Abdal Hakim Murad – William Williamson Paradigms of Leadership
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Bismillah R Rahman r Rahim.
So this is I guess the fifth in our considerations of certain
luminous individuals who may or may not have things to say to us
about this
Islamically dubious
man managerial category of leadership.
The idea is not so much to present certain tick box role models,
but rather to look at certain Muslim careers, to see how those
careers might shed light and perhaps deepen this rather flat
contemporary category which develops in the context of a world
which only values status, autonomy
moneymaking.
So, last time, we were looking at the interesting figure of Nana
Asmat off to see how in a pre reformed pre colonial, early
entirely classical Sharia centric Muslim context a woman could
achieve an influential position. Power is perhaps not the category
that Islam in its insistence on the direct divine Omnipotence
likes to conjure with very much. But instead, certainly to have an
influence, because to have an influence, if it's an influence
for hire for Good is something that is valued and is indeed,
prophetic. So perhaps influence rather than leadership is the kind
of Islamically compliant vocabulary that we should be
reaching to. And perhaps by the time I get to the end of this
series, we may or may not have some conclusions about that.
But if anything has become clear, at least to me, in the course of
these journeys, it is that we're not dealing with a single
paradigm.
Because we're talking about the concatenation of certain very
human traits, which then go on to influence other human beings.
We're not talking about leadership of the animal kingdom or whatever,
trying to get to tigers to make friends in London Zoo, we're
talking about money, Adam, much more difficult. And therefore, we
have to hold before ourselves, the Quranic insistence on human
diversity.
If TLF if they left LC, nautical, l weren't equal are of God signs,
the difference of your languages and colors, which is Quranic speak
for cultural diversity.
And that, therefore, we're not seeking a single paradigm of how
to influence human beings in an upward direction. pulling them
down is pretty easy. Pulling them up is that which follows the
Browse of philosophers and prophets and all ages.
But instead are looking at this gigantically massive galaxy of
individual human souls which it is pleased Divine Providence to set
in this dunya. No two human beings are ever alike. Even identical
twins. There's always a difference.
Few years ago, with a newspaper piece about the finalists for the
Miss Wales competitions, I assure you, I read just the text, but the
finalists were two identical twin sisters. This, of course, raises
all kinds of interesting questions. But one of them did
win. And the other didn't know that he is completely the same as
somebody else. And therefore, when we're talking about this kind of
capacity to shape a soul, we're looking at something on which
there can be few hard and fast the fixed algorithms
like medicine
can be one man's medicine can be another man's poison. And the
doctor may not quite understand the implications of what is
prescribing. So we've seen different human types.
And what I want to look at this time and perhaps in a future,
lecture is the type that is generated and flourishes
Islamically when it comes from a Western trajectory.
And this is a type that has been noisily, but superficially
celebratory devised by anxious communities
In the Western world, that silly little book, Islam, our choice
onwards, celebrity converts, but not really taken to be a possible
paradigm.
But the phenomenon nonetheless reminds us of something that we
frequently
let go of which is that Islam is not a matter of identity, and of
anxiously continuing ancestral ways, and defending off the guilt
that comes when we're not doing that correctly, but is instead a
path to God and a claim about reality.
It's interesting to note, in the midst of the panic about the rise
of the new National populism across Europe, and the Five Star
Movement in Italy, and what it thinks about Muslims and the
Fidesz party in Hungary, what it thinks about Muslims and Marine
LePen in France and what she thinks about Muslims, this post
liberal age that we're moving into, and all the migrants are
kind of sort of thinking in the headlights and not quite sure what
happened to their dream
that a communities retreat into markers of identity will just
exacerbate the difference that produces the nativist reaction in
the first place. It's not working, becomes a zero sum game.
Instead, Islam is presented as something that is about truth,
that you, compassion, respect all those ultimate primal prophetic
virtues, and not primarily about us, holding on for dear life to
these poorly understood, poorly applied ancestral principles that
we stuffed into our bags. When we left Kurdistan or Malaysia or
Pakistan or wherever and which we somehow want to keep hold off
here.
It is really about truth and virtue and hence universal things,
then it should be possible to deal with those people because they too
are concerned with the loss of identity.
Everybody's so puzzled by get Vilde as his right hand, man,
you're on van Cleveron, who announced his conversion to Islam
last week and everybody was kind of scratching their heads and
singleness is very funny and very odd Muslim shouldn't think it's
funny and odd. He's not the first than a clown, one of the leading
German. Far Right politicians thundering away for years against
the European Union and against refugees and asylum seekers and
Muslim terrorists also converted to Islam, and has now adopted for
Syrian refugee children.
This disturbs the usual Muslim community rhetoric because it's,
we thought this was about them and us Islamophobia, or a niceness.
But no, religion is about truth. And when you start to think of it
being about truth, rather than holding on to these ancestral
cultural heirlooms, and things become much more interesting and
monotheism shows its power, particularly in this decadent
relativistic post monotheistic, unhappy state. Europe isn't
monotheism is a very serious and attractive contender, but we don't
really want to present ourselves in those terms. We hardly ever do.
Instead, we get into our huddle in our little race temples, and we
keep up with the ancestral footways and just hope that the
far right take over and put us on a boat and send us far away.
That's the extent of our discussion. So when we look at
those whose
influence I shouldn't say leadership now, but influence
comes from having
leaped that, suppose it golf
between West and East, and we start to look at indigenous Muslim
traditions, then we start to hopefully cheer up a little bit
and perhaps even learned that there can be an Islam that's
genuinely local, and intelligent, and takes people's anxieties about
us seriously, rather than just holding on to Granny's customs and
hoping for the best.
But we're certainly not there yet. When Muslims came to this country
or to France or Germany or wherever, they didn't really ask
the local Muslims How do you do it here? They just kept on with
folkways because they couldn't imagine anything else. But that's
now the situation is becoming uncomfortable for us, we can
reconsider that determination. So that Islam is not just a badge of
ethnic irreducibility but as a set of claims about truth of virtue
and compassion. Maybe. Maybe we need to be kicked around a bit
before we realize what Islam says it is. In any case, the power
At times when you look at British Muslims, by which I mean those
whose ancestry is located here rather than somewhere else, I
don't think you can be any more
specific British in that sort of ancestral sense rather than any
other sense.
Again, you find an almost hopeless diversity.
There isn't a single paradigm or a single road to Mecca for the
country's Muslims.
What you do see is a large number of very distinctive and forceful
individuals almost by definition, somebody who, particularly in
colonial or pre colonial times, comes to Islam, from the very
fixed class ridden static world of little England is going to be some
kind of stormy petrol, some defiant mold breaker.
Perhaps it'll be a quiet, academic eccentric, but perhaps it'll be
quite a spectacular and unusual person.
But sometimes they have
threatened to
play a significant role in history. Lord Headley, for
instance, one of the first peers to convert in this country and
he's up in lights and that funny book, Islam our choice for various
platitude and rising reasons, was actually offered the turn of
Albania, following Albania's unwilling independence from the
Ottoman Empire. That was the time when the Europeans thought that
anybody who was a kind of Western aristocrat could, I mean, the
Greek royal family of Germans, aren't they? So the Bulgarians,
this is the odd way in which we liberated the Balkan furloughed
Headlee puppet vote proposed as king of Albania. You said it went
to that disappointing person, Kings org.
