Pickthall, Muslims of South Asia, and the British Muslim Community of the Early 1900s

This chapter explores how and why Marmaduke Pickthall, a convert to Islam in early 20th century - a leading British scholar of Islam, an esteemed novelist, a noted journalist and a pan-Islamic political activist - moved from defending the British Empire to collaborating closely with those Muslim interests in India that by 1920 were actively challenging Britain’s imperial role in the subcontinent. It asks why and how this relationship came about, what it was based on, and the part that it played in his own longer-term intellectual and political evolution, which resulted in him – perhaps unexpectedly - accepting the editorship of the nationalist newspaper, the Bombay Chronicle in India.