European Muslim Network

The 2001 census was the first one in recent times to include a question on religious affiliation. It showed that Muslims number: 1,591,000, or 2.7% of the UK population.

• England & Wales: 1,546,626
• Scotland: 42,557
• Northern Ireland: 1,943
• There are 411,415 Muslim households in UK
• Over 50% of Muslims live in the Greater London area

Ethnic origin:

Ethnicity in England and Wales

King Offa of Mercia (757 – 796)

Muslims first arrived on the British Isles as explorers and traders. By 772, Umayyads were ruling Spain and had extended their rule to within sixty miles of Paris. Charlemagne and King Offa entered into diplomatic relations with the Abbassid ruler Haroon Ar-Rashid. King Offa of Mercia (757 – 796), a powerful Anglo-Saxon king, built a huge earthwork, Offa’s Dyke, 120 miles from north to south dividing Wales and Mercia. He also minted the first gold coin in Britain. The coin or mancus, has the inscription of the declaration of faith of Islam (There is no god but Allah) in Arabic. Scholars speculate as to the coin’s purpose, theories include trade, diplomacy, a protest to Pope and even acceptance of Islam.

The Ballycottin Cross (900)

The Ballycottin cross, possibly an ecclesiastical artefact although peculiar in its content, was found at Ballycottin on the Southern coast of Ireland and is dated around the 9th century. This bronze equal four-armed cross is housed in the British Museum. Like Offa’s Islamic coin it also bears an Arabic inscription. At the centre of the cross set in a glass bead in Kufic Arabic script is the phrase ‘Bismillah’ (In the name of Allah). It is one of many Islamic style artefacts found from this period and is further evidence of Islam’s early interaction with Britain.

Robert of St. Albans (1185)

History records on many occasions throughout the hostilities between Christians and Muslims that religious dialogue was present. The great Muslim leader Salahuddin Ayyubi during discourses with his Christian counterparts spoke to them of the beauties of Islam. Salahuddin’s moral character fascinated some of the crusaders who were so much influenced by him that many of them did indeed accept Islam. Muslim compassion towards Christian captives resulted in thousands of conversions to Islam. Such is the case of an English knight known as Robert of St. Albans, a Knight Templar who traveled on a crusade to Jerusalem and then in 1185 embraced Islam.

King John (1167-1213)

King John was the younger brother of King Richard ‘The Lion heart’. Although John submitted his crown and country to Rome, it is presumed that this was a tactical move to invite support of the Church for John’s fight with the land barons of England. After finding no clear friend in Pope Innocent III and as a result of many quarrels, John was finally excommunicated. Matthew Paris, a contemporary monk, gives details of an emissary sent by King John in 1213 to the North African Amir, Mohammed An-Nasir. Arab chronicles imply several communications between King John and An Nasir. The second embassy was instructed to tell the Amir that John would ‘voluntarily give up to him (the Amir) himself and his kingdom; and if he pleased, would not hold as tributary from his; and that he would also abandon the Christian faith, which he considered false, and would faithfully adhere to the Islam of Mohammed’! He also vowed his support to the Amir’s in his final assault to conquer the remainder of Spain from the King of Aragon. After much thought and contemplation, the Amir declined John’s offer of any alliance with Islam.

Travellers and Traders

During the reign of Elizabeth I there were considerably more Englishmen living in North Africa than in all the nascent North American colonies: 5,000 English converts were resident in Algiers alone. British travellers in the East regularly brought back tales of their compatriots who had ‘crossed over’ or ‘turned Turk’ (an Elizabethan misnomer for conversion) and were now prospering in Ottoman service. By the end of the 17th century trade with Turkey accounted for one quarter of all England’s overseas commercial activity – the ambassador Sir Thomas Shirley warned that ‘conversation with infidelles doeth mutch corrupte’, in 1606, even the British consul in Egypt, Benjamin Bishop, converted and promptly disappeared from public records.