And the rest is history.
Khalid Sheldrake was appointed to be the king of Eastern Turkistan,
or the Sultan. That's the land of the oil girls who are currently
going through such hard times.
We don't know exactly the extent to which she exercised his
authority. But the story is there in the newspapers of the times
of the Abdullah Quilliam, another unusual person, maybe we'll trace
his story in a later lecture. Certainly, if you use the
paradigma leadership, individual,
founder of the first significant mosque community in the UK, also
somebody whose style of Islam
has a certain, shall we say exuberance to it.
And this is perhaps one of the things we need to think about in
offering thoughts about Western Muslim leadership or influence.
The Eastern way, really, since the 19th century, has tended to favor
forms of religiosity, marked by reactions to extreme anxiety.
If you look at the texts of 18th century Indian scholars and
compare them to the text of 20th century Indian scholars, you will
be amazed at how little sectarianism and how little
pettifogging insistence on a unique fapy rightness you find in
the older texts. That's Thomas Bowers culture of ambiguity, it
was assumed by the Muslim elite that Islam was this kind of
banquet of different possibilities.
Local India one of the most sort of exuberantly Diversity Affairs
affirming places on earth and the same goes for the Ottomans and
Uzbeks and everybody and then the Europeans kick in the door. And
there is a mass trauma and the elite start to become anxious and
unhappy and seek refuge in narrow sectarian isms. After the 1850s,
all of these reform isms thrive and it becomes unimaginable to be
a proper Indian scholar unless you are meticulously ticking 100 boxes
that make you a Braille V of a particular kind, or 200 boxes that
make you a Deobandi of a particular kind and everything
becomes a wrangling with other forms of unique rightness.
So, a relaxed style of Islam becomes a culture of anxiety. And
this is the culture that was brought to us in the West,
everybody being very anxious about the threat to their identity and
therefore seeking psychological refuge in forms of meticulous and
forensic correctness.
Thomas Bauer's whole book is about this. The transformation of the
oldest LOM which is kind of a relaxed and celebratory, lyrical
view of life and a shift
Do this Islam, which is all about tiptoeing through a minefield,
which is the dominant form of Islam, articulate Islam today,
look at the curriculum for religious studies in Pakistan, for
instance. And it's just a long list of reasons to be anxious
about various things that are wrong.
There is hardly a text there, that's more than 50 years old. In
any case, one can grumble about this. But the point of shifting
the optic and looking at Western figures is that usually these
Westerners do not come with this colonized, anxiety induced
mentality, which is not necessarily the fault of the
people concerned, but certainly gives us an arm a very different
flavor.
So you get umbrella Quilliam very much. Somebody who enjoyed his
Islam was impatient with Fettke minutiae. I read his newspapers,
there's very little there about fatwah wars, or sectarian
troubles. Hardly any mention of the Sunday she divide. And she,
when they came to his mosque in Liverpool joined in the
congregation, and they were all while I'm happy family as Muslims
and hard for that to happen today. It was just a different air that
that generation was breathing. And because those people were never
part of the psychological violence, wrought upon colonized
peoples they maintained in an odd way, that older style of Islam, so
we have this
remarkable lineup, even cobalt,
one of the best known perhaps the best known of converts female
convicts of the early 20th century, still very much her own
autonomous lady and if you go to her grouse more in Sutherland,
they were the aristocrats. You'll find her grave with
Nora inscribed on it right at the top of a mountain. And he's on the
treeless bleak corners of the top right hand corner corner of
Scotland, which was a deer park. She was a famous Hunter,
Benjamin Bishop, the British ambassador to Cairo in the 17th
century, who went native who loved the local way so much that he just
converted to Islam changes his name and the phone off his
archive, save any attempt to trace him failed. They've got no idea
what happened to him.
The Scotsman who became Ottoman governor of Medina,
denial who became captain of the Ottoman fleet to Tripoli, remember
that American anthem about the rockets red glow, and so forth,
that's about their battle with him. That we're fighting the
Ottoman Empire, which wasn't the Turks, it was a lot of converts.
There's been some recent academic studies on the Ottoman Empire as a
state, driven by the energy, the new blood of the converts. But in
just about every case, John Ward, several books about John war that
goes back to the 16th century now, the English captain, who dies in
Tunis is great as in Tunis, use of rice. None of these people
represent the modern anxiety Islaam of writing lots of anxious
articles to explain why one particular rival factor is not
following the correct delille. None of them, as far as one can
tell, are interested in that Islam.
And suddenly, this is the case with the individual that I want to
talk about today, because he's been resuscitated a little bit in
mass media,
albeit in a rather specialized and conspiratorial role on a Mac talk
about that at the end, why is he still out there?
But this is
Williams name is William Quilliam. So his parents must have had a
sense of humor. But now I'm talking about William Williamson,
with his parents don't seem to have much of a sense of humor
because some they were stern Victorians who gave him a hard
time but he becomes for the British Muslim community a very
kind of significant symbol of somebody who really combined his
Islam with an anxiety free kind of roving. His life is
extraordinarily jam packed with Adventures of various kinds. He
didn't write even though he was from an educated family.
And towards the end of his life, people recalled how he spoke with
this very kind of cut glass Victorian precise English.
Kind of Joyce Grenfell.
In English, if you know what I'm talking about,
but he didn't write, certainly never went to university.
So the information that we have about him is from people who knew
him. And one of the sources is from the records of oil
exploration in the Gulf in the early mid 20th century. Because it
turns out he was one of the key pioneers
of the Anglo Iranian oil company, and BP and Shell in extracting the
first oil exploration concessions from the Qataris and from the
Kuwaitis, so that's the place to go if you want contemporary
records. And no doubt there's lots of stuff in the foreign office
because they deplored him in many ways, and no doubt or dusty files,
with disapproving remarks on this English chap who went native.
You interesting to look those files out.
But also a novelist by the name of Stanton hope now largely
forgotten. We specialize mainly in the history of merchant navy and
shell tanker, fleet and so forth, was stuck in southern Iraq just
after the end of the Second World War, and spent a lot of time with
William Williams, and who by that time was pretty old, he died in
1958. And with plenty of time on his hands,
recorded his story. So that would have been lost for posterity had
it not been for
the
otherwise forgotten Stanton hope so we have a pretty full picture.
Born in 1872,
you is from Bristol.
Quilliam is from Liverpool, one of England's windows to the world,
great port city greatest sport in the world. Bristol is also a port
of course, although declining a little bit since it had been
associated with the slave trade. The stellar black boys Hill in
Bristol, various other slightly concerning place names are still a
major port.
This is still the age of sale, not of steam.
And the father, who has four children is almost the stereotype
of the Victorian stern patter familiarise, who wishes
to bring out the best in his children through endless
disapproval.
So he sends him to Clifton School, which is still one of the
country's well known schools, but
the boy rebels against the discipline, and rebels against
parental discipline and gets into all kinds of scrapes.
