Yahya Birt

As the Muslim Council of Britain marks its first decade, it seems an appropriate moment for reflection. As the largest Muslim umbrella body, it still remains primus inter pares among an increasingly large alphabet soup of representative bodies. The British Muslim Forum, the Sufi Council of Britain and British Muslims for Secular Democracy have all emerged in the last three years since 7/7, as well as a plethora of Muslim commentators and other bodies that seek to reflect the government’s “rebalancing” in 2006 of its relationship with Muslim communities to emphasise counter-terrorist imperatives.

Most of these new actors endorse either an implicit or explicit critique of the MCB and its style of community activism, and have positioned themselves more assertively on the contested issue about what to do about “extremism”. In the moral panic over “Islamism”, the MCB has too often fallen into the trap of refuting the aspersion of guilt by (ideological) association with violent extremism rather than framing its own proactive narrative on terrorism, and so other Muslim actors have stepped into this vacuum. Yet there will no returning to politics as usual by going around the problem of terrorism (nor, indeed, the war on terror). Even on the bread-and-butter issues, too little has been done about the shocking deprivation found in the last national census – figures that the MCB helped us to obtain but did not campaign hard enough to get changed.

Once the darling of the political establishment, the MCB has become just another voice at the table. The government has appointed a plethora of internal and external Muslim advisors, has rapidly developed its own national network of local contacts, particularly with respect to preventing violent extremism (PVE) funding, and set up its own panels to deal with imams and mosques, women and young people. Rightly or wrongly, the PVE rationale now drives or influences all aspects of government policy on Muslim communities across no less than eight departments, including the Department for International Development! And the major mosque-associations – including the MCB – seem poised to be effectively pushed back into civil society to manage imam training and run mosques through the mechanism of MINAB.

Organisationally the MCB appears ill-equipped to handle such momentous challenges in terms of its grassroots networking, institutional weakness and democratic health. After thirteen years, if one includes its pre-launch consultation phase in the 1990s, its strategic decision to rely on its affiliates has meant that it has done less grassroots networking than Respect did in a mere three. Even if it ups the ante in this regard, hundreds of Muslim organisations now seek representation elsewhere and, as such, developing effective partnerships is probably now more salient.

The MCB’s chief posts are still all voluntary and unpaid. Many of the MCB’s affiliates are much better staffed and resourced than the body that seeks to represent them. There is a backroom administrative function but no high-profile Chief Executive, Head of Policy Research, Chief Press Officer or any other of the personnel one would expect in such an institution. A greater push on core private funding is needed here.

Finally, the MCB is now reconsidering its overly-complicated election process that somewhat disadvantaged larger regional mosque associations in favour of some smaller national groups. A simpler one affiliate-one vote system of direct election of the executive positions and, importantly, of the Secretary-General is needed. With a direct mandate for a full-time paid position, any affiliate member should be able to put someone forward for the top post with nominations and be able to campaign openly for three months on a manifesto. Elections are supposed to be unpredictable affairs, but not so with the MCB, which has just re-elected both Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari and Dr Daud Abdullah as his Deputy for a second term. Where is the urgency to connect with that half of Britain’s Muslims under the age of twenty-five with more fresh faces in executive roles?

The next few years will be critical to the MCB’s long-term health as a relevant and dynamic organisation. In recent times, some of its prominent affiliates have looked far too close to active party political campaigning for comfort, particularly with Respect and Muslims4Ken, a strategy that was avoided by the Council in the 1990s, although mere party membership has been better handled. This association with the old left is hardly the best positioning for a non-party political institution preparing to deal with any incoming government that may very well be Conservative.

With all these challenges ahead, the biggest one may well be that of internal expectation from a young community that is looking for relevant and substantial leadership (beyond the usual pieties of “Muslim unity” and “Muslim interests”) and is alive to all the other opportunities for engagement that are now open to it.

Yahya Birt is Commissioning Editor at Kube Publishing and blogs at www.yahyabirt.com.

This article originally appeared in Emel Magazine, Issue 46, July 2008.

For the first time since 1997, the Conservatives suddenly look to be on the electoral march. A resounding victory in the local elections condemned Labour to third place and its lowest share of the vote since 1918: the Conservatives gained ground in Labour heartlands in Wales and the North, capped by Boris Johnson’s win as Mayor of London over Ken Livingstone.

Of course the Conservatives still have an electoral mountain to climb, a swing of 6.5% nationally to gain an overall majority in Parliament. Yet the momentum is with David Cameron, while Labour seems to be suffering the usual malaise of third term governments, being perceived as tired, out of touch and out of ideas. The proposal to get rid of the 10% tax band, rising fuel and food prices, falling house prices, the collapse of Northern Rock and the global credit crunch have all dented Labour’s strong record. Suddenly, after a decade-long boom, people feel insecure and have made their feelings clear at the ballot box. What we don’t know yet is whether the next general election for Gordon Brown will be a rerun of 1992 or 1997: will he be able to rally Labour support to keep a reduced majority, or go down to a Conservative landslide?

Just as New Labour sought in its first term to reassure voters as to its fiscal prudence by tying its spending to the Conservative’s budgetary plans, Cameron has similarly tied himself to some of Labour’s spending plans. As Labour became trusted with neoliberal economics, the modern Conservative party seeks to emulate the Clintonesque-Blairite third way, weaving neoliberalism with welfarism. It seeks to be trusted not to dismantle the welfare state, to be convincingly post-Thatcherite. There is, David Cameron has said recently, such a thing as society.

Of course Muslims might wonder how the question of Islam in the post-9/11 world would be treated under a Conservative government, say from May 2009. The evidence thus far is that the party is thinking out aloud in various directions. Cameron himself spent a week with a Muslim family and had positive things to say about his experience (although he was unsurprisingly alarmed by the conspiracy-itis he encountered at a mosque he visited). Dominic Grieve, the Shadow Attorney General, has argued at length about the deleterious effect anti-terrorism legislation has had on Britain’s proud tradition of fundamental civil liberties, on the proposed ID cards or on the extension to detention without charge or trial. And Iain Duncan Smith has done genuinely creative and thoughtful work on social exclusion, an issue that ought to exercise Muslims thoroughly given that our average unemployment rate is more than three times the national average.

There are also a variety of strategies proposed for dealing with “extremism”. Analogies are commonly drawn with the Cold War. Michael Gove, the author of Celsius 7/7 and the Shadow Minister for Housing, analyses Islamism within the framework of twentieth century totalitarianism, and argues strongly for confrontational ideological warfare against Islamism itself, and not just al-Qaeda, which is regarded in this analysis as its violent anarchist fringe. Charles Moore also recently argued that the Conservative party has sufficient distance from Muslim communities to lead this charge against British Islamism, as it is not entangled like New Labour in Muslim identity politics. Just as in the 1980s with trade unionism, the Conservatives now seek to take on the “Scargills of Islam“.

It has to be said that this is a rather worrying trend, not because Muslim political activism that galvanises a faith-based identity politics is somehow wholly beyond criticism, either internally or externally. It is not — for as it claims to represent Muslim interests, it should be held to account for the validity of those claims. Rather, the point is that when it comes to dealing with violent extremism, targetting Muslim political activism in Britain will have no perceptible impact on the “men of violence”. Muslim activists are really policy strawmen, being easy targets to knock down while the real action lies elsewhere.