Dr Henry Stubbe (1632-1676)

Dr Henry Stubbe was the first European Christian to write favourably of Islam. His biographer Anthony Wood described him as ‘the most noted person of his age that these late times have produced.’ He was also a scholar, who had mastered Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and was fully conversant with the new critical scholarship on the Bible. Putting all these gifts together, he wrote a book, An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, and a Vindication of him and his Religion from the Calumnies of the Christians. The book was never published but at least six manuscripts were circulated in a more or less clandestine fashion. No fewer than three of them were preserved in the private library of the Revd John Disney, who at the beginning of the 19th century shocked the established church by publicly converting to Unitarianism. Dr Stubbe died in 1676, after being accused of heresy, and spending some time in prison.

British India

The British East India Company, which was formed in 1600, wanted to cash in on the profitable spice trade of the East. But competition from the Dutch drove the company to India, which was ruled by the Mughals. British control of India, through trade, conquest and colonization, resulted in a gradual migration of many classes of Indians to Britain, including servants, sailors, students and civil servants. Many young British men went to India as employees of the Company in search of fortune. They returned to Britain as a new class of rich men, the ‘Nabobs’, and brought their Indian servants with them.

Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1877. In 1887 several Indian servants and their wives joined the royal household. Abdul Karim, the munshi (teacher), was the Queen’s favourite. He later became her secretary. The Queen took lessons in Hindustani from him and encouraged ladies at court to do the same. Abdul Karim received the title of ‘Companion of the Indian Empire’. All this attention given to an Indian servant horrified the court and, after Queen Victoria’s death, Abdul Karim was sent back to India.

Lascars

Between 1830 and 1903 some forty thousand foreign seamen sailed with British war and merchant ships, most spending some time in British ports, either in transit or discharged. They stayed with those of the same nationality and language in authorised boarding houses. Lascars, as they became known, often suffered under cruel officers and became distraught and diseased. Many did not brave the journey home and sought better and safe jobs on shore. Some worked in the booming dockyards or opened small shops while the new railways led others to industries in the North. However most were illiterate and became street sweepers, beggars and peddlers in London’s dockland areas of Shadwell, Wapping and Poplar. Living conditions were deplorable - often eight to a room, with many dying of starvation and exposure. It is likely that the first prayer halls for communities were founded in this era.

Salter Street

Joseph Salter was a missionary in the Chapel Street district of London (now Edgware Road) in 1853. He helped many Muslims and became interested in their religion and culture. In 1857 he was appointed to the Strangers Home, built to look after the sailors. The home became a national institution and seamen disembarking in Glasgow and Liverpool would travel straight there. In sixteen years some sixteen thousand Lascars visited the homes and over thirteen hundred were fed and clothed. The home survived until 1935, when it was converted into flats and named West India House by Stepney Borough Council. All that remains however, is a street named after him in the East End of London.

Zawiyahs

By 1948 there were some 850 Muslims, mainly Arabs from Yemen, in Tyneside. Many married local women some of whom converted to Islam. With increasing stability and growing families the Yemenis tackled their Islamic needs. They collected contributions from the community to set-up Zawiyahs (small mosques). The two world wars broke up the close-knit communities of Cardiff and Tyneside as many Yemenis went to work in the munitions factories of Sheffield, Birmingham and elsewhere. In the 1950s many Muslims arrived from other countries with different traditions and slowly zawiyahs declined in importance.

Sheikh al-Islam Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932)

In 1882 William Henry Quilliam of Liverpool visited Southern France on holiday and crossed over to Algeria and Morocco. There he learned about Islam and in 1887 he became a Muslim. He returned to Liverpool in 1889 to spread Islam as Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam. His mother was a Methodist activist until 1893 when at the age of 63 she also converted. Local Muslims called her Khadijah (Mother of the Faithful). Quilliam set up a prayer and meeting room in Mount Vernon Street. The Sultan of Turkey conferred upon him the title ‘Sheikh-ul-Islam’ of Britain, and one of his sons became British Consul General in Turkey. The Sultan of Morocco made him an Alim and the Shah of Persia appointed him a Consul.