This again, is reminiscent of Aaron Allen Bullock, who was here
when we had our opening at CMC, he was the first imam of the mosque
in either Oxford or Cambridge and a legend knocks British Muslims
who when he was an undergraduate in Cambridge during the Second
World War, when the places or other kinds of strange depopulated
town became one of the city's great night climbers. This is the
strictly forbidden pursuit of students going out at night in the
ordinary clothes climbing buildings.
They still do it, we throw them out unceremoniously if we catch
them, which sometimes we do anyway. One of his stumps was to
leave a chamber pot right at the pinnacle of the Fitzwilliam
Museum.
So youthful high spirits.
And
Williamson's favorite stunt was to climb the Clifton Suspension
Bridge.
They must have been about 12 when he did this, and the blood runs
cold when you think of that little boy going up there fairly
vertiginous inclines of if you've seen the Avon gorge and you've
seen a suspension bridge, you can get a sense of how fearless he
must have been. He also learned to ride these to go to the kind of
cheddar Gorge area and he became quite good in the saddle. Often
these were ways of escaping the tension of his father who
genuinely would either approach him or beat him when he was at
home.
The
father thought that he really wasn't doing very well at school.
And perhaps in order to knock this rebellious kid into shape, best
thing to do would be to give him an even more horrible experience
than an English public school,
which was, of course to put him on one of these ships, ocean going
vessels, which were heading out to the wide world from
Bristol Harbor. And to have a word in the ear of the skipper saying
make sure you give him a really hard time
And later on, the boy discovers he hears it behind the wheel house
skippers. I have to report back to his father that he's had
the most unpleasant time any chips boys ever had, and maybe then
he'll attend to his homework.
So he sent off on a foremast Bock
which is one of the fast, powerful sailing ships of those pre steam
days. And
his
his 13 at the time, and he recorded his father said, I hoped
my by the money I have to pay for premium will show better dividends
and the money wasted on your schooling. It was dad's way of
saying goodbye. So he goes on to the ship and immediately they're
in a gales is December in the Bay of Biscay. And the boy refuses to
polish the brass work on the ship and as a reward his mast headed
significant punishment in those days, especially if it's a
December Gale and Biscay, which means that you have to go up to
the highest point of the main mast and just stay there
until you are bidden. To come down again, when he comes down, he's
almost dead, has to be revived, but he still refuses to polish the
brass work and nothing they can do. For the rest of the journey to
get to Australia can make him come around so
his regularly flogged.
He gets to New South Wales.
This bark, unloads its cargo, and is then going back to Bristol Via
San Diego picks up calls in Australia and Newcastle and off it
goes to California.
This is the point at which he overhears vessels Captain
explaining to a first mate or someone that he has been given
strict instructions to give the boy a miserable time. And so he
decides not to give the Father the pleasure of seeing him again and
going back to school because he quite likes to seaborne life. And
at San Diego, where the rest of the ship's company go ashore in
search of usual sailors concerts, and bear in and beauty for the
most. Most cases, he walks straight inland in order to avoid
the possibility of bumping into any of the crew and essentially
jumped ship.
He's only got $2 He hasn't got any papers. And he finds work in a
farm somewhere near Los Angeles.
It seems hard for us to imagine. But in those days, despite our
current claims to be a free society.
Things were a lot easier for people who were happy to travel
with an expectation of being particularly comfortable. back
then. He didn't have a passport in his whole life, as far as we can
tell, but he traveled the globe. Sometimes if you had board of
trade papers, it helped getting a job as a casual laborer or a
seaman. But basically most of these guys, often they would lose
their papers in drunken brawls. And it was understood that there
was a floating population globally of people who were just migrants,
economic migrants. It's not like Trump building the wall back then.
Nobody thought about the difficulty of moving anywhere you
wanted in the world. And this really shaped his life. So he
works on a farm.
By the age of 14, he has his own shotgun,
learns to shoot as well as to ride
and just wanders away from the thumb never goes back just to
become a kind of trapper and hunter in California and outdoors
and he picks up his lifelong dislike of cities is very much
a nature man is sleeping underneath the skies in the rock
is hunting his own game.
And then he remembers that he has a relative his aunt Amy was
married somebody in California they have a little homestead. So
he amazingly finds her and she remembers him and he finds
employment there for a while.
Now she is a devout Seventh Day Adventist. And this is the first
point of which God comes into the story.
And the Seventh Day Adventists have already had their famous,
great disappointment. I think it was October the 21st 1844. When
the Adventists predicted Jesus will come again and the world
would end and all the Adventists in white robes went up to the top
of mountains on
of America expecting to be raptured up to heaven. Next day
came and things still pretty normal. That's called great
disappointment. And today's Seventh Day Adventist churches
still active, every church in Cambridge are descended from one
of the offshoots of the great disappointment. So they aren't Amy
is also big on this. And she would also go up to local hill hilltops
and sing in white robes.
But she actually took a shine to her nephews, Dylaney 14,
who was really useful about the farm, a good ride, well started to
most of the usual cowboy skills,
and didn't like most of the other cowboys blow all of his savings on
on women in the nearest to gun town, but seemed to be an
abstemious and reflective temperament.
It seems that he had developed largely as a result of exposure to
the sort of silent wonders of nature, a strong belief in God and
a dislike of cities and corruption and degradation, which he saw
the gold rush down to California in particular, worse showcases for
everything that is wrong with the human
condition.
So you have this image of this 14 year old boy with his own gun.
Really falling in love with God. But also, as you would expect,
full of adventure. This is the West
possibilities everywhere, and he decides to join the gold
prospecting
rush. So he gets a mule and
joins another cowboy. Turns out he's also from Bristol.
And they go to the Nevada mountains on the golf trail.
Not really knowing how these things are done. They're sleeping
innocently under the stars. And when they wake up in the morning,
they find that everything has been stolen even his own Mexican
shotgun, and his bag was stolen from beneath his head while he
slumbered, so they have absolutely nothing even their shoes have been
stolen.
Cook this other Bristol guy turns back, but Williamson in bare feet
is not discouraged and he continues to
move on to the Nevada us where he ends up panning for gold and
creates a stick to a mine which eventually sells for about $600.
What's his silver mine? It wasn't a particularly good mine, it seems
he drifts back to San Francisco.
And then he decides to try his luck at sea again.
So he gets on a cargo ship bound for Bordeaux, which has to go for
the Panama Canal round Cape Horn. And the crossing is so bad that
the ship almost brooches to almost founder's in terrifyingly high
seas.
And he spends a little bit of time in France and Spain, which He
reminisced about in later life,
but then decides with a friend that he's going to try his luck
working on the new Panama Canal. This is the first Panama Canal the
one that they tried to build at sea level which turned out to be
impossible and 1000 men a day were dying in the construction largely
through malaria and yellow fever. It was well paid but dangerous. So
he gets malaria that he has malaria for the rest of his life.
Works for a while on the canal but then makes his way back to
California and here he has another Earth is improbable experiences.
It turns out that he can juggle and sing quite well. So he joins a
traveling theatre troupe that goes around these cowboy towns, just
entertaining these probably quite easily pleased cow hands.