The other issue lies with the rancorous debate around Muslim integration. This has been held hostage to fears of terrorism and (admittedly) a dislike of small-”c” conservative Muslim values. What is needed here most of all is a division between security and integration policy imperatives, and a realisation that as Britain will remain very diverse, multiculturalism needs to be reinvigorated with a greater emphasis on responsibilities, participatory citizenship and an inclusive nationalism.

Recent conservative thinking has so far been wide-ranging but is not yet fully-formed on British Muslims. In any future scenario, no true political virtue can be made out of an acknowledged distance from Britain’s Muslim communities.

Yahya Birt is Commissioning Editor at Kube Books and blogs at www.yahyabirt.com.

This article first appeared in Emel Magazine, Issue 45, June 2008.

Today we live in an age when the boundary between two allegedly monolithic entities, “Islam” and the “West” appears to be rigid, politicized, ring-fenced. So the question arises as to the motives of converts to Islam. Are they converting to faith or to an anti-West political cause? Such questions get asked after terrorist incident involving converts like Richard Reid, Don Stewart-Whyte, and Germaine Lindsay.

Such examples reinforce the view that conversion to Islam is an act of joining an anti-West political cause rather than one of the world’s great religions. If conversion to Islam was dubbed “turning Turk” to the Elizabethans and the Stuarts confronting Ottoman naval power; “turning Terrorist” is its twenty-first century variant.

It can be observed that cultural boundaries between these two so-called worlds can, with time and circumstances, grow more or less rigid, or conversely become more or less permeable, with conversion seen as less threatening, as less remarkable. John Walker Lindh, dubbed “the American Taliban”, provides an iconic illustration of the tensions around conversion today.

Lindh converts to Islam in 1997, and sets out for the next few years to master Arabic and to memorise the Qur’an, in trips to the Yemen and secondly in Pakistan, to a simple madrasa in the NWFP. Exposed to the idea of global jihad, he signs up with Harakat al-Mujahidin for basic training in May 2001 and is then sent to Afghanistan in  to fight jihad there. In June 2001, Lindh, now fluent in Arabic, is sent to one of the Arab traning camps, al-Farooq, run by Bin Laden. Fighting for the Taliban he idealised against the Northern Alliance, Lindh never fires his gun once. He is shortly captured and incarcerated at a basement in the Qala-i Jangi near Mazar-i-Sharif. Of 330 men, only 85 come out alive, Lindh included. Lindh comes to global attention in a CNN interview just after he is captured but not yet in full American custody, as “the American Taliban”.

At the end of his trial, all charges relating to terrorism were dropped and Lindh was charged with carrying a rifle and grenades for the Taliban, for which he was sentenced to 20 years, and forbidden by a court ruling to speak Arabic in prison. In his final court statement Lindh repudiated terrorism, and al-Qaeda’s ideology and approach.

Lindh was the first prisoner to be “Abu-Ghraibed”, to be photographed naked and bound, blindfolded with the word “sh*thead” written across it, to be denied access to the Red Cross or to a lawyer. His was the first test case for the Bush adminstration’s creation of a legal state of exception by which international and constitutional rights were suspeneded.

Frank Lindh, John’s father, says that his son was born Muslim, always focused and disciplined from a young age. Throughout his journey to and through Islam, Lindh comes across as driven, but also as passive, as innocent to the complexities of the wider world around him. Lindh comes across as a majdhub, drawn to faith, to good practice, almost as if by a bestowal of Divine grace. He has an idealism, a divine foolishness, a fatal incuriosity for the practicalities of the world and the messy realities of politics. Tom Junod’s remarkable prison portrait leaves the unmistakable impression of itmi’nan, of Lindh being at peace with himself, in serenity at his lot in prison, reliant upon his Creator and constantly prayful. He is never known to miss the fajr prayer or to fail to offer his tahajjud devotions in the night. As the prison librarian he devotes himself to ancient Arabic texts. As a constant target for violence and abuse, Lindh cannot afford to leave himself in unsupervised parts of the prison. As Junood, puts it, despite being described as a global villian, as a modern-day “renegade”, “in response to what America has done to him” Lindh “has become more Islamic — more himself, and a better Muslim.”

Lindh is portrayed as an insider, the innocent American abroad, naive to political realities, touched by a simple profound faith of the heart, that divorces his intentions from his acts. But Lindh is also an outsider, one who has took up a task and a choice that few converts have: the cause of jihad on behalf of the Taliban. He is the terrorist, one for whom the basic dignities  and human rights afforded a prisoner of war and a citizen were suspended.

Lindh’s story indicates that choices away from liberal self-enlightenment can only be seen as acts of betrayal. But betrayal of what? Of enlightened morality and sound reasoning, as conversion enacts a reversal of the process of reformation and enlightenment. Such a choice might have been seen, in kinder times, as naive or eccentric, but today are seen as subversive, defiant, traitorous. Converts to Islam must be deconstructed as moral persons to make safe the boundary around liberalism (and indeed Islam), marked by words of rejection and acts of violence, such is the dangerous ambiguity of free choice, of acceptance and betrayal, that the convert represents.

Yahya Birt is Commissioning Editor at Kube Publishing and blogs at www.yahyabirt.com.

This article first appeared in Emel Magazine, Issue 44, May 2008.

The digital age is crucial to reshaping religious authority among Muslims today. The mass media and the internet have changed the way in which religious teachings are disseminated and indeed how religious disputes are projected and replicated to a vast audience. This is not new but arose two hundred years ago when the ulema began to write treatises addressed to the literate constituency of the Muslim masses through the medium of print. Since then the ulema, and the reformers who now contest their authority, have cultivated constituencies of opinion through the mass media.

Yet while the disagreements of opinion formers help define the scope of public debate, Muslim publics exert considerable influence too. By asking questions they have the power to set the agenda, while, in preferring one religious authority over another, they naturally reflect the existence of a competitive market for religious ideas. Religious debate is now primarily conducted through the mass media as everyone understands its power to reach millions rather than through the more traditional face-to-face method. This drive for mass access has created a global religious public sphere into which all scholarly and non-scholarly disagreements get projected.

The nature of the mass media has changed for good. Whereas it used to be hierarchical, elitist, linear and declarative, it is becoming individualised, demotic, non-linear, and interactive. In the age of print, television and to a lesser extent radio, there used to be an editorial process and a relatively high economic cost to media exposure, but, in the digital age, samizdat multimedia has become the norm and not the exception. Anyone can now publish and project their views globally. They can claim to speak for Islam, issue a “fatwa”, proffer advice, and provide counselling or spiritual guidance. Religious leaders struggle too to project any measure of decorum or scholarly expertise in religious debate in the new media, for it is difficult to be both player and referee in the same game.

Rancorous dispute has gone from street corner discussions in the early nineties to all being preserved in glorious binary digital code, archived and available for retrieval and redeployment. Electronic fatwas and sermons struggle to define a precise audience; they must ignore any original context of time and place to speak for “Islam” globally, for Muslims everywhere, in soundbite format. This loss of context, allied, to bricoloage culture, is injurious to intellectual expertise, proper deliberation and intra-religious pluralism.

The nightmare scenario is that Sheikh Google will lead the unified madhhab of the virtual umma in which a billion-plus, atomized Muslims project their subjective musings, screaming inanities into the ether in a dialogue of the deaf. Sheikh Google’s umma would be protean, individualised, samizdat, postmodern, unregulated and without any agreed standards in interpretive technique. All differences would become mere subjectivity, reducing everything to the will for recognition manifested as the narcissism of small differences.

