Abdal Hakim Murad – Welcome & Introduction

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.