When the Sultan of Afghanistan sent him a gift of £2,500, Quilliam used this to set up the Islamic Institute and Liverpool Mosque in Broughton Terrace, Liverpool. A hundred Muslims could pray there. The khutbah (sermon) was in Arabic and English. A printing press started publishing The Crescent, a weekly and the monthly Islamic Review. A weekly Debating and Literary Society attracted non-Muslims. They were also invited to the Institute for prayers and sermons on Sunday. There was singing from Quilliam’s collection of Hymns for English speaking Muslims. These meetings brought a hundred and fifty non-Muslims to Islam by 1896.

Quilliam always faced opposition, arguing for, amongst other things, muezzins and the cessation of British interference in Sudan. As his success increased, the level of harassment worsened. Parts of the Church and media were quite antagonistic. Finally he left for the East in 1908, and his absence led to the decline of the Institute and Mosque.

Woking Mosque (1889)

In 1884 Dr Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, an Orientalist and traveller born in Budapest in 1840, left his post as Principal of Punjab University, where he had been for 20 years and came to England. As a linguist, his great ambition was to create an institute for Oriental learning and literature in the form of an Islamic University. In 1889 Professor Leitner built a mosque in Woking with money from Her Highness the Begum Shah Jahan, ruler of the Bhopal State, after whom the mosque was named.

After his death in 1899, it declined in importance until the arrival of Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, a brilliant scholar and barrister from what is now Pakistan. In 1912 he came to Richmond, Surrey and started publishing the Islamic Review. In 1913 he repaired and revived the Woking Mosque and started the Woking Muslim Mission, a body set up to aid new Muslims. In that same year, in December, a member of the House of Lords, the eleventh Baron Headley, announced that he was a Muslim. Headley was not the first peer to do so. Lord Stanley of Alderley, an uncle of Bertrand Russell, had become a Muslim half a century earlier. Headley was a civil engineer and had worked in India. He had learnt about Islam in 1896 and converted, taking the title Sheikh al-Farooq.

Marmaduke Pickthall

Marmaduke Pickthall was born in 1860, the son of a Reverend, in Suffolk. He went to Palestine, Syria and Egypt as a young man, where he learned Arabic. During his two years in Palestine he was tempted to embrace Islam but was dissuaded by the Shaykh of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. “Wait till you are older”, the old man advised, “and have seen again your native land. You are alone among us, so are our boys alone among the Christians. God knows how I should feel if any Christian teacher dealt with a son of mine otherwise than as I now deal with you”.

Pickthall was a novelist and between 1903 and 1921 he published nine novels set in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Yemen and Turkey. In 1920 he went to India with his wife, initially writing for the Bombay Chronicle and then later in 1925 he went to work for the Nizam of Hyderabad. In 1928 the Nizam gave Pickthall special leave of absence on full pay for two years to complete his translation of the Qur’an. It was the first translation by a Muslim whose first language was English.. The title of the work he finally published in 1930 was The Meaning of the Glorious Koran. He died on 19 May 1936 and was buried at the Muslim cemetery in Woking.

Abdullah Yusuf Ali

Abdullah Yusuf Ali was born in 1872 to a Bohra family of Surat, his father was a local police chief ennobled by the Raj for his services. He was educated first in a Bombay Muslim school set up along semi-modern lines, and then in a Scottish missionary college. A remarkable academic aptitude allowed him to take his first degree at the age of 19, whereupon he won a scholarship to study law at Cambridge. On his return to to India he was appointed a magistrate in Saharanpur in the United Provinces and then at Bareilly.

He visited Britain again in 1900 and married an Englishwoman, Teresa Shalders. He grew in popularity as a spokesman for Indian Muslims, winning a medal for his lectures to the Royal Society of Arts, and being hailed in the Times as a ‘very talented member of the Indian Civil Service and a representative of the great Mohammedan community.’ In 1934 the first instalment of his Qur’anic translation appeared in the bookshops of Lahore. He spent his declining years in London where he eventually died in extreme poverty in London in 1953, and was buried near Pickthall in the Muslim cemetery in Woking.