Yet is this not a rather dismal prognosis, the bias of the conservative to the peril rather than the promise of the new digital age, predicting chaotic mediocrity rather than creative renewal? Charles Leadbeater in his new book We-Think argues that the better future of the internet lies with its emerging ability to harness mass creativity and innovation if it can garner responsible self-governance.

One success story Leadbeater cites is Wikipedia, a prime example of open-source creative collaboration. In 2007, Wikipedia had six million articles in hundreds of languages; its total cost was 1.5 million and it only had five paid employees. It has a small committed core of volunteers alongside hundreds and thousands of other members of the public. In March 2007, Wikipedia was the eleventh most popular website, the Encyclopedia Britannica, 4,449th. Wikipedia has 250 million words, Britannica, 44 million.

But what of accuracy? Is not Wikipedia the repository of conspiracy theorists, gossips and amateurs as well as experts? A study by Nature magazine surveyed forty two corresponding articles in both and found 162 factual errors in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica, so the difference is less than we might think. Yet Wikipedia, with greater resources of peer review, has been shown to correct itself more quickly. And it is – unlike Britannica – making the inheritance of human learning available to the world for free.

So rather than Sheikh Google, Wiki-Islam provides a better possible future for Islam online, amenable to its unchurched nature. Creative collaboration between scholars, experts, intellectuals and Muslim publics would allow for the social and intellectual process of ijma and ijtihad to become dynamic, relevant and infinitely refinable. The internet is no panacea: real-world conditions of authoritarianism in the Muslim world, the war on terror and intellectual conservatism may stymie unlocking the true potential of Wiki-Islam. But a crucial first step nonetheless to unlocking that potential is to recognize the collaborative creativity the digital age offers to the Muslim.

Yahya Birt is Commissioning Editor at Kube Publishing and blogs at www.yahyabirt.com.

This article first appeared in Emel Magazine, Issue 43, April 2008.

Diana Appleyard, a features writer at the Daily Mail, sent out the following appeal on 16th February (HT: BBRC, Recess Monkey, CiF):

—–Original Message—–
From: rsreply@—–.com [mailto:rsreply@----.com]
Sent: 13 February 2008 15:57
To:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Response Source - Diana Appleyard , Daily Mail (Request for personal case study)

PUBLICATION: Daily Mail (Request for personal case study)
JOURNALIST: Diana Appleyard (staff)
DEADLINE: 14-February-2008 16:00
QUERY: I am urgently looking for anonymous horror stories of people who have employed Eastern European staff, only for them to steal from them, disappear, or have lied about their resident status. We can pay you £100 for taking part, and I promise it will be anonymous, just a quick phone call. Could you email me asap? Many thanks, Diana

HOW TO REPLY:
Email: mailto:dianaappleyard@—.com
Phone: not provided for use
Fax: 01296 —– (preferred)

What an absolute disgrace! What a shameless display of xenophobia and cynical abuse of press power! If the Press Complaints Commission doesn’t do anything about this, it will confirm its status as an ineffectual internal watchdog.

Wardman Wire has done a forensic job in pointing out that the BBC, both online and in news headlines, trailed the interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury on the World at One in sensationalist and misleading terms, i.e. his giving assent to the view that accepting the rule of Shariah law in some parts of Britain was “inevitable”. This was a complete distortion of what the ABC actually said on Thursday, 7th February, either in his interview or his speech later on that evening. There is good evidence that the BBC therefore set the tone for the tabs, the Sundays and the broadsheets. (Of which more, hopefully, later.) It also tells us something about the need for responsible reporting in the light of the 17,000 complaints the Beeb received in the subsequent twenty-four hours that were hostile to its original misrepresentation.

Sunny Hundal of Pickled Politics has rightly written to the Corporation to complain. Perhaps we ought to write too.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent intervention on the recognition of Shariah in English law has sent the country into a spin. His address on “Civil and Religious Law in England”, which calls for “interactive pluralism” in law, is far from being a call for legal and cultural separatism. [1] However alarmed the reaction has been, there is simply no question of separate or independent courts; rather, the aim, it seems, is to bring existing informal Shariah courts under the purview of English law.

The main reason for the adverse and fearful reaction is that Shariah is popularly used as a synonym for penal law with its fixed penalties that can involve capital punishment. However, there is no Muslim representative body advocating Islamic penal law in Britain. Furthermore, the term “Shariah” itself is an umbrella concept that includes criminal and civil law, ethics, personal morality and conduct and matters of worship. Thus, due to this semantic confusion, attacks on the Shariah can often be misconstrued by Muslims as an attack upon their core values. More clarity about what Shariah actually means is essential to moving this debate forward constructively.

The campaign for the importation of the hybrid Anglo-Muhammadan law or “Muslim Personal Law” developed in British India and retained after independence, [2] that would be applied separately and uniformly on all British Muslims, has never been a popular option, despite the long drive on this score by the Union of Muslim Organisations, one of the British Muslim umbrella bodies, since 1970. None of the other umbrella bodies has supported the UMO’s campaign for legal dualism.

However, the picture on the ground is more complex and offers more creative possibilities. For some decades now under English civil law, marital and inheritance law and the arbitration of disputes have been judged under Shariah if both parties have freely consented to adjudication on that basis. This has required the civil courts to provide guidance for judges on ethnic minority law and to call upon a roster of Islamic legal specialists, many of them ulema. Where such claims have fallen foul of English law or contravened basic human rights legislation, they have been rejected by the courts. [3] Conversely, we can also note the recent recognition of some aspects of Islamic finance in English law to enable the development of a competitive Islamic finance sector. [4]

Therefore, the question is how much should these cases of arbitration be dealt with by the civil courts and how much by minority courts regulated under English civil law?

Under existing English law, two aggrieved parties are given the flexibility to resolve disputes in innovative ways under the aegis of a third party. The settlement of such disputes must be reasonable and based on the consent of both parties. In this space, minority tribunals like the Jewish Orthodox Beth Din, Somalian customary law and indeed Shariah courts are developing, as well as in business, with commercial arbitration becoming an established practice. In order to ease the burden on the civil courts in settling small claims and disputes, this trend, suitably regulated, has been encouraged in the past. [5]

Some Muslim scholars like Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqui [6] argue that informal Shariah courts should now follow the example of the Beth Din courts. The main Beth Din in Finchley, North London, only deals with cases on the basis of mutual consent. Once agreement is achieved, both parties are obliged under English law to follow the court’s ruling. The Beth Din deals with small claims, neighbourhood, business, tenancy and other such disputes, as well as divorce cases. It has no remit for criminal law, nor does it seek one. The best established Muslim equivalent, the Muslim Law Shariah Council in West London, mostly deals with cases of limping marriages, granting dissolution of the nikah on behalf of wives whose husbands have refused to divorce them under Islamic law. [7]

A further objection raised is that Shariah courts would, even in adopting the Beth Din model, be fundamentally iniquitous, as the state would be viewed as abdicating its responsibility to protect the rights of vulnerable members of the Muslim community. Particular concerns centre on Muslim women. Maleiha Malik has therefore rightly argued that the state should seek to apply all human rights and anti-discrimination legislation rigorously to avoid structural discrimination in the operation of these minority courts of arbitration. [8]

However the Archbishop’s “interactive pluralism” suggests further internal Muslim reflection too. Muhammad Khalid Masud argues that a jurisprudence for minorities (fiqh al-aqalliyat) that still works from a dhimmi template and therefore calls for the application of “differential equality and protection” for Muslim minorities is inadequate. Rather the challenge is to look more widely for a “Muslim jurisprudence of citizenship in the framework of pluralism”, even if Shariah courts are successfully incorporated as tribunals of arbitration. [9]

A version of this article will appear in Emel Magazine’s March 2008 issue.