He also works as an amateur boxer
and gets through the first three stages of the front end San
Francisco boxing championship, presumably within his weight. He
was only a teenager at the time.
The night before the big fight
except a beer in a bar in San Francisco that turns out to be
laced with opium or some other drug and he wakes up the next day
in the hole of a ship that sailing out of
San Francisco Bay. He is in
that
he's been shanghaied. In fact, that origin of the term Shanghai
comes from the fact that this is how they picked up unwilling
sailors in the Red Light District, which was the Chinatown of San
Francisco, you just drag them, drag them to the ship, and then
they were, were stuck. So he's on a ship that turns out to be a
whaler. So the next year of his life, he spends
whaling
turns out that he likes it. So even though the Captain has
crimped him in this way, he agrees to stay on. So he's already a
seasoned Mariner
proves himself to be
a good man with a harpoon.
And then,
he
returns to San Francisco, and takes ship again with another
schooner this time, one headed for the South Seas.
and here begins another almost unbelievable episode in his life,
which is that in the Caroline Islands, which at the time were
largely controlled by Spain, being adjacent to the Philippines, he
sets up as a local trader specializing in sea cucumber
farming, which is a rather specialized niche market. But this
is something that's a delicacy for the Chinese, under certain islands
that were these rather unprepossessing creatures may be
had.
He also has a sideline in the buying and selling and the repair
of firearms. And this is what gets him into
the next extraordinary, dangerous scrape, because it turns out that
some of the Martini Henry rifles that he has been trading has been
have been used by rebels in the Philippines who were rebelling
against the depredations of the Spanish authorities. So the
Spaniards come along, and they put him in jail.
And he stays in this quite atrocious prison.
For months without any real prospect of a trial. The Spanish
rule in the Philippines was particularly brutal, and harsh.
This is before the Americans takeover.
A Filipino friend once told me if you want to understand our
colonial history, for 400 years under the Spanish, we lived in a
monastery, and then for 50 years under the Americans we lived in a
brothel. So that's the kind of, but this is very much the the
stern inquisitorial Spanish colonial world that he is
experiencing, but he manages to bribe a guard to leave his
manacles unlocked, and having carefully
worked out his route of escape. at a key moment, as the
chain gang is being led through the streets of Manila to do some
work in the docks, he
runs away, shots are fired after him. But he dashes through the
door of the American Consulate this in the flag and the console,
or the startled bars, the door behind him and the Spanish
soldiers are kind of beating at the door and asking for the
escapee to be rendered up. But the console is is an interesting
circumstance turns out to be somebody who is also very
important in American Muslim history is Alexander Russel Webb.
Some of you may know that Dr. Ahmed Abdullah, has written a book
about Alexander Russel Webb as really the first significant data
in the history of the United States. And another interesting
case of a very independently minded westerner who manages to be
quite establishment in many ways, but also to be a noisy advocate
for Islam. At this point, web hasn't yet converted.
We don't know if there was any subsequent relationship other than
the fact that when
Williamson does convert, some years later, he writes a letter to
all the people he knew, summoning them to assignment one of these
seems went to went to web, but whether that was instrumental in
his conversion, nobody seems to know.
So
this is Alex Russell, word 1846. To 1916, your first salient figure
in American Islam interesting
coincidence of narratives. The British Consulate say no, they
don't want anything to do with an escaped prisoner. Please don't
bother us. They refuse to get involved. So web probably acting
beyond the call of duty contact of the captain of British tramp
steamer in Manila Bay, explaining this
situation, and the captain comes along to the embassy with heavy
fireman's uniform. And
Williamson goes through the streets of
Manila under the eyes of the Spanish authorities pretending to
be a drunk fireman. Nobody notices who he is, and he makes good his
escape.
He then, because he's
learned his trade well is a good Mariner learns a position when he
reaches Hong Kong, which is where the steamer is going as
quartermaster on a crack liner, one of the piano liners, which is
heading for Singapore and India.
So at that time, ships could be really terrifyingly scruffy, old
tubs, but they were also kind of the first class wide body jets of
the time, but more elegant.
And he's got a job on one of these crack liners. So he goes to Bombay
is paid off. And here again, he seems to have one of his sort of
wanderlust episodes. And again, he's got his religious eyes open.
Bombay is a completely amazing place because all of the world's
religions are there. And as it were on display, it's like a
living museum of world religions.
temples, churches, mosques, he goes to the caves of Elephanta. He
sees the burning gaps, the Towers of Silence, and everything is
there in Bombay. And this also makes him think about higher
things. He does seem to have a
spiritual yearning, which Brooks surface first when he was
wandering around in California, but now it's there again, and he
starts to wonder, well, which of these could possibly be right?
Christianity had been kind of beaten out of him by this severe
Victorian upbringing.
But which of these extraordinary exotic alternatives could possibly
be the case? Remember, he's still
a teenager. But he's a seeker is a serious person. And he's looking
for a sign and he starts praying for a sign.
It's confusing. Bombay is 1000 religions. How is he supposed to
make up his mind? So the next ship he works on is going to Eden,
which is ghosts ruled from British India, separate colony, and the
ship has a little library, and in the library, he finds a book about
Islam.
This is the famous book, the religion of Islam by Abdullah
Quilliam, the first really real Muslim blockbuster in the UK, even
Queen Victoria ordered lots of copies to give to her friends and
Muslim visitors. She had an interesting relationship with
India and Islam.
So he reads it again and again. And he's really interested.
And it looks as if this is the key to his knock. Here he has
the answer to all of those questions which have been
going around in his mind ever since he was lying on his back in
the Californian desert, looking up at the stars, wondering and
wondering.
It seemed to be a monotheism that was practical
and
common sensical. And this is certainly the way Quilliam
presents it
a religion less stereotypically oriental in the kind of Baroque
complex sense. Then Christianity, which Quilliam tried to present as
this really exotic Greek Mystery Religion full of doctrines and
paradoxes that nobody could ever really understand. But whose charm
was in there, incomprehensibility, Trinity, dual nature of Jesus and
so forth, and Islam This is much more common sense almost Anglo
Saxon type of religion. That seems to be the line that he's taking.
In other words, the D ethnic sizing of Islam and its
presentation is something that directly speaks to the questions
asked by his
religion and it also seemed to be a religion for independently
minded people. Again, Quilliam is endlessly going on about the
church as a restriction of the believer by the church and the
parish system and the Inquisition and so on, doesn't have that kind
of hierarchy and you pick the Mufti that you want, and it's kind
of almost like a Free Church. You just freelance as
Were no mediators between man and God. And it's also seemed
quite appealing to somebody of such strongly individualistic
spirit.
So he gets off the ship in Aden.
And Aiden is not like Hong Kong, or Los Angeles, or
Bombay, where there's a district where they lose go, which is
always
outrageous.
Bombay has Grant Road, which had visited which into the stage, it's
a street of prostitutes and women are in cages.
Nothing like that in Aden. He's in Arabia now, even though it's part
of the British Empire. The culture is Muslim culture, severe,
oriented towards heaven, and it's quite different. So
it turns out that the assistant resident in Aden is an old friend
of his father's.
