(Mohammed) Marmaduke William Pickthall, (1875 - May 19, 1936), one of the most renowned Western Islamic scholars of all-time, noted as one of the most poetic and accurate translators of the Qur'an into English. A convert from Christianity to Islam, Pickthall was a passionate and articulate novelist, praised by the likes of D.H. Lawrence and H.G. Wells, prolific journalist, headmaster, and steadfast political and religious leader.
Born into a prestigious family, whose roots traced itself to a knight of William the Conqueror, Pickthall travelled across the plains and coastyards of many Eastern countries, forming a great reputation as one of the foremost Middle-Eastern scholars of his time. A strong and steadfast advocate of the Ottoman Empire, Pickthall devoted his time and attention to studying the mysteries of the Orient, publishing several highly informative articles and novels in regards to the subject. While under the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad, Pickthall published his celebrated translation of the Quran, becoming the first English translation to have been authorized by the Al-Azhar University, and earning the praise of the Times Literary Supplement as "a great literary achievement."
Pickthall was buried in the Muslim cemetery at Brookwood. His legacy lives on today, in the hearts and minds of today's new generation of Western Muslims, particularly converts to Islam, who consider him a father of the path they have undertaken.
Marmaduke was born in 1875, and when his father died five years later the family sold the Suffolk rectory and moved to the capital.
Pickthall’s novels, at their best, resemble a marriage of the two styles, just as he found in Islamic faith the ideal which he had sought in Christianity: a medieval liturgy combined with a low ecclesiology, the hieratic dignity of Laud invigorated by the social passions of Dissent.
Pickthall a most amiable and deeply religious man. And although he was a convert he had nothing of the fanatic in him that most converts, no matter to what faith they are converted, betray in their speech and act.
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