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Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall   1875 – 1936
Muhammed Marmaduke Pickthall lived in Five Chimneys, Hadlow Down between 1909 and c.1916/17. Electoral Roll records of 1912 show him owning one quarter of the C16 wood framed house now re-fronted with red brick and the central chimney stacks cemented over but finished with brick tops

Pickthall was born in Cambridge Terrace, near Regent’s Park in London on the 7^th. April 1875 the elder of the two sons of the Reverend Charles Grayson Pickthall (1822–1881) and his second wife, MaryHale, née O’Brien (1836–1904).  Mary, of the Irish Inchiquin clan, was the widow of William Hale and the daughter of Admiral Donat Henchy O’Brien, who served in the Napoleonic Wars, Charles was an Anglican clergyman, the rector of Chillesford a village near Woodbridge, Suffolk  The Pickthalls traced their ancestry to a knight of William the Conqueror, Sir Roger de Poictu, from whom their surname derives.

Marmaduke was an English Islamic scholar noted for his 1930 English translation of the Qu’ran, (usually anglicized as “Koran” in Pickthall’s era). His translation is one of the most widely known and used in the English-speaking world. A convert from Christianity to Islam, Pickthall was also a novelist, esteemed by D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and E. M. Forster, as well as journalists, political and religious leaders. He declared his conversion to Islam in dramatic fashion after delivering a talk on ‘Islam and Progress’ on 29 November 1917, to the Muslim Literary Society in Notting Hill, West London. Continue reading “Marmaduke Pickthall – Oct. Mini-Bio”