So the local resident perhaps without
consulting the father offers in a job as a policeman. He needs
another white policeman.
And Williamson has to add a couple of years to his official age, but
he's accepted. And so he gets a house good money, and for him an
opportunity to live amongst Muslims to see how the thing
actually works in practice,
quite dangerous work in many ways, but he's a man who's good with his
fists and knows how to use his service revolver, and he is sent
occasionally on piracy suppressing expeditions to Northern
Somaliland. His unexperienced cowboy, he has those gunslinging
techniques and so he becomes a good policeman.
But the residency is not happy with the way in which he
fraternize is with the natives. No British imperial ideology is based
on the aloofness the charisma of the white man and the men sob as
being a kind of Empyrion cast benign towards the natives, but
certainly not fraternizing, or befriending them. And this applies
even to relatively minor functionaries such as the Aden
police.
So they start to keep an eye on him because of this sort of social
apartheid. And he's spending time in the mosques. Not Muslim yet,
but he's going to the mosque, he goes to the McCollum of hobby
bubble bucket and Ida rose, which also upsets them he acquaint
himself with the SADES. The guard is the other luminaries of the
port, the alma mater, saying, well, you're young, don't rush
things, make sure you know what you're doing. They can see a
certain impetuosity in him and wide eyed zeal of the neophyte. So
he takes his time.
But the authorities think that actually young William is not
quite the thing.
It upsets the August Grandia of the British elite in Aden for one
of their representatives to be fraternizing with the natives and
to go into their place of worship. And so
they
create a crisis. And the crisis seems to have been triggered
slightly earlier when another policeman in the Aden pray also
converts, possibly maybe in order to marry a local girl. But he's
immediately sent off to India and isn't allowed to remain.
So the resident sends him to talk to various army padres, about
Christianity, and to remind them of the Christian duties of the
servants of the Raj, and he ought to pull his socks up.
But he doesn't pay any attention. He spent about a year there as
learning Arabic spending time with all of that with these very kind
of
cool people who
assist him, but aren't immediately kind of on his case, and
bombarding him with flattery and urging him to take his shahada
immediately, they adopt the more reticent traditional form. So he
then sends a letter to his father, saying, by the way, Pedro, I've
got a nice job as a policeman in Aden. And have you considered the
truths of the Koran.
Okay, so the father is once again
disappointed,
and then he finally decides that he's going to take his shahada in
a very public way. Aiden is just
is the kind of
British corner but he goes to the palace of the Sultan of Lodge,
which is to the north of Aden, where he makes his formal Shahada.
And even though the automat say, well, you're an adult convert, you
don't really need to be circumcised, you insists on going
through with it. So it's the use the traditional egg and Flint
method, which I probably won't describe here.
And it becomes Abdullah father.
And the rest of his life is * Abdullah FADEL, later on paddy
Abdullah father Zubayr, when he starts to live in Serbia in
southern Iraq.
And he goes back to Aden, and immediately tells all of the
members of the European community what is done. So of course, he is
placed under arrest, sent off to India. And the official story is
that he's suffering from a touch of the sun,
some stroke, going dative, or some other embarrassing thing. He asked
to be released from the police when he gets to Bombay, and they
say yes, and by the way, here is your ticket back to England,
you're from a free ticket. But he refuses this wants to go back to
the Middle East. But he finds that he can't is being followed, he
can't get a ticket, and nobody will grant him passage and going
by sea is the only possible way to go.
So what he does is to buy somebody else's ticket in somebody else's
name. This is a Iraqi horse dealer who's in Bombay, who doesn't need
the sector return half of his ticket. So Abdullah buys it from
him. And off he goes incognito, as it were, even though the British
stopped the ship in the Gulf, thinking that he's probably on
board and search it and he admits Yes, this is me, William Williams,
and it is told returned to India immediately. But when the backs of
the British returned, he manages to exchange his clothes for Arab
clothes and sails away in the company of some Kuwait is on a
dowel and goes to Kuwait. So he is now in
the southern fringes of the Ottoman Empire, spent a lot of
time in Barcelona, which eventually becomes kind of his
spiritual home. It's great Ottoman city at the time, of course,
outside British control
and improving his Arabic.
He has
an interesting encounters in the city of basura, not least with the
most famous Christian missionary of the day, Samuels. Waymo
was the founder of a number of important centers, including
central at Hartford Seminary in America and the Journal of the
Muslim world, which is now one of the best journals for Muslim
Christian relations. And it's certainly not a missionary
publication any longer. But he has this huge debate in basura, who's
kind of pushed up by the Arabs as their spokesman, even though the
debate has to happen in Arabic, with Samuels Waymo. So you've got
this 19 year old English new convert against this professorial
defender of the Trinity, and apparently, according to his
reminiscences anyway, he acquitted himself well.
And one of the things that he points to his interesting
is that he says, When the you Christians are always divided, a
Catholic missionary will be saying something else, and orthodox
mission will be something else. Why are you in the state of FTF?
Whereas look at us Muslims in southern Iraq, look at the good
relations between the Sunnis and the Shia. Were there any trouble
between the Sunnis and the Shia in Iraq,
different age, wasn't it?
But that was normal until recent eruptions and the rise of anxiety
Islam.
So you say from the Christians religiously, but the British
Empire is still not pleased with him, and he gets instructions to
report to the British Consulate in Basra.
And they pressure the Ottoman Governor into accepting this but
before he allows himself to be manhandled and taken to the
consulate,
he
vanishes
and his Arabian clothes now speaking possible Arabic, but he
learns Farsi later on apparently he had a very interesting career.
Iran also
takes his guns and his money and just vanishes into the desert.
Well, neither the Ottomans nor the British can possibly get their
hands on him.
So he spent some time in small desert towns Zoop
Air which becomes his final home, which is a Sunday town in southern
Iraq and walled city and
important center for the all on that, and also in Kuwait,
which is not part of either the British or the Ottoman domains at
the time. And he's working really hard, improving his Arabic and
also learning Islam.
At a later point in his career, he studies at another site in
Damascus is Kena. Really, who wants to, to know that element,
but he also loves traveling. He's got the Wanderlust again. So he
finds that there's a certain convergence between the cowboy
lifestyle and life on the open range, and the life of the Bedouin
of Arabia, which he appreciates for its freedom, and also the
spirit of adventure. So he learns much more about horses, and he
also learns about camels as well, and starts to earn an income
buying and selling horses and camels.
And then,
in 1894, he decided to do the Hajj. Seems he does the hunch
three times in his life, and this is the first 1890 vois a long time
ago. And one of the nice things about his account of the Hajj is
that you get a sense of what the Hajj was before widebody jets and
McDonald's and the kind of
money spinning experience that it's been turned into.
Unfortunately, in many ways since then. This is the time when you
went from Iraq, on Hajj, on camel, or maybe on a horse. Or you could
walk if you wanted. And it was dangerous. Because the marauding
nomads would pick you off if you were alone, or just in a small
group, you had to go with the official convoy, the caravan with
1000s of animals
that was sanctioned by the Khalifa himself
behind the great bilock, which is the banner, a huge nine foot high
red and green flag, which led the caravan
and the caravans would start relatively small from different
towns and then they would come together certain pre arranged
dates and certain towns and then it will just get bigger and bigger
until it reached the Holy City.
So there was this banner. And because most of the journey was
done at night, at the top of the banner, there would be a kind of
large globe that would have a lantern in it. So if you were lost
in the in the darkness, you hopefully be able to find your way
back to the
back to the Hodge caravan so he was going to join it from Zubair.
And later on it would meet up with the other caravans, but already
there's 3000 camels being sold and being saddled and you had to buy
everything yourself. You had to buy sheep slaughter the sheep dry
the meat you had to buy, I think he bought barrels of dried herb
machines and that kind of thing. And it really was a matter of your
own survival. So he buys seven pack camels loads them with all of
his stuff, and a
tent as well.
There are also Iranian and Indian hedges, those who have come
overland, who have joined the Arabs in Iraq in order to join
that the Bayrock cater for banner.
He reports that there was strict and efficient discipline on the
caravan. So before the caravan reached a place that would be
outriders who would go ahead to check the road obstacles or for
highwomen.
Another group which was always left behind, which would follow
about a mile or two behind in order to pick up any stragglers or
any items of value that had been left behind. Because of course
you'd have grannies and babies and it would be like a city on the
move.
In the evening there would always be formal sessions whereby the
scholars present would recite the Quran or answer questions and of
course the days before screens people could really benefit the
Hajj was a major is for some people the major life opportunity
for learning about religion, knowledge and so forth would be
would be a song now I'm dollar is young, vigorous and finds this
thing completely spectacular and amazing. People aren't in a
firearm yet they're in their national dress and the flag and
the beauty of the desert. It's a wonderful thing to see. He has a
white, fast riding camel, they'll all and he's always going up and
down the line sometimes going right up to the front.
Sometimes he
That was the entourage with the Emir al Hajj because there'll be
somebody in charge of it. And then when he got to the front to just
kind of sit back with his camera and just watch the whole
procession lumbering past and hearing people singing and
listening to different languages and traveling along something
called the darab Zubaydah.
Zubaydah was famous Princess daughter of Khalifa Harun Al
Rashid, one of the great sort of women of the Arabian Nights, who
was a benefactress of the Hajj. And to this day, if you go to
parts of Arabia, and even an Arafat, one of the few bits that
hadn't been pulled down is her aqueducts that she built in order
to carry water so the hydrogen artifact could have, could have
water and all the way on the road from Baghdad and southern Iraq to
Medina and Mecca. She would build systems and fortresses and make
sure that the hundreds would always be well supplied, and in
some cases, they're still functioning to date.
Nowadays, you might find that as a Coke machine next to the well or
something, it's not quite what it was, but the buildings are still
quite formidable. So that's the double beta. So beta is road.
They get to hat in daqarta heartless town in northern what's
now northern Saudi Arabia, local emir, slaughters enough camels to
feed everybody one of his traditional responsibilities. He
says that there's, they had cauldrons big enough to
accommodate a complete camel. If you can imagine what that
spectacle would have looked like. And then the next day, punctual to
the hour, the Baghdad caravan arrives and suddenly the moving
city is even larger.
Two weeks pass and they get to Medina
not going into the city until after the middle of the morning.
So they camp overnight in a place designated for the Baghdad caravan
and they can see the lights of Medina in the distance.
So he finds a place to stay quite close to the Haram wasn't really
hotels in those days, it was just local residents renting out rooms
or sometimes even their own the whole houses.
And then he goes into the harem in Medina and of course it's then a
city of scholars everywhere, every guest every column that some chef
comes scholar speaking in some language, because people needed to
leave plenty of slack in the dark ages so as not to miss the Hajj.
So everybody would get there pretty early. Otherwise, you have
to come back next year. And if you've just walked from Kashmir or
somewhere that's a big deal, so people will get there early. And
you'd have this idea of Mecca and Medina university cities in the
two or three months before the Hajj so he learns the as well. And
then
he goes to
Mecca to the harem itself following a motto with it seems he
does appear on Hajj. And again he leaves spectacular description of
what the Hajj was like the traditional firing of fireworks at
sundown
at the time of the father from artifacts, when everybody leaves
artifacts and head off to was delissa to signal that there will
be a cannon but also fireworks in the Ottoman period.
So he's done his Hajj, his Hajji. And for the rest of his life is
* Abdullah father does.
And then he goes off into the desert for several years, it seems
he's got this kind of wonder lost romance of the desert. He just
likes the life of it. And that's an interesting
phenomenon,
the falling in love with a desert in the bedwin Despite their
incredibly difficult lifestyle and the dangers of it.
Doughty for instance, who was here at Cambridge for a while one of
the great Arabian discoverers never really liked Islam never
particularly felt at ease. But when he came back from Arabia, and
he wrote his great travels in Arabia desierto, which is perhaps
the best book in English on the Arab suit was quite a good
observer. He went to live in His own town near Brighton it took
about two years before he could bear to take off his Bedouin
clothes and put on English clothes again, something goes into the
heart, Mohammed acid as well, who's going to many of the same
places maybe
3040 years later.
The mystique of the desert, the great silence the changeability of
the sky and the landscape. The simple, primordial intensity of
human life there. The wildlife is still lions at this time in the
desert. Ostriches wolves, it's an incredible place,
that he does get that bug
and
starts to become something of a sort of Bedouin himself. His
Arabic by this time seems to be more or less perfect, he can pass
as a native.
He associates with the tribe of Zafira, which is in the north of,
of Arabia,
participates in the bedwin favorite sport of the puzzle,
which is reading other tribes for to grab their own camels and their
sheep and their horses. And because he's a cowboy, His skills
are very much appreciated.
He has a slave, which records you finds difficult, but somebody
gives him this Nubian slave.
And he says, Well, of course, I'm going to liberate you. And the
slave is absolutely horrified, said no, we have a really good
life. And there's a slave who's now the governor of Basara. And
there's a long argument between him and the slave as recorded
later on by one of his biographers in which you get the sense that
slavery of we would understand it at a plantation slavery in
America, it was not what existed in the Arabian desert at the time,
but slaves were fully incorporated into people's houses, wore the
same clothes at the same food,
could get married, could own property could become wealthy and
generally didn't want their survival status to come to an end.
It's an interesting conversation. He has all kinds of interesting
adventures. On one occasion, he defends an entire tribe from a
large group of raiders is gun running again. So he has 20
Martini rifles, which he breaks up and gives to everybody in the
caravan, even half of them are kind of little girls as to Unix.
They've never used a gun before. It is at least for my circle at
night and kind of make a noise. And he does, in fact, save, save
the caravan. He travels very extensively, he goes from Kuwait
area down to Oman, across to Hadramaut to Sun Ark, up to visit
Rwanda bedwin, kind of northern Syria. So he goes all over Arabia,
his, he would be remembered as one of the great Raven explorers,
except that he's not really interested in
sort of observations. Unlike Abdullah Philby, who's the great
British Muslim, who is the first really to record a crossing of the
Empty Quarter, he goes across the Empty Quarter, but he doesn't
really talk about it is too much embedded in the lifestyle. Wilfred
thesiger Another interesting example of a kind of Englishman
that really gets into the bedwin bedwin world
various adventures and almost dies on a number of occasions, once he
gets cholera really badly, and very nearly dies. And
he, one occasion goes off on his own, to visit the encampment of
another tribe about a day away. When he gets encampment, he
realizes that the men of the encampment are all gone at this,
just the chieftains two daughters who were there.
And he gets chatting to them, and they spend a very pleasant
evening, the girls were worried this is kind of dangerous.
Because people are, are chased. Partly because if you step out of
line, somebody's going to cut your throat, crimes of passion, just a
way of life.
But then having a nice conversation with girls and
telling them about England and what the weather's like, and
factories and things like that. They're kind of amazed by this,
these tall tales, all three of them fall asleep.
He wakes up and there is the girl's father in the light of the
moon. And he's got his knife out. He's kind of looking at this
scenario.
And
eventually, the father decides against his original plan, which
he said was just to leave the three heads on the sand.
And says, Well, what you have to do is to marry one of my
daughters, obviously.
So Sheikh Abdullah
doesn't agree. He says, I'm not ready to get married. I like
traveling around and if I have a wife, he says if I have one wife,
she's she will regard it as a slight to be married to a man who
only has one wife. So she's going to insist that I take a second
wife, and I don't want to do that. And who am I
compared to the glory of
your lineage and I'm not worthy kind of thinks of things to say.
Unfortunately, the old guy kind of changes his mind and
doesn't mind particularly. So he has a number of narrow escapes
like that, no doubt more than he ever
records.
So he
is now back in
southern Iraq and spend some time with increasing success selling
polo ponies to the British, who used them a lot in India.
Polo is a kind of very elite thing here. But in India, where it was
more or less invented, just about every regimental officer would
have his own polo pony and groom and there was a big market for
them. Of course, the best horse has always come from Arabia. So he
manages to corner the market in that there's all kinds of
interesting tales of him going to Bombay, dressed Of course, as an
Arab, and listening to all these English officers, various foot
regiments talking about the horse, assuming he doesn't understand a
word of it. And not knowing that he's actually a wanted man in
India still just kind of stands there looking, because he does
look very much like like an Arab. And he gets away with it for
years, selling horses and making in some cases very considerable
profit.
So it kind of gets his own back in that way.
Other interesting, mischievous episodes,
it seems that He's the first man ever to ride a bicycle in southern
Iraq
is in Zubair, and the rule of Zubair is that I've ordered this
very weird thing called a penny farthing from England, and it's
come in a box, and none of my son's can figure out what it's
for.
So your English, can you come and explain this thing. Now, it seems
Williamson has never written that pennyfarthing either. And it's
actually really difficult.
It's not just like putting your leg over a normal bicycle. And
with a shove, away you go, you have to run it from behind, as if
you're running and jumping on a horse. And it takes a lot of
practice. So he's heard this, and he gets the sons to hold the
pennyfarthing while he jumps at this thing very improbably, from
behind, and he does himself quite a lot of injury, while little
wondering what on earth the strange performances.
But after a couple of days, he actually masters it, and open the
doors of the courtyard. And he goes off cycling this huge
pennyfarthing around the marketplace in Zubayr. And
everybody thinks it's a gin. The girls will be learning a lot kind
of hiding themselves, he goes through the bizarre, and it's a
total sensation than it was in anything like this before. And
that does his reputation some harm because he's identified with
various kinds of unnatural magical forces in so bear after that,
which is also reinforced when he teaches the local people how to
use a phonograph the kind of phonographic huge thing with a
long kind of trumpet attached to it very Congress, which comes with
cylinders, so he's able to record people reciting Quran and molded
into the phonograph and he pays it back to them and they they cannot
understand how somebody's voice comes from it. They can understand
of course, music coming from it, because they know that there's
little gin musicians inside the thing. Everybody can understand
that, but when it shifts so and so reading Quran, and now she soon so
is inside the phonograph also biller
just an interesting illustration of how unchanged those places were
and how total has been
transformation since that time, but he's obviously having a lot of
fun with all of this. Yeah, so he's known for a while as the gin
of the big and little wheel. That's his nickname in.
Yeah, in
Zubayr. So he's been 12 years, trading in horses and amasses
quite a fortune. And he decides that his latest change of career
track is going to be to go back to sea again. But this time, he wants
to have his own ship or in the Arabian Gulf, a dowel. It's very
ancient Caravelle type things which are amazingly SCI worthy,
actually, they're very intelligently put together, but
they're expensive. So he buys a relatively small Dow and he goes
on a series of expeditions sailing all over the
all over the Gulf. And eventually, of course, he comes up
with before the EagleEye of the British authorities, who have the
Royal Navy all over the Gulf looking for gun running and also
for slaving. So there's reports
Well, William Richard Williamson professing to be Hedgy, Abdullah
father and Muslim Arab to work goes up to the captains of
Corvettes to keep an eye on him. But generally he
knows how to give them a slip and seems to have a kind of reasonable
relationship with most of the Royal Navy vessels there.
So he's no longer in a tent. He's now in quite a comfortable house
in Basra. And whereas previously, whenever marriage was suggested to
him, he would say, a day's hunting with the Hawk is worth many women.
Don't know if he said that to the girls directly, but this is his
excuse. But he now seeks out the hand of a young
stubaier girl and he later acquires a wife in Baghdad as well
and has a lot of descendants and the descendants are still there.
But five years ago, I got an email from one of them.
Researching my grandfather,
with a muscley man, a family of Zubayr tourists my picture,
they've even got a little website in English about him.
So the descendants still perfectly
familiar with his story. And he's the kind of celebrity in
some circles in southern Iraq.
Now the best thing you can do with a doubt in Arabia, if you really
know the waters is Pearl fishing.
Now the pearl fishery is a dead for various obvious reasons in the
Gulf. But it used to be the world's most prolific place for
producing pearls which a
really valuable poll is something you can put in a Rogers Crone.
Very frustrating, because you have to open 10s of 1000s of oysters
before you get one with the with the valuable Pearl and it happens
seasonally. So this one pearls fishing season towards the end of
the year called unwholesome Kabir, which is the great dive which is
when everybody who's got even little skier for rowing boat goes
out and tries to dive.
It's a quite difficult because there are sandstorms
and shocks.
But present in a way the warmest sea in the world is actually the
sea between Bahrain and Qatar.
I see temperatures ever recorded. And the idea is to swim down to
the seabed to find the oysters and of course, there's nothing like
Aqua lungs or diving equipment of any kind, you just put a peg on
your nose and slip down and
it could be quite damaging for the health if you're going down to 20
meters or so to get to the seabed. And then with the basket on the
end of the cable would fill the basket and it would be hoisted up
and you just keep doing that for months. And you didn't need to put
into port I guess you would eat fish which you catch. And for
fresh water. The fishermen knew where they were freshwater springs
on the seabed, swim down with a leather skin, fill the leather
skin with the freshwater bring it up to the surface and you could
drink it might be slightly brackish, but it meant you didn't
need to put into harbor regularly. So again, a very kind of free
environment which he appreciated.