Notes

[1] The text of the Archbishop’s speech, delivered at the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday, 7th February, is reproduced at http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1575, accessed 8th February 2008.
[2] Michael R. Anderson, “Islamic Law and the Colonial Encounter in British India” in D. Arnold and P. Robb (eds.), Institutions and Ideologies: A SOAS South Asian Reader (London: Curzon, 1993), 165-185.
[3] For instance in the case of Khan v. UK (1986), the court rejected the argument, on the basis of a ruling of the European Commission of Human Rights, that setting the legal age of marriage under British law at sixteen was a violation of religious freedom – in this particular instance of the “right” to marry a young women aged fourteen. It was rejected on the ground that the marriage could not be considered as “merely” a religious practice. See S. Poulter, “Muslims: Separate System of Personal Law”, Ethnicity, Law and Human Rights: The English Experience (Oxford: University Press, 1998), 195-236, example given at 218.
[4] Sunday Times, 12th March 2006.
[5] Innes Bowen, “The End of One Law for All?”, BBC News Online, 28th November 2006, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6190080.stm, accessed 9th February 2008.
[6] Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqui is currently the Rector of the Hijaz College, an Islamic seminary in Warwickshire, and a commercial law barrister.
[7] See the detailed study by Nurin Shah-Kazemi, Untying the Knot: Muslim Women, Divorce and the Sharia (London: Nuffield Foundation, 2001).
[8] See Maleiha Malik’s contribution in Madeleine Bunting (ed.), Islam, Race and Being British (London: Guardian and Barrow Cadbury, 2005). Maleiha Malik is a leading specialist on discrimination law at King’s College, University of London, and has written on issues relating to minority protection in Europe.
[9] Muhammad Khalid Masud, “Islamic Law and Muslim Minorities”, ISIM Newsletter, 11/02, 17. Masud is currently the Chairman of the Islamic Council of Ideology, an official body that advises the Pakistani government on Islamic issues, and was previously the Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden, the Netherlands.

What was the status of the Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles? Evidentially there is no definitive answer to this and my tentative conclusions are provisional as I do not have the immediate means to get to the bottom of what most would probably regard as an “historical footnote”.

The office has only had one incumbent: Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932). The Ottoman caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, granted Quilliam the position in 1894 and Quilliam effectively had to relinquish the post when he left Britain in 1908 and could only return a few years later pseudononymously. (Yaqub Zaki dates Quilliam’s return as early as 1910. [1]) This probably means that we have to distinguish between how the Ottomans saw the role and how Quilliam himself viewed it.

The Ottoman View

Whatever has thus so far been retrieved from the Ottoman archives [2] concerning Quilliam tells us three things:

(i) The Ottoman bureaucracy valued Quilliam as a source of information about the reporting of Ottoman affairs in the British press.
(ii) Sultan Abdul Hamid II trusted Quilliam as a competent and impartial figure given the fact that the caliph sent him on a fact-finding mission to Macedonia to report back objectively given his detachment from the internal politics of the administration there.
(iii) The granting of the title Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles in 1894 (the addition “and Dominions” appears very late towards the end of the Liverpool period and may not have been an official caliphal designation) was seen in the context of supporting minority Muslim populations outside of Ottoman control. The key example of this was the earlier deal struck between the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs over Bosnia in 1878.

The Bosnian Parallel

This third and most important point justifies more elaboration. Bosnian Muslim elites in the nineteenth century were part and parcel of centralised Ottoman power and furnished it with significant military and administrative personnel. However these elites also resisted the tanzimat reforms that compromised their independence, e.g. the uprising against Mahmud II in 1831 by Kapetan Gradascevic. Between 1878-1909, the deal with the Hapsburgs left Ottoman-style institutions in Bosnia under Austro-Hungarian control, even though legally Bosnia was still part of the Ottoman state until 1908. After 1909, the Bosniaks (or “Bosnian Muslims”) achieved an autonomous millet-style status, with their links restored to the Sheikh-ul-Islam in Istanbul, even though between 1908 and 1918, Bosnia was legally part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Of course, the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 rendered all such ties to whatever vestigal Ottoman structures remained completely moot. [3]

In any case, after 1878, the sovereign writ of the Sultan in Bosnia was an unexecuted right (nudum jus): imperial prerogatives became merely symbolic in a manner redolent of the later Abbasids when they no longer controlled the more distant provinces. Firstly the khutba in Bosnia would be read out in the caliph’s name and secondly Ottoman currency would remain in circulation there (like the late Abbasid claim to sikka, or to have their name stamped on the coinage of those distant provinces no longer under their control). Thus the Bosniaks were effectively to deal with the Hapsburgs alone. [4]

In the Ottoman state, religious administration came to be intertwined with the state, and within this a complex hierarchy of ulema developed, at the top of which stood the Sheikh-ul-Islam. Originally the mufti of Istanbul, the holder of this post came to be regarded as the most senior Sunni authority by the nineteenth century. However, under the Dual Monarchy, as religious and political authority was separate, the Bosniaks sought a creative institutional solution “in the views of Hanafi jurists regarding the position of Muslims under non-Muslim rule, the Osmanli hierarchy of ulema, practical demands and the interests of new rulers.” [5]

The main change was to keep religious institutions in place but under the formal control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; after 1909, the Bosniaks administered their religious, waqf and educational affairs autonomously. The Sharia courts were, however, largely separate from this arrangement and were considered part of the state judiciary.

The primary interest here lies in the post-Ottoman office of Ra’is-ul-Ulema, for this is more likely to reveal how the Ottomans might have considered the post of Shiekh-ul-Islam of the British Isles than would any quick association with the Sheikh-ul-Islam of the Ottoman caliphate in a spirit of Osmanli nostalgia. Why? The main supposition is a chronological one. The example of Bosnia from the previous decade might have been in the minds of the Ottomans when granting Quilliam his title. It was only later on after the war of 1912-1913 that a more uniform solution to the post-Ottoman status of Balkan Muslims (in Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Romania) suggested itself in the form of national religious administrations headed by chief muftis whose role went beyond the giving of ifta’.

In early Ottoman times, Ra’is-ul-Ulema “was an honorific title (`unwan), not an office.” [6] Later the title was given to military judges in the European part of the caliphate, and over time it came to be divorced from the requirement for scholarly competence and therefore, in loosing prestige, came to be seen as a subordinate role to the Sheikh-ul-Islam. It also came to be associated with Bosnia during this period. After 1882 under the Hapsburgs, the rights and prerogatives of the office came to be fixed, and the Ra’is-ul-Ulema became the highest (and independent) post among the Bosniaks. Baş Mufti or Grand Mufti was now used interchangeably with Ra’is-ul-Ulema.

As was not the case with Albania at the time, the Bosniaks insisted upon the continued authorization of the post of Ra’is-ul-Ulema between 1882 and 1924 by the Sheikh-ul-Islam in Istanbul by a letter of appointment known as a manshur. A manshur, in this instance, is a formal legal document that confirms that a certain person is authorised as Ra’is and who is granted authority to issue similar letters of appointment to subordinate religious officials. These letters of appointment had been issued to the provincial muftis of Bosnia during the period of direct Ottoman control, who were then the highest religious officials in the region.

However, this manshur appears to have been a symbolic formality in the case of the Ra’is. After 1882, any candidate for the post once it had fallen vacant was selected and appointed by the Austrian monarch from a shortlist of three, drawn up by a special electoral body (curia) of Bosnian ulema. Only after the appointment of the Ra’is did the curia request that a manshur be issued by the Sheikh-ul-Islam in Istanbul confirming the new appointee. From 1930 until present times, a special body comprised of national Muslim dignitaries is now charged with issuing the letter of appointment to the Ra’is-ul-Ulema until a legal caliphate is re-established. A similar use of the manshur after a national appointment process for the head Mufti was also adopted by other Balkan Muslim minority groups after 1913.

Does any of this shed much light on the case of Quilliam’s investiture as Sheikh-ul-Islam in 1894? Well it does tell us that in the final years of the Ottoman caliphate, the Ottomans were prepared at least to expend whatever symbolic authority they still possessed to allow Muslim minorities in Europe to organise themselves better institutionally in ways that were inspired by a vision of Muslim minorities according to the jurisprudential principle al-muslim bi-dhimmati l-kafir, or essentially a millet in reverse. Perhaps Quilliam’s role was technically granted through a manshur, and so was thus allowed to read the khutba in the Caliph’s name, to organise and lead his community, to offer it religious guidance and so on as he best saw fit. Clearly the Ra’is-ul-Ulema inherited established religious institutions that had come out of the Ottoman period; Quilliam, however, even if his models of religious institionalisation and authority were Ottoman by inspiration, had to create such facts on the ground from scratch. Furthermore, there is a lack of official and primary evidence of any formal agreement (as has yet to come to light at any rate) between the Sultan and Queen Victoria to formalise the role of Sheikh-ul-Islam in a manner similar to the Ra’is-ul-Ulema. [7] The position of Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles had honorary and symbolic significance but no historical continuity to draw upon — unlike the Ra’is-ul-Ulema — and in the context of the Balkan experience generally, the honorary appointment of the Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles appears to have been a one-off in terms of the Ottoman practice of recognising Muslim minorities outside of its formal control during this period.

The View from Liverpool

Leaving aside the Ottoman view, there is also the separate question of what Quilliam made of the position of Sheikh-ul-Islam, and how he saw his mission and his role. As far as can be ascertained, the main points are as follows:

(i) Authorisation to read the khutba in the name of the caliph Sultan Abdul Hamid, and, as mentioned above, this was an honorary and symbolic act when agreed for lands under which the caliph no longer had jurisdiction, a practice dating back to the late Abbasids. The Liverpool Muslim Institute under Quilliam held services according to the Hanafi School, another indication of Ottoman allegiance, and made prayers for the Sultan as “Head of the Muslim Church” regularly during the English-language prayers held in the evenings. [8] Quilliam’s own description of the post to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool in 1903 reads: “I do not officially represent Turkey in Liverpool, but I do represent the Muslim Faith, and am the Sheikh of the Mussulmans in the British Isles. I do not receive one penny from the Turkish government.” (The Crescent, XXII, No. 565, 11th November 1903, 309.)
(ii) The role included the duty to issue fatwas. In the case of his 1896 ruling on the British invasion of the Sudan, Quilliam uses the terms “Fetva”, “proclamation” and “declaration” interchangeably. [9] Quilliam saw himself as competent to give fatwas: he was fluent in several languages, including Arabic and Persian, had studied Islam in Morocco for two years and in 1893 the Sultan of Morocco had “conferred on him an honorary `alimiyya (of Fez). The title came accompanied by a robe and a turban.” [10]
(iii) The role included the mission to preach Islam. Quilliam kept meticulous records of the number of converts and worked through several channels — like the temperance movement, which was strong in Liverpool, the Unitarians and other such avenues — to spread Islam in what was often a hostile environment. His real success in this regard was in Liverpool itself and less so outside of it.
(iv) The role included the duty to speak out on the current affairs of the day but from a sense of religious conviction, this much is clear from Quilliam’s commentary on his own “Fetva” of 1896, allowing for the essential proviso that he did not separate politics from the purview of religion. [11]
(v) The role was non-stipendiary. [12]
(vi) The role was an office that would be passed on to a successor. [13]

It seems evident enough then that Quilliam did see the honorary title of Sheikh-ul-Islam as a serious means by which to found Islam in Britain and to create a permanent office. This non-stipendiary office, as Quilliam saw it, included the duties of legal guidance, preaching and the mobilisation of the Muslim diaspora in support of the Ottoman caliph. In that sense the Ottomans not only bestowed Quilliam with symbolic legitimacy but with a model of religious institutionalisation in Britain and a pan-Islamism [14] defined by a last-ditch defence of the caliphate in its final years.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank the following for their helpful comments and assistance: Batool Al-Toma, Humeyra Ceylan, Prof. Ron Geaves, Muhammad Akram Khan-Cheema, Dr H. A. Hellyer, Daoud Rosser-Owen, Dr Muhammad Isa Waley and Dr T. J. Winter. Special thanks go to Dr Yaqub Zaki who most generously lent me a draft version of Chapter 23, “The Apostle of Merseyside”, from his forthcoming work, The Shadow of the Cresent: Islam in Britain, 1770-1918, which has been essential in casting some light on this obscure issue. All errors of fact or judgement are of course my own.

Notes

[1] Yaqub Zaki, The Shadow of the Crescent: Islam in Britain, 1770-1918, Ch. 23, forthcoming. Nineteen hundred and ten is four years earlier than the previous estimate of 1914, see my earlier blog entry here.

[2] Personal email communication from Dr T. J. Winter, 28th January 2008.

[3] Xavier Bougarel, “From Young Muslims to Party of Democratic Action: The Emergence of a Pan-Islamist Trend in Bosnia-Herzegovina”, Islamic Studies (Islamabad), 36/2, 3 (1997), 533-549; Fikret Karčić, The Bosniaks and the Challenges of Modernity: Late Ottoman and Hapsburg Times (Sarajevo: El-Kalem, 1991), 111.

[4] Fikret Karčić, The Bosniaks, 81.

[5] Fikret Karčić, “The Office of Ra’is al-`Ulama’ Among the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims)”, Intellectual Discourse, 5/2 (1997), 109-120, citation at 110.

[6] Fikret Karčić, “The Office”, 111.

[7] The website of the Association for British Muslims argues for this official recongition:

“The ABM is the oldest extant organisation of British Muslims. Founded originally in Liverpool in 1889 as The English Islamic Association by HE Shaykhu-l Islam Abdullah Quilliam Bey, Shaykhu-l Islam of the British Isles by appointment of the Caliph, HIM Sultan Abdul Hamid II, jannat makan, (which appointment was endorsed by the Queen-Empress, HM Queen Victoria, and also by HE the Emir of Morocco, HM the King of Afghanistan, and HIM the Qajar Shah of Iran). The organisation was revived in London’s Notting Hill in 1927 as The Western Islamic Association, with HE Khalid Sheldrake, sometime Emir of Kashgar, Eastern Turkestan, as Amir. It was reconstituted at the London Central Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre in Regent’s Park in 1974 as The Association Of British Muslims with Imam Daoud Rosser-Owen as Amir, and again in 1978 as The Association For British Muslims with Imam Hajji Abdul Rasjid Skinner as Amir. [my italics]” Available online at: http://members.tripod.com/~british_muslims_assn/contents.html, accessed 4th February 2008.

In a conversation in late January 2008, Sheikh Daoud Rosser-Owen mentioned that the late Professor Safa al-Khulusi (1917-1995) had been his source for this information. However, the reference is not a literary one: in the first edition of Islam: Our Choice (Woking, Surrey: Woking Muslim Mission & Literary Trust, 1961), the first unabridged edition, edited by Professor Khulusi, there is no separate entry for either Quilliam or under his pseudonym of Professor Haroun Mustafa Leon, and thus no light is shed on the matter at all. Quilliam did, however, write the entry on the life of Marmaduke Pickthall, and oddly a photograph of Prof. Leon (102) is included as part of the entry, unrecognisable here as the Sheikh-ul-Islam and looking appropriately, given his pseudonym, more like a well-decorated continental professor, complete with handlebar moustache. The second version of Islam: Our Choice (Karachi: Begum Aisha Bawany Waqf, 1961), abridged by Ebrahim Ahmad Bawany, does have an entry on Leon (18-21), but not on Quilliam, and there is certainly no mention of the Sheikh-ul-Islam, let alone Queen Victoria, but only the vague mention of receiving “many decorations from Sultan Abdul Hamid Khan , the late Shah, and the Emperor of Austria” (21).

[8] Yaqub Zaki, Shadow, Ch. 23, catalogues several architectural allusions and gifted features (from the Sultan himself) of the Liverpool Muslim Institute that emphasized the Ottoman connection, the source of Quilliam’s status as Sheikh-ul-Islam. Solid silver candelabras from the Sultan flanked the mihrab (Zaki, Shadow, citing The Crescent, XI (1898), 391); he also donated eight calligraphic roundels. There was also a gilt Osmanli crescent and star on the facade of the Institute, a motif repeated in the main lecture hall. Bunting, including the Ottoman flag, was put out annually for the mawlid al-Nabi, the two Eids and the Sultan’s birthday.

[9] Abdullah Quilliam, “The Union of Islam”, The Islamic World, IV, 39, July 1896, 84-90; “proclamation” (86), “declaration” (87) and “Fetva” (88) are used respectively to describe the same document.

[10] Yaqub Zaki, Shadow, Ch. 23.

[11] Quilliam, “Union”, 89:

“… and only one [Indian Muslim critic] … advised me ‘to leave politics alone and confine myself simply to preaching Islam.’ This is not and has never been a question of politics with me. It is purely and solely a question of religion. I decline to stand dumb and see Muslim set against Muslim in fratricidal strife, embroiled in a quarrel for which there is no cause, at the bidding of any Giaour [misbeliever] or nation of Giaours. The person who would cowardly hold his peace on such an occasion I regard as unworthy of the name of a man and a True-Believer. I believe in the complete union of Islam, and of all Muslim peoples; for this I pray, for this I work, and this I believe will yet be accomplished. In England we enjoy the blessed privilege of a free press, with liberty to express our thoughts in a reasonable way, and this advantageous position can be used for the purpose of promoting the entire re-union of Muslim peoples.”

As the work of Eric Germain indicates, Quilliam used Liverpool as the hub of a transnational network linking disaporic Indian Muslim communities with supporters in British India that promoted pan-Islamism and the Caliphate and heavily criticised British and European imperial action against the independent Muslim states, see Germain’s ‘Southern Hemisphere Diasporic Communities in the Building of International Muslim Public Opinion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27/1, 2007, 126-138.

[12] The Crescent, XXII, No. 565, 11th November 1903, 309, with thanks to Yaqub Zaki for forwarding this reference to me which comes in the context of an account of a public debate in Liverpool about the Macedonian question.

[13] Quilliam groomed one of his sons, Ahmed, as his successor, taking him to Istanbul on a number of occassions. He also had plans to build a grand jami` mosque in Liverpool which came to naught due to a lack of financial support from the caliph. In the first and grander version of the planned mosque, Yaqub Zaki notes the inclusion of a detached Turkish Ottoman-style türbe (tomb) for Quilliam: “…it is intended to have a tomb on the terraced courtyard in front of the projected Mosque for the last resting-place of the mortal remains of Shiekh W.H. Abdullah Quillliam, the first Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles, and founder of Islam in this country, a dome will be built in connection with the mosque.” (Yaqub, Shadow, Ch. 23, citing The Islamic World, III, no. 36, Apr. 1896, 367.) Zaki notes too that the proposed tomb was large enough to hold his progeny and indeed successors to the office of Sheikh-ul-Islam. One of the final notices (The Crescent, 13th May 1908, 313) informs us that Quilliam and his son were “summoned” to the Sultan’s private residence at Yildiz and could expect a warm welcome and further honours, even as “the Sultan’s first secretary”. This optimism would shortly prove to be unfounded.

[14] Liverpool, as the cosmopolitan imperial entrepôt, the gateway for trade with Eygpt and India, handling forty per cent of worldwide maritime trade, was an amenable milieu for pan-Islamism and as strange a phenomenon as an English Muslim community. See Diane Robinson-Dunne, “Lascar Sailors and English Converts: The Imperial Port and Islam in late 19th-Century England”, Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges. 12-15 Feb. 2003. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., 29 Jan. 2008 <http://www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/seascapes/dunn.html>. Quilliam echoes this view of Liverpool is his 1896 speech on “The Union of Islam”, 89-90, that:

“The True-Believers are scattered all over the world, in the ice-bound land of the white Czar, as well as under the burning sun at the Equator. In the Islands of the West Indies and in British Guiana, in the sandy desserts of Western Australia or the fertile valley of the Nile, the Negro, the Arab, the Indian, the warlike African, brave Turk, polite Persian, and the Moor all join in the Fatheha and turn their face Meccawards five times each twenty four hours. From Liverpool our steamers and trading vessels journey to each part of the world, and here within the walls of this Institution who knows but that the scattered cords may not be able to be gathered together and woven into a strong rope, Al-Hablul-mateen, of fraternal union.

“There’s a light about to glow,
There’s a fount about to flow,
There’s a midnight blackness changing into grey:
Men of thought and men of action clear the way.”

This is no idle dream on my part; it is a feasible project, which only requires unity of purpose and effort on the part of True Muslims to be made an accomplished effort. Here in Liverpool, brethren, let us do our part to bring about this glorious consumation of our hopes. ‘Tis true that it is not in mortals to command success, but all can work to deserve it (applause).”

According to officialdom, 37% of working Muslim men are employed in distribution, hotel and the restaurant trades (and one in ten work as taxi drivers) — much more than any other group. What are the implications of such bare statistics, which are hardly ever the matter of sustained reflection among British Muslims? The key issues here are anti-social hours, stressful conditions, poor pay and overly-competitive and saturated markets (and saturated fats).

Hasan, originally from Istanbul, helps to run a takeaway pizza place near De Monfort University in Leicester. He works six days a week from 4pm to 4am or 72 hours a week. Over Christmas, he told me that he had a week off. I asked him if he was going to Turkey to see family and friends and he told me he would take the chance to catch up on lost sleep as he was exhausted. Unsurprisingly, Hasan finds the work dull and repetitive: “each day is different but the work stays the same”. As the evening wears on, the customers tend to be drunker and more abusive. Once I saw him get sworn at gratuitously for no fault of his own and on this occasion he stood up to the abuse. But immediately afterwards he was concerned that he had been rude to do so, and, doubtlessly, there is always the pressure in the background not to lose future custom. Thus the need for personal dignity gets squashed in a competitive business.