Migration and the Growth of a Community

The whole of Europe was occupied with the massive task of reconstruction after the Second World War, and there were labour shortages everywhere. The government positively encouraged immigration initially from Europe but then also from Ireland and the New Commonwealth. From the 50s to the 70s, there was a tremendous influx of Muslim immigrants. Most immigrants came with the intention of returning though many stayed on. The majority came from rural areas of the subcontinent, their main motive for immigrating was economic - many jobs paid thirty times as much as in Pakistan. However it is important to note that most came from areas with a long tradition of migration. From Pakistan they came from Azad Kashmir, the Northwest Frontier and parts of Punjab, areas that the British Army and merchant navy had long recruited from. Almost 95% of Bangladeshis come from the north-eastern district of Sylhet. Many of them came to Britain via Calcutta in West Bengal as cooks and galley hands on merchant ships. There were Sylheti restaurant workers in London as early as 1873. Over the years Sylhetis have come to dominate the market for South Asian cuisine and run the majority of the seven thousand outlets where customers spend hundreds of millions of pounds.

Doctors found work in the newly established NHS. Others worked on the buses and railways. Many more obtained jobs in textile mills, foundaries and factories, which required a supply of cheap low-skilled labour, especially for night shifts. This explains why large Asian communities developed in London and in the industrial towns of the Midlands like Wolverhampton and Coventry, and the textile towns in Lancashire, Yorkshire and Strathclyde like Bradford and Glasgow. Here, their much-needed labour helped to rebuild industries and keep services going.

Throughout the last century Muslims from India, and various parts of Arabia, Africa and the Far East also came to study. Disasters, famine and wars have also brought a number of Muslim migrants to Britain in recent years. While some have returned, others have settled and became part of the British Muslim community. We have also seen that there have been, and there are now, many Muslims of Anglo-Saxon descent, some of whom have played a leading role in the Muslim community. Perhaps the most significant to us now are the growing second and third generations, who form over half of the 1.6 million strong Muslim community in Britain. They are British Muslims, yet have also incorporated aspects of Asian and Arab culture. Together this ethnic mix has played a significant role in shaping the British Muslim identity of today.

(Adapted from a leaflet produced by the Islamic Society of Britain, Muslims of Britain)

Most Muslims have citizenship, recent arrivals – asylum seekers and refugees or those on travel visas – do not show up in most statistics.

The key national representative organisation is the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), established in 1997. It has over 300 affiliated organisations and mosques. There are also others that have tried to play this role, such as the Union of Muslim Organisations (UMO) (established in 1970), the Council of Imams and Mosques, the Muslim Parliament (established in 1992) and the British Muslim Forum (BMF) (established in 2004). There are also other important organisations such as: Muslim Youth helpline, Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism (FAIR), the Muslim College, al-Khoei Foundation and the Islamic Foundation, that have been able to establish good relationships with government institutions and have had some significant effects on policy matters.

In terms of grassroots membership and activism, organisations such as the Young Muslims UK (YMUK), The Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), the Federation of Students Islamic Societies (FOSIS) and the UK Islamic Mission (UKIM) have been important players in the past. These organizations originated from, or are still related to, a broad revivalist influence.

However, the majority of Sunni Muslims in the UK originate from two Asian trends – the Brelwi and the Deobandi movements which have their origins in the Indian sub-continent. The Brelwi movement is a populist spiritual movement in Pakistan, especially influential in rural areas, emphasising rituals and connection with saints. The Deobandi movement (closely related to Jama‘at Tabligh) is a reform movement emphasising education and a purist approach to Islam. Both of these movements also have connections with Sufi orders. The Shia form about 25% and though they hail from a variety of different trends are mainly Ithna Ashari. The World Federation of Khoja Shia Ithna Asheri Muslim Communinities and the Council of European Jamats, along with the Khoei Foundation are important Shia networks in London.

