Victorian Muslim

After formally announcing his conversion to Islam in the late 1880s, the Liverpool lawyer William Henry Abdullah Quilliam publicly propagated his new faith and established the first community of Muslim converts in Victorian Britain. Despite decades of relative obscurity following his death, with the resurgence of interest in Muslim heritage in the West since 9/11 Quilliam has achieved iconic status in Britain and beyond as a pivotal figure in the history of Western Islam and Muslim-Christian relations. In this timely book, leading experts of the religion, history and politics of Islam offer new perspectives and shed fresh light on Quilliam's life and work. Through a series of original essays, the authors critically examine Quilliam's influences, philosophy and outlook, the significance of his work for Islam, his position in the Muslim world and his legacy. Collectively, the authors ask pertinent questions about how conversion to Islam was viewed and received historically, and how a zealous convert like Quilliam negotiated his religious and national identities and sought to indigenise Islam in a non-Muslim country.

This is the first full biography of Abdullah Quilliam (1856–1932), the most significant Muslim personality in nineteenth century Britain. Uniquely ennobled as the Sheikh of Islam of the British Isles by the Ottoman caliph Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1893, Quilliam created a remarkable Muslim community in Victorian Liverpool, which included a substantial number of converts. Ron Geaves examines Quilliam's teachings and considers his legacy for Muslims today. Ron Geaves is professor of the comparative study of religion at Liverpool Hope University and has contributed substantially to the study of British Islam, religion in South Asia, and fieldwork in religious studies.

How did the Victorians perceive Muslims in the British Empire and beyond? How were these perceptions propagated by historians and scholars, poets, dramatists and fiction writers of the period? For the first time, Shahin Kuli Khan Khattak brings to life Victorian Britain's conceptions and misconceptions of the Muslim World using a thorough investigation of varied cultural sources of the period. She discovers the prevailing representation of Muslims and Islam in the two major spheres of British influence - India and the Ottoman Empire - was reinforced by reoccurring themes: through literature and entertainment the public saw 'the Mahomedan' as the 'noble savage', a perception reinforced through travel writing and fiction of the 'exotic east' and the 'Arabian Nights'. "Islam and the Victorians" will be an important contribution to understanding the apprehensions and misapprehensions about Islam in the nineteenth century, providing a fascinating historical backdrop to many of today's concerns.

Jamie Gilham collates the work of leading and emerging scholars of Islam in Britain, Christian-Muslim relations and Victorian Studies to offer fresh perspectives on Islam and Muslims in Victorian Britain. The contributors reveal 19th-century attitudes and beliefs about Islam and Muslims to demonstrate the plurality of approaches and representations of Islam in Britain's past. Also bringing to life the stories and voices of early Muslim settlers and converts to Islam, this book examines the lived experience of Muslims in the Victorian period. Sources include political and academic writings, literature, travelogues, the press and other forms of popular culture. Intersectional themes include religion and religiosity, 'race' and ethnicity, gender, class, citizenship, empire and imperialism, and prejudice, discrimination and resilience.

Conflicts and controversies at home and abroad have led Americans to focus on Islam more than ever before. In addition, more and more of their neighbors, colleagues, and friends are Muslims. While much has been written about contemporary American Islam and pioneering studies have appeared on Muslim slaves in the antebellum period, comparatively little is known about Islam in Victorian America. This biography of Alexander Russell Webb, one of the earliest American Muslims to achieve public renown, seeks to fill this gap. Webb was a central figure of American Islam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A native of the Hudson Valley, he was a journalist, editor, and civil servant. Raised a Presbyterian, Webb early on began to cultivate an interest in other religions and became particularly fascinated by Islam. While serving as U.S. consul to the Philippines in 1887, he took a greater interest in the faith and embraced it in 1888, one of the first Americans known to have done so. Within a few years, he began corresponding with important Muslims in India. Webb became an enthusiastic propagator of the faith, founding the first Islamic institution in the United States: the American Mission. He wrote numerous books intended to introduce Islam to Americans, started the first Islamic press in the United States, published a journal entitled The Moslem World, and served as the representative of Islam at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. In 1901, he was appointed Honorary Turkish Consul General in New York and was invited to Turkey, where he received two Ottoman medals of merits. In this first-ever biography of Webb, Umar F. Abd-Allah examines Webb's life and uses it as a window through which to explore the early history of Islam in America. Except for his adopted faith, every aspect of Webb's life was, as Abd-Allah shows, quintessentially characteristic of his place and time. It was because he was so typically American that he was able to serve as Islam's ambassador to America (and vice versa). As America's Muslim community grows and becomes more visible, Webb's life and the virtues he championed - pluralism, liberalism, universal humanity, and a sense of civic and political responsibility - exemplify what it means to be an American Muslim.

ISLAM IN VICTORIAN LIVERPOOL is a unique eyewitness account dating from 1895 of Britain’s first mosque community by an Ottoman intellectual. It not only brings to life the figure of Abdullah Quilliam (1856–1932), the founder and president of the Liverpool Muslim Institute, but the converts who make up its community and their daily lives and religious practices. The author sets out to find the truth about Liverpool’s Muslims — who had become famous all over the Muslim world. The book caused great controversy among Liverpool’s Muslims and was later banned by the Ottomans. The history of Abdullah Quilliam’s activities as the leader of Liverpool Muslim Institute from 1887 to World War One provides a rich laboratory to understand the formative period of modern Islamic thought and the long-lasting geopolitical legacies of the Ottoman and British imperial relationship in shaping contemporary Muslim political identities. Scholars have been fascinated by the extraordinary success of Liverpool’s convert Muslim community and Quilliam's personal charisma in establishing transnational intellectual links with Muslims across the world, the support they received from Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid, and the unprecedented impact they had on contesting the racialization of Islam in the metropole of the British Empire. By translating and publishing an Ottoman-Egyptian intellectual’s critique of this community, Birt, Macnamara and Maksudoğlu shed new light and insight on the global politics of pan-Islamic thought in the high age of imperialism. With great attention to details of personalities, events and conflicts within and around the small Liverpool Muslim Institute, this book provides an excellent example of microhistory that informs, challenges and revises our big narratives of caliphate diplomacy, pan-Islamic solidarity and imperial politics. This annotated translation of Yusuf Samih Asmay’s critical account of “Islam in Victorian Liverpool” is presented with an authoritative scholarly introduction, and should be a required primary text on both graduate and undergraduate courses on imperial Muslim thought and politics.

A timely reconsideration of the life and times of one of the West's most prominent Muslim converts.

After formally announcing his conversion to Islam in the late 1880s, the Liverpool lawyer William Henry Abdullah Quilliam publicly propagated his new faith and established the first community of Muslim converts in Victorian Britain. Despite decades of relative obscurity following his death, with the resurgence of interest in Muslim heritage in the West since 9/11 Quilliam has achieved iconic status in Britain and beyond as a pivotal figure in the history of Western Islam and Muslim-Christian relations. In this timely book, leading experts of the religion, history and politics of Islam offer new perspectives and shed fresh light on Quilliam's life and work. Through a series of original essays, the authors critically examine Quilliam's influences, philosophy and outlook, the significance of his work for Islam, his position in the Muslim world and his legacy. Collectively, the authors ask pertinent questions about how conversion to Islam was viewed and received historically, and how a zealous convert like Quilliam negotiated his religious and national identities and sought to indigenise Islam in a non-Muslim country.