Hasan is unmarried but one can imagine how frustrating it would be for a husband and father to be asleep during the day and out of the house all evening and thus largely miss his children growing up. The adverse impact on a good quality of family life seems clear enough. How are spouses and offspring to cope with a virtually absent father? This is a common factor in too many Muslim households.

Then there is huge competition for not much business. On my local high street, there are a high-dozen kebab shops, five “Dallas Chicken”-style joints and a few pizza places - all run by Muslims. Only a few do well and the rest are just ticking over. How many Indian restaurants can you walk past on a weekday evening and see one lonely couple having a curry? How many Muslim taxi drivers wait over half an hour to pick up a ride? In Leicester the Muslim taxi drivers in their black hansom cabs snake back from the train station to the Central Mosque two hundred metres down the road, waiting forlornly for their fares. And then how many sons are going into the family trade with not much chance of better prospects?

Over the last ten years, we’ve had an explosion of chillified halal fried chicken outlets - Dixy Chicken, Dallas Chicken, Maryland Chicken, New Jersey Chicken, Chicken Cottage, Southern Fried Chicken, Halal Fried Chicken, Perfect Fried Chicken etc. The combinations of battery chicken, red chilli powder, breadcrumbs and American federal states seem endless. Even if KFC have had to bring out a zinger burger, behind this success story is the same tale of job insecurity and market saturation. Attempts at creating a franchise model in the halal fried chicken business has failed to consolidate this sector.

Back in 2003, Taflan Dikec set up the National Association of Kebab Shops which aimed to promote a better image of the donner kebab. However it doesn’t seem to have lasted very long: the website records that there were only ever two issues of the Association’s newsletter, Kebab and Fried Chicken. One would have hoped however for something other than rebranding a business sector. Tackling the suspect environmental and diet-unfriendly credentials of the donner or the fried battery-farm chicken as well as the low pay and poor conditions for those working in the industry is more urgent.

There is also, perhaps, the bolstering of cynical attitudes in having to do Friday and Saturday nights week in and week out, and seeing the excesses of binge drinking culture, whether as doctors in A&E, taxi drivers outside the clubs or in the takeaways. This cynicism remains in check in large part by Muslim traditions of hospitality and service, yet one cannot but help think that seeing the sharp end of weekend hedonism does little to encourage a rounded “intercultural understanding”, to employ the current jargon.

It is time to address seriously the social and economic impact of these “takeaway lives”, with their profound implications for family life, social cohesion and economic underdevelopment. Without looking at ways to diversify the business sector or avenues for reskilling and encouraging new kinds of Muslim entrepreneurship it is difficult to see how the general social and economic profile of the community can be improved.

Yahya Birt is Commissioning Editor at Kube Publishing and he blogs at www.yahyabirt.com.

This article originally appeared in Emel Magazine, February 2008, Issue No. 41.

The choice of Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932), ennobled as the Sheikh of Islam of the British Isles in 1894 by the Ottoman caliph and by the Emir of Afghanistan, as a symbolic flag-bearer for British Islam is less straightforward than it might appear. One recent appropriation of his legacy presents him as a kind of proto-Brownite patriot, a social entrepreneur working in the third sector (and of course he did great social works like setting up a school, an orphanage and many other institutions in building up his unique community in Liverpool at the end of the nineteenth century), larded with Brownite-style explicit invocations of Britishness. Seen by the new eponymous foundation as a “forebearer” for British Islam, (a retrieval that should not be “blurred” by the complications of the great postwar migrations from the Commonwealth,) Quilliam’s name is invoked “to help foster a genuine British Islam, native to these islands, free from the bitter politics of the Arab and Muslim world”.

But even a cursory glance at Quilliam’s life immediately reveals a more complicated personality than the simpler invocations of British Muslim patriotism will allow.

For instance, Quilliam’s community called the adhan out aloud, which would surely have fallen foul of the Bishop of Rochester, who is not a fan of the amplified call to prayer. We can hear the echoes of the Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali in the complaint of the Liverpool Review of 1891:

To hear the muezzin here it is most incongruous, unusual, silly and unwelcome, and the man who stands howling on the first floor of a balcony in such a fashion is certain to collect a ribald crowd, anxious to offer a copper or two to go into the next street, or even ready to respond to his invitation with something more than jeers. [1]

Quilliam lived during the high noon of European colonialism, and, in particular, of the British Empire. In 1900, eleven (mostly) European empires had 160 million Muslim subjects (or 80% of the umma); the British Empire itself had 100 million Muslims stretching from northern Ghana to Kelantan in SE Asia (so half of all Muslims were subjects of the Crown). By contrast, the independent Muslim states — the Ottoman Empire, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, Morocco and Afghanistan — had a mere 41 million Muslims. [2] After 1870, the European denial of “progress” in Muslim terms (for “progress” could only truly be European in character) fed the growth of the Salafiyya movement, which advocated a return to the ways of the earliest generations of Islam. In some ways, Salafiyya was an analogue of nineteenth-century European classicism, and it tended, at this time, towards nationalism and was critical of what it saw as Ottoman despotism. This general pessimism towards the Ottoman Empire grew with the Balkan Crisis of the 1870s and the loss of Tunisia to the French and Egypt to the British in the 1880s, and much Muslim public opinion turned against it. The idea of the sultanate was still promoted in the independent Muslims states while stressing the religious dimensions of the role as amir al-mu’minin (in some ways close to the European idea of ‘defender of the faith’), while British royalty was also known to invoke caliphal authority at the same time. But generally, Muslim political elites began to detach the idea of sovereignty from the sultan (or empire), and to invest it in the nation-state, expressed in the constitutional movements of the early twentieth century.

Quilliam, based in the colonial metropole, was seen to be an anti-imperial agitator. He was unashamedly pro-Ottoman and a supporter of the Emirate of Afghanistan, a fact naturally reflected in the string of scholarly, religious and diplomatic titles and honours he had acquired by 1908:

His Excellency Abdullah Quilliam Bey Effendi, Faziletlu Hazratlaree, B.A., F.G.S., LL.D., Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles and Dominions, Turkish Consul and Persian Vice-Consul [3]

He opened the pages of his publications to George Rule, the Honourary Ottoman Consul in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and to Enver Bey, the Ottoman Consul in Liverpool. His interventions on foreign policy were generally regarded as “un-British” by the press of the day. He questioned the virtue of Muslim imperial subjects fighting on behalf of the Empire against their fellow brethren in the Sudan (see the original text below). He defended the Ottomans from criticisms he regarded as unbalanced or unfair over the Armenian uprisings in 1895. And as British foreign policy began to move away from support of the Ottomans at the beginning of the twentieth century, Quilliam was seen to be out of step.

After Quilliam left Britain in 1908 for Istanbul, it would have been impossible for him to return to Britain as Sheikh-ul-Islam particularly during the First World War (when the Turks sided with Germany). Yet there is some evidence that he did return under the pseudonym of H. Mustapha Leon or Henri M. Leon, some dating the return as early as December 1914 while others place it after the war in 1922. [4] Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, the famous translator of the Qur’an, before and after his conversion to Islam in 1917, was seen as “a security risk” in official circles. [5] Indeed, in this whole period, according to the leading historian of British Islam,

British Muslims were greatly affected by the First World War. Turkey’s involvement on the side of Germany caused immediate doubts about the loyalties of all classes of Muslims within the empire, which reinforced perceptions that Muslims were essentially “un-British”. [6]

How contemporary that predicament sounds! And it indicates that Quilliam’s experiences are more poignantly pertinent a hundred years later than hasty patriotic appropriations would crudely suggest.

