The Early Hours: A novel by Marmaduke Pickthall

By Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall

Muslim Academic Trust, 308 pages

Set in the dramatic last days of the Ottoman Empire, this novel of love and bloodshed depicts a world trapped between Islam and the modern age. Camruddin is a simple Macedonian soldier caught up in the Young Turk conspiracy to overthrow the Sultan.

A romance with a girl from a Pasha’s harem presents him with a desperate choice: to join the Jihad in the Balkan hills, or to enjoy his love and the patronage of a high Imperial official. The collapse of old Turkey, amid intimations of the birth of a new nation, is brilliantly depicted, as the humor and good-natured nobility of the Ottoman establishment totters under the hammer-blows of invasion and internal revolt.

About Author:

Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthal was born in 1875 in London, to an Anglican clergyman, and spent his formative years in rural Suffolk. He was a contemporary of Winston Churchill at Harrow, the famous private school. During intervals from living a sedentary life in Suffolk, Pickthall traveled extensively in the Arab world and Turkey. In 1917, Pickthall reverted to Islam.

A strong advocate of the Ottoman Empire, Pickthall studied the Orient, published articles and novels on the subject, best known for the English translation of the Qur'an ' The meaning of the Holy Qur'an' While under the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad.
In India, he became a champion of independence and a close friend of Mahatma Gandhi and served as editor of the Bombay Chronicle, served as an Imam

Abdal Hakim Murad (Timothy J Winter) graduated from Cambridge University with a double first in Arabic in 1983. He then studied Islam under traditional teachers at Al-Azhar, one of the oldest universities in the world. He went on to reside in Jeddah, where he administered a commercial translation office and maintained close contact with Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad.