Lauren Booth – Rediscovered mother of British Islam
AI: Summary ©
The transcript discusses the "medicals and their impact on society," including their influence on political and cultural fronts, including the Tory movement. The "medicals and their impact on society," including their influence on political and cultural fronts, including the Tory movement. The segment also touches on the "medicals and their impact on society," including their influence on political and cultural fronts, including the Tory movement. The segment also touches on the "medicals and their impact on society," including their influence on political and cultural fronts, including the Tory movement.
AI: Summary ©
As-salamu alaykum brothers and sisters.
From pirates to aristocrats, the kind of people
accepting Islam from the British Isles is as
varied as each of our characters.
But one important story remained buried for a
hundred years and has now been brought to
light, alhamdulillah.
It's a story of a working class woman
of immense bravery and intelligence who hailed from
the same area as my father's family.
Now Liverpool in the north of England, where
Elizabeth Cate was blessed with her awakening, was
an area described at the time as the
most drunken and violent in the United Kingdom.
But this brave sister's test and determination give
us questions about how Islam can look in
the British context.
How can we organise ourselves?
What does dawah actually look like and mean
in our context?
And what mistakes and victories did our earliest
organised community have?
So my guest today has written a groundbreaking
work called Our Fatima of Liverpool and we're
going to be exploring that.
Yahya Burt is a British American writer and
academic.
He holds an Oxford University MPhil in social
and cultural anthropology and his research interests include
Muslims in Britain and Europe, Islamophobia, contemporary Islamic
thought, and I want to add an interest
in working class converts to Islam in Victorian
Northern England.
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem.
As-salamu alaykum brother Yahya.
Walaykum as-salam wa rahmatullah.
I think I want to kick off with
a taste on the flavour of urban Liverpool
in the 1880s because really the roots of
our Muslimness in the British Isles, if you
like, in that first community, come from this
very dynamic, quite frightening reality.
Tell us about Liverpool in the 1880s.
Well, you know, this was Liverpool's heyday.
Half of Britain's shipping went through Liverpool and
that was a seventh of the entire world,
but it wasn't just the freight that was
powering the industrial revolution in the northwest of
England at the time.
It was also a major passenger port as
well, so you had people coming from the
east, from the east and from the West
African coast, and so Liverpool on the docks
and the area around the docks was multicultural.
So many people coming in and out of
the city and obviously it would be hugely,
hugely expanded.
You had a huge Irish population, Welsh population,
so it was a very lively mix of
different cultures come to this boom town, basically,
that was the main port for the industrial
heartlands of the country.
So there was great wealth being generated there.
There was also great poverty and there was
great, you know, great cultural interchange and dynamism.
So it was an exciting place to be,
despite all the problems, obviously, that it was
facing.
But it was known for drunkenness.
Unfortunately, I've got too many alcoholics in my
family who were scousers as well.
You know, we've got that in our family,
like, you know, we've got that in archbishops,
bishops in our family and alcoholics, that's what
we are.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, you know, with something like 40
,000 to 50,000 sailors coming in and
out of the docks every year.
And they got their pay when they landed
at the dock.
And with all this money in their pocket,
they spent it on booze.
And women, you know, there was a lively
trade in prostitution as well on the docks.
So, you know, there was a lot of
attempts to, by the police to try and
crack down on brothels unsuccessfully, for the most
part.
And there was also the temperance movement as
well, which was a kind of, which was
really driven by devout Christian women, started in
America, but spreads globally to Britain and other
places, including Liverpool.
But it was allied with progressive causes like
anti-imperialism, trade unionism, the rights of women,
and so on.
So it's a very underappreciated movement.
It's sort of seen today, mistakenly, as a
kind of puritanical movement.
Actually, it was aligned with progressive causes at
the time.
But one of the heart of the temperance
movement as well was that the liquor trade
is a great evil.
So there was a judgment there.
And did that come off the back, this
movement of, you know, there were lots of
Catholics, Irish Catholics who lived in Liverpool, but
there was also Protestantism.
Weren't there kind of warring factions on the
street around this time?
Yeah, there was, you know, it was a
divided city to a certain degree.
You didn't marry across the line.
In fact, you know, my family comes from
Liverpool.
And in earlier generations, you know, my grandparents
broke that taboo.
And neither of the two sides really spoke
to each other after that, so it was
a real thing, even into the 20th century.