Usually the dolls would return to port without anything very much.
Occasionally some lucky captain would find some amazing pink pearl
in which case he'd be set up for life. It was a kind of gambling
really, but very reminiscent of * Abdullah's days panning for
gold in California. So he threw himself into it with with relish.
So he had his own 40 tonne Dow which equals affetto higher
and
describe describes
the daily pattern.
Dawn the divers sailors would line up and pray and then the divers
would rhythmically fill an empty their lungs to oxygenate the blood
and then would empty their lungs so they wouldn't have the buoyancy
and would dive. Straight down. There were certain two hours and
prayers that you would say at various points of the exercise
usually to go down. You would hold a lead weight or rock or something
to accelerate your trip to
the bottom, always on the lookout for shocks, poisonous sea snakes
which are common in the Gulf even now. barracudas other the terrors
of the deep that might
to
go for you, and then some of these Makara prayers, and in the evening
the sailors would just sit around prising open the oysters looking
for the pearls.
* Abdullah never strikes it rich. Unfortunately, an exception
to this is Allah's decree. I'm not going to make money this way. And
so he goes to Damascus for two years, where he really has some
quality time with Allah Matt in various madrasahs improving his
knowledge of the religion. So towards the end of his life, he is
recognized as a religious authority in Zubair area, and
people will come to him with with their questions.
And it's this point, when he comes back from the mother, I said that
he finds work with Western oil prospecting companies, which are
just starting to get underway in in the region.
So most notably in 1935, he leads the angle of Iranian oil companies
negotiations with the then ruler of Abu Dhabi, that he's the one
who negotiates the contract that actually starts
hybrid petrol carbon prospecting and production in
in what were the Trucial States, now the United Arab Emirates
similarly, he is useful to Imperial airways, the just
starting up flights from England to Australia 1935 It was really
expensive, much more expensive than taking a lineup
and it would be a flying boat, which would have to land on the
sea and suddenly couldn't go when the air was turbulent or at night.
So there had to be these landing
places in lots of various kinds sheltered from the waves, all the
way from Southampton where they started down to Northern Australia
and around the coast of Australia to
to Port Jackson, Sydney Harbour and they would go through the
Gulf. So he spent some time prospecting for suitable places
for these big Sunderland flying boats.
There's a lot of information about this is a book by somebody called
Archibald cision, which is, which is about the first Kuwaiti oil
concession some of the best sources for information about him.
He also spent some time in Iran, which is less clear and less well
documented, but it seems that is interest our commercial
buying and selling particularly equipment for the oil industry.
1937 he leaves the oil business and retires. He built himself a
little house in a village called cortile Hajaj near Zubair please
spend the rest of his life he dies in 1958 and this is where these
various travel writers catch up with him and listen to his story.
He was
always at the US Hormozgan bus era, particularly when a visiting
scholar was giving a class always present tearaway prayers.
At home he would either be with his Tasbeeh or with some cheap
novel about the Wild West. He had this endless supply of Penny
Westerns with titles like to gun Pete and mayhem at Dodge City kind
of thing that was his was his indulgence.
And then in 1958, he's taken on his his his Mazhar is known and as
I mentioned, his family are still very proud of his, his memory and
his still.
* Abdullah is still a person whom some old timers in the Gulf
particularly Kuwait, and also of Qatar, because he appears to have
been the first to have met the Emir of Qatar back in the early
30s, in order to start negotiations for prospecting, when
Qatar was really kind of
very, very, very poor. And he relates mischievously that he went
with the British High Commissioner of the crucial states, who
realized this was important and he said when we get to the Emir's
encampment, they will offer you sheet eyes, and it is very
important. Did you eat them with every appearance of enjoyment? And
poor old ambassadors thinking of a king and country
is actually a kind of urban legend. There's no particular
bedwin cultivating sheep's eyes. It's a kind of British
thing.
But Abdullah then goes to the chef's cooks and retinues and says
that you know, he's
His Highness the ambassador has a particular liking for sheep's
eyes. And it will be wonderful diplomatically if you could make
sure that he is regularly served with them. So of course, there's a
huge plate of sheep's eyes in front of the ambassador. And
everybody's watching to make sure it's eating with appreciation when
he chews on these nasty things.
Actually, they don't get the concession at that point, I'm
sorry, spoiler free for for some time. So even as a fairly old man,
he still enjoys
a laugh at the expense of authority.
Just an after thought.
He's been there in various improbable forms in the
blogosphere the last few years partly as a result of a strange
piece by an Iranian nationalist on forbes.com Because it's a kind of
recurrent conspiracy theory again, amongst secular Iranian
nationalists that
Abdullah Williamson was actually Khomeini's father.
This is a very, very widespread belief and there's even an obscure
English guy who's married to an Iranian woman who's written long
article in which he tries to prove this, that Khomeini's mother who
is a slightly mysterious woman from Kashmir, I think she was
Indian
actually had this child with this mysterious wandering Englishman,
and that Khomeini was always very
discreet about his family and his ancestry. And for the Iranian
nationalist anti Islamic brigade. This is perfect because it means
once again, the British show that nemesis of Iran have messed us up
by bringing in this clerical spy Khomeini, in order to stop Iran
marching on to its manifest Aryan destiny. It's an attractive idea
for some of them.
In practice, it seems that the evidence is rather thin and
contrived. It's not inconceivable. He was a man of
who was able to engage in all kinds of scrapes and adventures,
but it's not really been verified. As far as we can tell. He just had
the two Iraqi wives and suddenly that's what the family now are
claiming. But it's an interesting thought. Carnage Sheldrake, Amira
Turkistan, Lord Headley, king of Albania. And William Williams in
the father of the
Ayatollah Khomeini, it would be a great story, if only it could be
verified, great movie as well. Of course, all of this would make
this inconceivably exciting, exciting film. So I've gotten in
some detail into the picturesque qualities of this particular
individual, one of the one of those for whom Islam seemed to
work particularly well as a religion for free spirited people.
For those who are more comfortable with nature than with cities,
those who were not particularly afraid of discomfort or death, but
value to the qualitative intensity of traditional human life, over
and against the kind of centrally heated comforts of our mediocre,
say me modernity.
He saw both worlds and he was very clear as to the one which he
preferred, and in which he felt his humanity was most exercised.
There are plenty of other cases, some more documented than others
of British people who have found Islam
particularly appropriate spiritual context for this kind of radically
anti LUMION individualistic style of
fashioning one's life. Nowadays, in a highly regulated,
scrutinized, written or scanned worlds, it's rather harder for
people just to vanish and go off grid the way he did.
But it's interesting that Islam can function in the context of
being inspirational, being kind of leader, not just for somebody who
has a large amount of faithful followers hanging on his every
world, but somebody who always wished to be a solitary and unique
person plowing his own lonely Pharaoh.
So that is very different in an SNL. That's part of the point was
more than one way of being an inspirational Muslim, Salam
aleykum.
Cambridge Muslim College, training the next generation of Muslim
thinkers