Abdal Hakim Murad – Welcome & Introduction
AI: Summary ©
The British Isles college is hosting a conference on their eighth full year of operation, with a focus on their diploma programs in Islamic. They are independent of Cambridge University but have its accreditation from the British Accreditation Council. The college is interested in the history of individuals living in difficult situations, including the rise of Islam in the 19th century and the negative impact on people's political and economic lives. They discuss the various ways in which Islam has been portrayed in modern Britain, including through records and diaries, and the importance of understanding the history of Islam in relation to British national identity.
AI: Summary ©
Bismillah R Rahman r Rahim on behalf of
Cambridge Muslim college and its trustees, staff and students. It's
a great pleasure for me to be able to welcome you to this which is
really our first major international conference. I think.
For those of you who don't know, our college is now in its eighth
full year of operation. We run firstly a one year diploma program
to train British imams in key leadership skills. We now have a
four year degree program in Islamic Studies. And we host a
number of full time research fellows including Dr. Allison
Islam and Professor John Mabry, who are currently working on
religion and science issues with funding from the Templeton
Foundation. We are independent of Cambridge University, but have our
own accreditation from the British Accreditation Council.
For me, it's a source of particular pleasure that this
first significant international event of ours should be on the
subject of British Muslim history.
Although the British Isles really are locked away at the further
edge of the European landmass, when seen from the perspective of
pre modern Muslim geography, whether North African or ottoman,
our country has experienced forms of engagement with the Islamic
world from a very early period.
Catherine Beckett has written on Islam as understood from the
perspective of Anglo Saxon England, offering a recent survey
of the very beginnings of this historic engagement.
We have the book by Graham Davis on perceptions of Islam and
Muslims in wealth literature, and we've had occasion to host Dr.
Davis to speak about his book at the college.
There have long been distinguished studies of Islam as seen through
the lens of British travelers, writers, theologians, Orientalist
and poets. One of the most distinguished historians in this
area, the Crusades expert, Jonathan Riley Smith died only
three days ago, here in Cambridge. Like others, he showed that
physical distance from the heartland of the Muslim world was
not in practice and impediment, being compensated for by our
status as a maritime and often warlike nation.
None of that, however, is of primary concern to us in today's
conference, history of British experiences of the world of Islam
will be important history. But we're not writing that history
today. Instead, we focus our attention on the history of
Muslims who have lived on our shores.
It turns out that this is a no less fascinating but historic
graphically far more challenging venture.
To be Muslim in Britain before the 19th century, was to inhabit a
risky and invidious position. One might perhaps enjoy diplomatic
protection as with say, an ottoman fnd accredited as a diplomat to
the court of St. James, one might perhaps manage as a Moroccan
silver trader in Manchester in the 18th century. But such individuals
were necessarily birds of passage, the origins and place of return
late in oriental lands.
The story of those who in some way pitch their tent here, necessarily
fascinating is that of individuals who are living a clash of
civilizations in a way which was always discomforting and sometimes
carried deadly risks.
The titanic struggle of Europe itself, which for pirenne, and his
school, was also the creation and the definition of Europe was
against the Saracen and he taught us Islam was the dark other of the
Kantian demure theme of the Battle of Cooley cover field of the Lucy
ads. It was Europe's dreaded nemesis, and frustratingly
successful other.
Those who have that others creed, who sought to live here faced a
truly difficult task.
English literature its true has no exact equivalent to the founding
moments of national mythos which cast the people as heroes in an
unequal fight against the sericin or Hadrian invader. Spanish
literature begins we may say with a cave of Dawn Pillay or French
literature start with a short Zondervan on the literature's of
Britain precisely because of our geographical location, trace their
genesis to Arthurian legend, to Caedmon. To Beowulf. For us in our
own Dark Ages. The formative and defining other was usually the
Norse man, the Dane and not the Saracen.
What bleak, called the matter of England did not emerge from the
refiners fire of a crusade.
Still, while the national imaginary lacks that sense of
agenesis in tension with Islam, religious laws of an effectively
totalitarian kind militated against the replication in western
Christendom, of the kind of multicultural society which was
normative in the Muslim world, whether in Al Andalus or the
Levant.
Late antique traditions of cosmopolitanism and ease of
movement and intermarriage, were maintained in the Islamic world
and much less so in Christian lands. A Muslim in England before
the enlightenment, and the later laws of emancipation was not Al
Kitab or Ella Dima, in the eyes of the British crown and church.
There was no such mediator of category of toleration.
Jews existed according to various degrees of exclusion and
disadvantage, being a people at least known in biblical record.
But the Saracen was a deeper stranger Islam. The second
Semitism did not carry the vitriolic stigma of deicide. But
unlike the Jew, the Muslim recalled a neighboring military
threat, he was still the object of almost universal condemnation and
fear.
So the project of the historiography of British Islam,
when it seeks to reach far back in time, finds itself thwarted not
only by the thin demography of Islam in pre modern Britain, that
constitutionally could not acknowledge its stable presence,
but also by the fact that Islam is sheer illegality made the creation
of records, diaries and other writings by early British Muslim
residents all but impossible. Moreover, those British Muslims
who fled our shores whether as traders, of course as well simple,
adventurous, and to join the not inconsiderable ranks of the
renegade us were overwhelmingly unlettered men. Simple mariners,
soldiers of fortune are slaves of various categories, and
provenances.
Their names appear with some frequency in the Inquisition
archives, as Bartolo may have been assault has shown in his book look
at Angola. Yet, they were overwhelmingly simple folk
incapable of writing their experiences down.
When it's almost reminded of the feminist complaints that half of
history is missing, because women did not or were not permitted to
write.
One bitterly regret the silence. How many astounding adventures
will never be told, one knows the picaresque Adventures of say
Samson Rowley, or John Ward, but there must have been so many
others, whether they remained in the Dar Al Islam, or returned to
our shores to retain, in some cases that Islamic confession, but
this remains in substance, an empty page.
Still, the true historian will only be incentivized by this void.
We long to fill it, what we have, and what we know turns out to be
remarkable, not only because some unusual individuals and stories
can be identified, but because their presence as witnesses to the
Israelite God in the heart of Christian Europe, tells us so much
about that Europe.
If Islam is historically often constructed as Europe significant
other, its Titanic rival, its inversion and mirror image, then
British Muslim history must emerge as something far more than a
simple marginal byway of odd traders, pirates and romantic
wonders.
Instead, the story of the Saracen within vanishes, a remarkable
illumination of how Britain has seen itself.
The story finally continues. This is a history which is still being
written. And today, too, we learn so much about the nation, its
identity, its anxieties, ideals, and paranoia is by examining its
attitude to Muslims in its domains.
Islam inhabits our present in complex and endlessly diversifying
ways
that I am sure that by looking at the British Muslim past, we will
learn much about the narratives of our Ireland in ways which are
likely to prove of direct interest and relevance to the conversations
we're now hearing about the role of Islam in Britain today.