And there could be sectarian violence.
And it was a cause of political split
in the city.
So the Tories played up the Irish question
in Liverpool, and were able to, you know,
to secure the working class Protestant vote in
the city.
Because of that, despite that trade unionism flourishes,
even under some aligned with the Tories, including,
in fact, the founder of the first mosque
in Britain, Abdullah Quilliam, he was a trade
unionist and a Tory, both, and was president
of the Carters Union, among his many other
activities.
So we can't tell the story of Fatima
Kate, as she changed her name from Elizabeth
to Fatima, without a little bit of the
history of William Abdullah Quilliam, because they met,
and he is this incredible, dynamic figure, both
in Liverpool, and of course, at the heart
of that Muslim community.
Tell us, you know, some of the pivotal
points that we need to know about Abdullah
William Quilliam.
Sorry, apart from the fact his parents had
a sense of humour, calling William Quilliam.
Yes, exactly, yeah.
I mean, Victorian humour doesn't always land, but
some of it does.
I mean, he was, he came from a
temperance background, like many of the early converts
in Liverpool, including Fatima, and he had a
double training as a lawyer and a journalist.
And, through overwork, his doctor told him to
take a rest cure.
He winds up going to Gibraltar to study
the rocks.
He had a passion for geology, and decides
on the spur of the moment to go
and visit Morocco, where he meets Muslims for
the first time.
He comes back to England, self-studies, and
converts privately in 1886.
But what makes him an historic figure is
that the following year, he decides to actually
call the people of England, the people of
Liverpool, to Islam, through the temperance movement, initially,
because that was where he'd spent his youth,
actually, as an activist.
And so I think he wanted to bring
the temperance movement, people into Islam, by describing
the Islam as the greatest totalist movement in
history.
So this is one of the early things
that really interests me about Abdullah Quilliam, is
the way that he gives dower.
So first and foremost, just because he learns
about Islam in Morocco, he doesn't come back
and dress like a Moroccan.
He's very much the Victorian gent, with the
beard in that certain shape, and the top
hat for his work as a lawyer, and
the frock coat.
And yet, from his mouth, was coming in
English, this great exhortation and love for the
one he calls the great Arabian teetotaler.
Tell us about his form of dower, and
who he would have been speaking to.
Well, I think he had a period of
reflection on this, because I think, after he
privately converted, he tried a direct approach, and
attacking Christianity, looking at its shortcomings, and comparing
them disfavorably compared to Islam.
But he found that that didn't work.
He got a lot of, he got immediately
kind of chastised, and rejected, and thought as
a kind of bit of a loony, basically.
So he then decided to put an indirect
approach, and we see this preserved in what
is probably the first dower lecture to be
published in English anywhere, which is his address,
Fanatics and Fanaticism, which was recorded verbatim by
a shorthand copywriter.
And so we have that, and it was
published.
And you know, he basically sort of talks
about how teetotalers are visionaries who, you know,
are misunderstood, and castigated, and rejected.
And he then talks about other sorts of
pioneers and reformers, like William Wilberforce, the Hull
MP who campaigned for the abolition of slavery
in the British Empire.
And then he talks about George Stevenson, and
the invention of the locomotive steam engine, and
the first railway line between Manchester and Liverpool,
and how there were a lot of naysayers
about that scheme as well.
And then he goes on to talk about
the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, somebody
who was similarly misunderstood, but was the greatest
reformer of any time, and the Prophet indirectly,
through the route of talking about reform and
teetotalism.
Obviously designed to appeal, as I said, in
the early years, I think the first two
years of his mission, his call as dower,
was to bring the temperance movement, local temperance
movement, on board with Islam.
And, you know, the thing is that I
should emphasize that as a young man, he'd
worked right across the north in the temperance
movement, and was well regarded.
So he was building from his pre-existing
network, let's put it that way.
This was not a cold call for him.
He was working with people that he already
knew.
So what we can take from that about
dower then, surely, is that you work within
the people who you already know you and
trust you, which is very prophetic, isn't it?
The Prophet, peace be upon him, was known
as the truthful.
He didn't come from somewhere else with an
alien, you know, character.
They knew him.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think that there has to be it's
a challenge for all of us.
If we look at Britain today with a
population of four million Muslims, who are racialized
in significant ways, converting to Islam today is
kind of a modern variant of turning Turk,
which is what they used to call converts
to Islam in Britain, you know, in the
16th century.