New sufi groups have also appeared with personalities like Hamza Yusuf becoming more popular in the UK. Salafi associations are quite established and a small number of mosques of this orientation also exist. The more radical groups such as Hizb al-Tahrir, al-Muhajiroun and Jihadi factions also have a small presence, though this has reduced even further in popularity after 9/11.

It is important to note that while there are some clear demarcations between the groups, many of the followers and members do interact and there is a lot of cross-membership or movement within the spectrum mentioned.

There are no accurate figures, but estimates show that over 1,500 mosques exist (only a few of these would be purpose built). Most of the mosques mentioned would be used for salat al-jumuah, even prayers halls in universities.

There are a growing number of bookshops – at least fifty exist now and are listed, but the actual number may be much higher.

Many other businesses, especially restaurants and convenience shops, exist which are owned by Muslims. See below (economy) for more.

The UK does not have a system of ‘recognition’ of religion as found in some other EU states such as Germany or Belgium. Instead the relationship is a complex one governed by less formal arrangements and discrete references in the legal system that may be of relevance to the community concerned.

Main legislation:

• Race Relations Acts 1965
• Race Relations Act 1976
• Human Rights Act 1998
• Race Relations Amendment Act 2000
• Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001
• Employment Directive on Religion and Belief 2003

There are currently two pieces of legislation on Incitement to Religious Hatred and Delivery of Goods and Services that are under discussion.

Newspapers: Muslim News (monthly), Muslim Weekly, also some ethnic newspapers such as Daily Jung, The Nation, as well as Arab papers

Magazines: numerous including: emel, Q-News, Salam, Impact.

Publishing houses: The Islamic Foundation, Islamic Text Society, Ta-ha publishers, IIIT/AMSS, Amal Press, and others. The Islamic Foundation has produced over 300 books and has three journals.

Many Radio Ramadan stations during the month of fasting (about 12 last year) as well as one web-based and local radio station: Radio Ummah.

One satellite channel, Islam Channel.

Multitude of websites: e.g. salaam.co.uk, mcb.org.uk/direct, muslimheritage.com, masud.co.uk, ummah.net.

Over 100 Muslim schools, five of these are state funded.

Over twenty seminaries for the training of Imams, most of these provide recognised GCSE, A-level qualifications or BA qualifications and their other courses may be partly recognised by some British Universities.

A number of colleges, including Hijaz College in Nuneaton and the Karimiah Institute in Nottingham.

At least four Muslim institutes of post-graduate education and research: Markfield Institute of Higher Education, the Muslim College, the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, the Islamic College for Advanced Studies.

Halal meat is allowed and is regulated by the government.

British Muslims began joining the mainstream political parties in the 1960s and the first councillor, Bashir Maan, was elected in 1970. Until quite recently the affiliation was almost exclusively with the Labour Party. Currently there are over 250 Councillors, 4 Members of the House of Commons (all Labour), 4 Members of the House of Lords and 1 Member of the European Parliament, that are of Muslim origin. It is difficult to estimate the number of Muslims that are members of the various parties.

Recently there has been a shift away from support for the Labour party to the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative party, especially as the class and socio-economic profile of the community is changing as well as protest against the war in Iraq.

There are 8,500 Indian restaurants, of which roughly 7,200 are owned by people of Bengali origin. 10% of London’s businesses are Asian owned, many of these would be Muslims.

Britain may have over 5,000 Muslim millionaires with liquid assets of more than £3.6bn. Furthermore, this is identified as a rapidly growing market. This means that the market for Islamic finance in the UK is set to grow substantially. (Datamonitor)

The age profile is very important – 52% of Muslims are below 25.

The prison population is 9% Muslim.

Success in education is low, though those who make it to university level tend to do well. However, recent research is showing that with targeted policies and resources significant improvement are being made in some areas.

Other socio economic indicators also show underachievement, e.g. employment, housings, family, income, health, etc.