributes to the book’s overarching theme in the journey to God that embraces critical thinking as part of that journey and as a proof itself to God’s help and the manifestation of faith.

                What I loved most about this book (May God bless the author and all people with it) is that while other seerahs may reflect on “Muhammad, the Greatest Messenger”, “Muhammad the Political Leader”, or “Muhammad the Greatest Man” etc. this seerah seemed to reflect most on Muhammad (Peace be upon him) the human being whom although, God’s messenger, was not exempt himself from the same test that we as human beings are all bound, who himself was not without flaw (keeping in mind his prophetic state), and who although is our leader, teacher, and guide (Peace be upon him) cannot help us where our direct relationship with the All-Merciful is concerned. For this reason it’s felt like the most beneficial book to me in that sense to draw from, understand, and implement.

And God is the best Appraiser, and Granter of success.

Daniel Abd Al Hayy Moore

In 1988, I interviewed Abd al Hayy Moore for The Saudi Gazette, a Jeddah newspaper written in English for expats and readers who wanted to practice English (still circulating). The interview took place via letters--that is the way things worked then. Abd al-Hayy was, like myself, a Southern Californian who had converted to Islam, but unlike myself had stayed in Southern California. His presence gave him the opportunity to educate people in Santa Barbara about the gentlest version of Islam--mystical Islam, the version that any convert who remains Muslim permanently tends to find him/herself embracing, especially given the tumultuous years since 9-11.

Abd Al-Hayy Moore was one of the first to partake in spearheading an Islamic creative writing movement in English. His ten year hiatus from writing would seem an odd obstruction to necessary momentum,  but more likely it helped him keep balance--for when an artist in any medium immerses him or herself in a spiritual undertaking, creative expression can be a deceptive device as a springboard for the ego. (Too many actors in the spotlight and making millions have crashed and burned for the phenomenon not to be generally acknowledged.)

When Moore agreed to forgo writing at the request of teachers in Morocco, he said that he "actually saw, with my own eyes, examples of perfection I had only imagined or gleaned from the 'fictional' cosmologies of Blake."

 In Dawn Visions, published by City Lights (San Francisco, 1964), a work composed around 1960 when the poet was 20 years old, both the search for truth and verses presaging praise of Allah break surface in Moore's upbeat vision:

I come down from the mountains
bringing only a piece of mirror fashioned by storm and calm
a mirror reflecting 
what mirrors cannot reflect/the inverse hemisphere
that spreads itself out beyond the horizon of sight,
the glow of a Flame that casts no shadow. . .

While Abd al Hayy, then known simply as Daniel, was a student at UCBerkley, his manuscript of Dawn Visions,  still unpublished, won the Ina Coolbrith Award and the James D. Phelan Award. Themes present in that work take on rich spiritual hues when the reader discovers The Chronicles of Akhira:


all of the mirrors stand up on the desert, their eyes searching far for the sign that will say "Yes!" 
to let them surge forward, each one, one by one, to the light that shines at the end of the tunnel.


By 1971, all of Moore's work was purchased and placed in the Archives of the Bancroft Library of UCBerkley. This included manuscripts published and unpublished, photo collections and scripts for the Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, a theater Moore had founded as writer and director in 1967.


Moore's first work after conversion was Burnt Heart, put out by City Lights and ignored by critics. "It was my first expression of a not-yet-completely understood Islam," wrote Moore. He did drawings for it, being a graphic artist as well, and the book was later printed by Villiers, London. Its significance is as a transitional piece, not without a certain power, and served as a farewell of sorts "into the bridge of silence leading to the 1980s when I began writing seriously again."


Moore's subsequent work should rightly take its place at the helm of modern Western Islamic creative writing. At the time of our interview, so long ago.he was busy participating in the Santa Barbara Arts Festival Poetry Night and had read his poetry often on the the KCSB radio on Friday evening poetry hour. A visit to his website on wordpress (home to my other blog, the grassroots writers guild) at least
will bear out he is still performing in as many ways as possible, sharing the spiritual vibes (and some delightful puppets!):

http://ecstaticxchange.wordpress.com/


I read The Desert is the Only Way Out as well as The Chronicles of Akhira. Moore wrote the first in deep nostalgia for Morocco, but the allegory is clear in that it depicts this life as a barren desert through which we mortals pass through as travelers:

When he steps, the light steps iwth him
When he pauses, the shade is his roof.
The intellect is a beast of burden,
a rope tied around its hoof,
hobbled, kept still, not wandering
into gardens of mischief and pain. . . . .

