Turkey’s leadership role in-between the East and the West in Marmaduke Pickthall's novels and travelogues

Abstract

Marmaduke Pickthall, a neglected British novelist, has written about a dozen Oriental novels and travelogues. Pickthall who often asserts himself to be a lover of the East and Turkey has widely travelled in Syria, Palestine and Istanbul. He was an unusual traveller in the East without any cultural baggage and the frame of mind of a colonizer or a missionary. His sole concern was to fraternize on an equality with Orientals. In his deterritorialised encounters, Pickthall was not completely blind to what he found unbecoming in the Orient following a constructive and symbiotic line of flight ending up as a Turcophile journalist against his government. Despite overtly critical outlook in his novels of Syria, Palestine and Egypt, Pickthall is surprisingly positive and assertive about Turkey and the Turks in his travelogues and two novels and he professes Turkey to be "the head of the progressive movement in the East, the natural head, the sanest head”. This study aims to show that Pickthall’s preference of Turkey is not biased and results from his deep and concerned observations and retroactive and prospective analyses in his travelogues and two novels, The House of War (1916) and The Early Hours (1921). It also highlights a spontaneous rhizomatic response in Pickthall’s work to Shaw’s play Getting Married (1908). The study contributes to the debates on alternative Orientalisms and help in shaping the potential ‘minor’ contributions of Pickthall to postcolonial studies and the future of Turkey as a bridge between the East and the West.