From Liverpool, Quilliam worked alongside Joosub Moulvi Hamid Gool of Cape Town and Hassan Musa Khan of Perth to unite together the diasporic Indian Muslim communities in places as far afield as Australia and South Africa, on the basis of a strong rhetoric of international brotherhood mobilised in support of the Caliphate. His strongest support came from the NW part of the British Raj in Gujrat, the Punjab and the NW Frontier Province, and particularly from the Afghans. However, the elite of the Indian Muslim diaspora couched their pan-Islamism in Anglophilia, claiming their Britishness as they sought to claim their equal status and worth. (And it is the Anglophilia rather than the context or the substance that seems of utility to hasty appropriators.)

In the high tide of Empire, Quilliam wrote his subversive pan-Islamist tracts in favour of defensive jihad, ummatic solidarity and the support and defence of the beleaguered caliphate. At least in the mid-1890s, he seemed to be a staunch Islamist, to use the current terminology, and thus seems an unlikely candidate for the latest fashion in Britslam-makeovers.

Despite the context, Quilliam was certainly unabashed and unapologetic about his loyalties. Here, in the two texts from 1896, he calls upon Muslims not to fight on behalf of the British Empire against fellow Muslims, and argues that supporting the caliphate is the mark of the mu’min (believer) and the only guarantor of Muslim unity. Given the current climate, it seems more than likely that his writing of the period would have fallen foul of current anti-terrorism laws on incitement and propagandising. The Daily Mail might even have seen him as one of those “preachers of hate”!

*****

Text One: Quilliam on Jihad

In the name of God, Most Compassionate, Most Merciful!

Peace be to all True-Believers to whom this shall come!

Know ye, O Muslims, that the British Government has decided to commence military and warlike operations against the Muslims of the Soudan, who have taken up arms to defend their country and their faith. And it is in contemplation to employ Muslim soldiers to fight against these Muslims of the Soudan.

For any True Believer to take up arms and fight against another Muslim is contrary to the Shariat, and against the law of God and his holy prophet.

I warn every True-Believer that if he gives the slightest assistance in this projected expedition against the Muslims of the Soudan, even to the extent of carrying a parcel, or giving a bite of bread to eat or a drink of water to any person taking part in the expedition against these Muslims that he thereby helps the Giaour against the Muslim, and his name will be unworthy to be continued upon the roll of the faithful.

Signed at the Mosque in Liverpool, England, this 10th day of Shawwal, 1313 (which Christians erroneously in their ignorance call the 24th day of March, 1896),

W.H. ABDULLAH QUILLIAM, Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles.

[Source: The Crescent, March 25th 1896, Vol. VII, No. 167, p. 617; original punctuation and spelling retained.]

*****

Text Two: Quilliam on the Caliphate

[681] In the name of God, Most Compassionate, Most Merciful!

Peace be to all the faithful everywhere!

“O True-Believers, fear God with His true fear; and die not unless ye also be True-Believers. And cleave all of you unto the covenant of God, and depart not from it; and remember the favour of God towards you.” Sura 3, “The Family of Imran,” Ayat, 103

All praise be to God Who, in His unlimited goodness, has favoured us with the gift of the True religion of Islam, and Who has ordered the brethren to be united, and declared this to be His law in the before-quoted Ayat of the Holy and Imperishable Koran!

Among Muslims none should be known as Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Ajem, Afghans, Indians or English. They are all Muslims, and verily the True-Believers are brethren. Islam is erected on the Unity of God, the unity of His religion, and the unity of the Muslims. History demonstrates that the True-Believers were never defeated while they remained united, but only when disunion crept into their ranks.

At the present time, union is more than ever necessary among Muslims. The Christian powers are preparing a new crusade in order to shatter the Muslim powers, under the pretext that they desire to civilise the world.

This is nothing but hypocrisy, but armed as they are with the resources of Western civilisation it will be impossible to resist them unless the Muslims stand united in one solid phalanx.

O Muslims, do not be deceived by this hypocrisy. Unite yourselves as one man. Let us no longer be separated. The rendevous of Islam is under the shadow of the Khalifate. The Khebla of the True-Believer who desires happiness for himself and prosperity to Islam is the holy seat of the Khalifate.

It is with the deepest regret that we see [682] some persons seeking to disseminate disunion among Muslims by publications issued in Egypt, Paris and London. “Verily, they are in a manifest error.”

If their object – as they allege it – be the welfare of Islam, then let them reconsider their action and they will perceive that instead of bringing a blessing to Islam their actions will have a contrary effect, and only further disseminate disunion where it is – alas that it should be said – only too apparent.

We fraternally invite these brethren to return their allegiance, and call them to the sacred name of Islam to re-unite with the Faithful.

Muslims all! Arsh is under the standard of the Khalifate. Let us unite there, one and all, and at once!

Given at the Mosque at Liverpool, this 5th day of Dhulkada, 1313, which Christians in their error call the 20th day of April, 1896

W.H. ABDULLAH QUILLIAM, Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles.

[Source: The Crescent, Vol. VII, No. 171, April 22nd 1896, pp. 681-682, original punctuation and spelling retained, pagination indicated in square brackets in the text.]

*****

Far from being “free” of the “bitter politics” of the Muslim world, Quilliam seemed fully engaged, working not only against the British Empire but also the tide of opinion in the Muslim world that had become anti-Ottoman, rallying the Muslims of the diaspora to a defiant defence of the caliphate. In a way, his mixture of local public service and global political concern makes Quilliam an oddly resonant figure for young British Muslims today — a marionette for our anachronistic fears and hopes.

Notes

[1] H. Ansari, The Infidel Within (London: Hurst, 2004), 83.
[2] R. Schulze, A Modern History of the Islamic World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 25.
[3] E. Germain, ‘Southern Hemisphere Diasporic Communities in the Building of International Muslim Public Opinion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27/1, 2007, 126-138, citation at 130, n. 30.
[4] Germain, 134, notes an attestation to 1922, but there is the Islamic Review, January 1915, pp. 4-7, that records a speech by Prof. H. Mustafa Leon in London in December 1914, which was in fact the inaugural address to the newly-formd British Muslim Society, based in London. The speech is reproduced here online: http://www.wokingmuslim.org/work/bm-soc1.htm. Quilliam’s vision for the new Society sounds very similar to how he had envisaged the role of the Liverpool Muslim Institute in the previous decade: “The Society will, I trust, keep us in touch with each, though separated by miles of land; bind us together into one great brotherhood; help us along the Islamic pathway; and strengthen each and all of us to play our part in the battle of life and the defence and exposition of those eternal principles of human conduct and Islamic religion and doctrine for which we are fighting. It. will, I hope, also serve to keep us in touch with the other parts of our world-wide brotherhood. Union is strength. May it be a uniting link not only between every British Muslim but between us and the Muslims everywhere, consolidating and binding the whole into one unbroken and unbreakable chain, stretching through the Orient and Occident, Africa, and the South and North American States. We have now planted the banner of Islam in the heart of the British Empire, its silken folds are fluttering on the breeze, good and noble men and true and gentle women are rallying beneath it. Let us keep it flying on the winds unstained, untarnished, as spotless as when it was first unfurled on Arabia’s burning sands over fourteen hundreds years ago.”

[5] P. Clarke, Marmaduke Pickthall (London: Quartet, 1986), 31.
[6] H. Ansari, 89.