The vision of the day of Judgment is presented in the Chronicles with cinematographic care:

They came down from the high and low places,
They threaded themselves along through the intricate threadings,
the ancient ones and the new ones,
all the famous were among them,
all the shining stars,
all the historical glory grabbers,
the great thieves
all the inventors with their psychological quirks,
the nobodies came as ewll, the flowing multitudes of the anonymous,
the endless dissatisfied housewives, authoritative bureaucrats,
gas-station attendants and couples with no children,
philanthropists and the workaholics. . .


Ramadan Sonnets, the fifth in a cycle of six books which all fit under the main title of Long Days on Earth, explain the difficulties of fasting, something my own younger son did out of sheer stubborn spiritual desire starting from the second grade,  in elementary school after elementary school in California with nary a single other child to share the commitment, and I marvel at how the stanzas express what he went through without complaint (although I have never really seen anyone for whom it is easy. I daresay that is an illusion.). If I end with reflections on my own life or my child's, it is to draw attention to the fact that until art reflects life it is not art. The best worship attains to art. (That is what Beethoven believed.) Here is an excerpt from Ramadan Sonnets:


It's like practicing for death. No food or drink
during the daylight hours no matter
 what, in the heat of summer or the
cold of winter,
and no way out of it but through 
sickness, pregnancy, menstruation, madness, or travel
So that
it's something that comes
inevitably each year, like it or not,
whether or not
you've got a knack for it, and
some do, and love to fast, and
thrive on it, but
I do not, yet
each year it makes its visit, and
year after
year  it builds up to be a sweet thing,
which makes it like death, the way it's
always on the
horizon, and an absolute obligation, which  must
be
why Muslims often die well.
They've had a 
lifetime of Ramadans tenderising
them
for the Inevitable, and the
Inevitable surely comes.

Islam Between East and West by Alija Izetbegovic

Alija Izetbegovic

American Trust Publications (February 1, 1985)

This is a heady distillation of intellectual Muslim thought, demonstrating the kind of man Izetbegovic was. I once gave this book to my father (an agnostic) who said, "He's so intelligent it's scary."

Islam Between East and West is a modern treatise on cultures and civilization which attempts to show how so many philosophies have failed to give human beings what they need. Izetbegovic was no coward, and in this fine book he makes strong assertions: "Every culture is theistic in its essence; every civilization is atheistic."

By differentiating between culture and civilization, he shows the difference between critically analytical Islamic thought ( best exemplified by the Golden Age of Muslim philosophers) and the Christian turning of "the human spirit in upon itself" (witness the convents and monasteries betokening the negation of worldly life).

Tomb of Alija Izetbegovic

Izetbegovic argues that the Islamic ideal offers firm middle ground between Christianity, which focuses on the spirit, and Judaism, which "represents the 'this-world' tendency." In support of the latter assertion, he writes, "The Jews have never entirely accepted the idea of immortality. . . . The Kingdom of God which the Jews were predicting before Jesus' appearance was to materialize on earth, not in heaven as the Christians believed." This, then, apparently explains why the Jewish nation has tended to focus on external progress: "It seems as if they have been constantly migrating from a civilization on the wane to one on the rise."

Izetbegovic was the farthest thing from a fundamentalist, royalist, or nomad,which in some part explains the tepid interest of the Saudi government when he approached it during the Bosnian War at the very moment when Serbs began machine gunning hordes of Caucasian Bosnian Muslims in front of pits--the educated first. Perhaps the Bosnian Muslims looked, to the Arab World, a little too much like Westerners.  Indeed, perhaps Izetbegovic himself looked a little too much like a Westerner.Certainly he had a secular education, involving himself, as a young man, in activism and politics--both dicey concepts in the Arab Gulf..

Izetbegovic does not ignore the East at all, pointing out that those lands swallowed by socialism, communism, and fascism show how if religion, by itself, does not necessarily lead to progress, "science does not lead to humanism and in principle has nothing in common with culture."

Izetbegovic defines culture as "the art of being man," while civilization is "the art of functioning, ruling, making things perfect." Both are indispensable, he says: "Civilization educates; culture enlightens."

He explains education as something that makes human beings more capable but not freer, better, or more human. In many ways, he contends, the progress of education has made mankind less happy, if longer lived. He points out that man has the propensity to grow in nobility specifically when faced with adversity, yet science treats man as an animal, and that is why psychology is an accepted science in a material world. But in a scientific world, there can be no equality or brotherhood--that is only possible when we accept that man is created by God. The equality of human beings is spiritual and not a natural, physical or intellectual fact.

Izetbegovic uses art as proof of the existence of the soul--it matters not that the artist himself should be a believer in God. His argument? Art, he offers, is a spiritual rather than material act; the flip side to this argument is that "A human being is not the sum of his different biological functions, just like a painting cannot be reduced to the quantity of paint used." This book proves that in our modern time, there have been exceedingly erudite Muslim thinkers, far from the inflexible psychosis of fundamentalism.