At the height of the British Empire’s authority and power, a group of British people renounced Christianity and converted to Islam. These are the stories of the three pioneers whose conversion to Islam was a real challenge to Victorian norms of that time when Christianity was the bedrock of British identity.
Abdullah Quilliam
William Henry Quilliam/islamosfera.ru
Solicitor William Henry Quilliam got interested in Islam after seeing Moroccans pray on a ferry in 1887: “They were not at all troubled by the force of the strong wind or by the swaying of the ship. I was deeply touched by the expressions on their faces, which displayed complete trust and sincerity”, he recalled later.
After detailed inquires about religion during his stay in Tangiers, 31-year old Quilliam decided to become a Muslim, describing Islam as a “reasonable and logical” faith: : “Personally, I felt it did not contradict my beliefs”.
Although Islam does not oblige new converts to change their names, the British solicitor took a new name and became Abdullah.
On his return to England in 1887, he became a preacher and, according to historical documents, played an important role in the conversion of about 600 people across Great Britain. Quilliam also established the first mosque in the country, which opened its doors in Liverpool in 1887. At those years, Liverpool was considered to be the second city of the British Empire.
Queen Victoria, who ruled over more Muslims than the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, was among those who ordered his pamphlet “Faith of Islam”, which summarized the religion and was further translated into 13 languages. She is said to have ordered six more copies for her family. But the British Queen’s willingness and openness to new information and the desire to learn were not always supported by most of the empire’s residents who considered Islam to be a violent religion.
In 1894, with the Queen’s approval, the Ottoman Sultan appointed Quilliam as Sheikh al-Islam of the British Isles, a title reflecting his leadership in the Muslim community.
Despite the official recognition, many Liverpool converts faced resentment and abuse over their faith, including being assaulted with bricks, offal and horse manure. Quilliam believed the attackers had been “brainwashed and led to believe that Muslims were bad people”.
He was locally known for his active work with the underprivileged – advocating trade unionism and divorce law reform.
In 1889, he built another mosque in Woking, which became the second oldest mosque in Britain. The Liverpool mosque bears the name of Quilliam to this day.
In 1908, Abdullah Quilliam left Liverpool and went south, where he lived under the name of Henry de Leon. In 1932 he passed away and was buried in the city of Surrey.
Lady Evelyn Cobbold
Evelyn Cobbold/yaumma.ru
It is worth mentioning that there was nothing unusual about the fact that members of the upper class were fascinated by Islam, often inspired by travelling across Muslim lands. For instance, from an aristocratic family, Edinburgh-born Lady Evelyn Murray spent most of her childhood travelling between Scotland and North Africa. “There, I learnt to speak Arabic and my delight was to escape my governess and visit the mosques with my Algerian friends. Unconsciously, I was a little Muslim at heart”,she wrote. At her ancestral estate of Dunmore Park, she excelled at deer-stalking and salmon-fishing.
Her explorer father, the 7th Earl of Dunmore, often travelled to different places, including China and Canada. The little lady’s mother, later a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, was also passionate about travelling. Lady Evelyn inherited her parent’s wanderlust: in Cairo she met and married her husband John Cobbold – a businessman who was part of the brewery dynasty.
It is not known exactly when she converted to Islam. Perhaps, that seed was sown during her travels at a young age. However, her faith might have strengthened after a holiday in Rome, where she met the Pope.“When His Holiness suddenly addressed me, asking if I was a Catholic, I was taken aback for a moment and then replied that I was a Muslim”, she wrote later. “What possessed me I don’t pretend to know, as I had not given a thought to Islam for many years. A match was lit and I then and there determined to read up and study the faith”.
According to historian William Facey, who wrote the foreword to Lady Evelyn’s memoirs, it was a spiritual aspect of the religion that attracted many converts. He says that they followed a “belief that all the great religions shared a transcendent unity… behind the superficial doctrinal detail that divides them”.
In the Middle East, Lady Evelyn – referred to as “Lady Zainab” by her Arab friends – often had access to the areas reserved for women and wrote about the “dominating influence of women” in Muslim culture.
At the age of 65, she performed the Hajj to Mecca, having become the first British woman to complete pilgrimage to Muslim holy lands. Later she wrote about her impressions of the trip in her book “Pilgrimage to Mecca”.
It is little known about her life afterwards, except the fact that she travelled across Kenya for some time. Lady Evelyn died in an Inverness nursing home in 1963 at the age of 95. Before that she had left rather detailed instructions that a bagpiper should play at the funeral, and a passage from the Quran was inscribed on her gravestone.
“I am often asked when and why I became a Muslim”, she wrote in her memoirs. “I can only reply that I do not know the precise moment when the truth of Islam dawned upon me. It seems that I have always been a Muslim”.
Robert Stanley
Robert Stanley/lyf.org.uk
The narrative of Victorian Muslim history is usually dominated by those from the higher strata of society, whose stories, letters and property in general have been better preserved. Keeping written documents, such as diaries, was generally more a sign of the middle class.
Robert Stanley, another British Muslim, rose from working class grocer to Conservative Mayor of Stalybridge, a mill town near Manchester, in the 1870-s. According to Ms. Longden, who has written a book and a play about him, he was also a judge who set up a fund for workers, having been fired for voting in line with their bosses’ views. The woman also found out that he regularly wrote about British colonialism to the newsletter of Quilliam’s Liverpool mosque.
Stanley got acquainted with Quiliam at the end of the 1890-s when he had retired from his political career and they became close friends.
However, only in 1898, when he was 70, Stanley became a Muslim and adopted the name Reschid. Later, Stanley moved to Manchester where he died in 1911.
His conversion to Islam was kept quiet by his immediate descendants and was only discovered by his descendants in 1998 thanks to Quilliam’s granddaughter. According to her, it was an age when, if you did not meet the generally accepted standards, you could have been forgotten forever.
By happy coincidence, one of Stanley’s descendants – Steven – became a Muslim in 1991 after studying in Egypt as part of his university degree. When the man found out about his ancestor seven years later, he noted: “The fact there was a man who chose to be a Muslim at a time when you couldn’t possibly imagine someone would do something so unorthodox. People are not afraid to stand up and say what they believe in, whether that’s politically or religiously”.
Ilmira Gafiyatullina
Фото: Konevi/Pixabay