So I think that there's always been an
attempt to cast Islam as a foreign religion,
when it's so clearly now a religion of
the land, a religion of the country.
And so the challenge is going to be,
I think, is always when somebody converts is
to actually stay in their communities and bear
witness, rather than seek the comfort of that
formerly and strong community and just inhabit that
space, and no longer inhabit the space of
our original communities, or at least to do
a balancing act between the two.
And I don't personally, I don't think I've
succeeded myself very well in that.
Why not?
Why not?
What would you change?
I think that, I think that I, if
I look back, because I've been a Muslim
for over 30 years, I think that the
cultural distance was much bigger back then between
British Muslims and British society at large, and
now that gap has closed.
But I think I had this sense of
inhabiting different worlds, making cultural adjustments on my
own journey, rather than thinking in the way
that Quilliam thought.
But then he was in a different context,
really, they were on their own.
I'm not saying they were an isolated community,
far from it, but they quickly developed an
international reputation and contacts and so on.
But nonetheless, they were basically on their own,
they admitted themselves to Islam, they didn't read
Shahada to anybody.
They were still in the middle of their
community, even after converting, if you see what
I mean.
They weren't sort of, there wasn't somewhere to
receive them.
Oh, I see what you mean, there was
nowhere to go, right?
They had to create their own institution, they
had to make their own mosque, and you
know, and they only took their Shahada later,
maybe two years after having admitted themselves to
Islam.
So you see what I mean, they were
doing it on their own anyway.
So we're gonna, I want us to, we'll
circle back, remind me to circle back about
how their version of British Islam looks, and
what they brought with them, because they were
in this bubble.
But let's talk a little bit about who
was Frances Cates, and what was her background?
Because I think there has been a good
amount written, for example, about some of the
aristocrats, who may have converted to Islam, but
for some reason, our Fatima was left by
the wayside.
How did you rediscover her?
And how hard was that?
And who was she?
A lot of questions there.
So let me talk about her first.
So Fatima, Frances Elizabeth Murray, as she grew
up, a working class girl from Birkenhead.
Her father was Irish, her mother was from
Edinburgh.
She was the fifth of six children.
She was at the first cohort to be
educated under the Education Act of 1870.
So that meant that she got an education
up to the age of between five and
12.
And we don't know much more about her
early child, except she loses, her father dies
when she's young.
And although her mother later remarries, I think
that they struggled, and the older boys had
to support the family, because I don't think
Agnes, her mother, worked.
But she was curious.
She obviously had some education.
She got involved in the temperance movement, became
secretary of the local association.
And that's where she meets Quillian for the
first time.
He gives a talk about the Great Arabian
Teetotaler in the summer of 1887.
So the thing is, what's remarkable about her
is that she didn't let her background, her
lack of advantages, hold her back.
Whatever opportunities she could take, she took.
And she shows remarkable determination, intelligence, and perseverance
in everything that she does in her short
life.
She only lives to the age of 35.
And she's a truly remarkable inspirational figure.
She was written about briefly in Ron Jeeves's
biography of Abdullah Quillian, which came out over
a decade ago.
There's about a page, page and a half
on her.
But with the work of my co-author,
Hamid Mahmood, and myself, we decided she deserved
her own standalone story.
We didn't want the story of this first
community to be focused on the individual founder,
because it was a working class community of
around about 250 individuals in total over a
period of 20 years, with international contacts.
So people coming in and out of the
community from all different parts of the Muslim
world.
So we wanted to kind of flesh out
the story of this whole community.
And Fatima was an obvious person, because for
me, she really is the co-founder of
the mosque.
And she was really the second most important
figure in this community after Quillian.
So we wanted to give her her due.
So in terms of finding materials, we had
to go to India to find that material,
because before the community produced its own newspaper
from 1893, in the earlier years you have
to go far and wide to find materials.
And happily, you know, Fatima's own story, her
own conversion account, was published in a journal
published in Allahabad in India.
It's a fantastic book, which we have at
the back of the book.
And that really was the nucleus of what
helped us to tell her story.
And other than that, of course, we're digging
in things like, you know, archives and old
maps and A-Zs and business directories and
census and birth and death certificates, marriage certificates,
you know, thin material.
And also reading between the lines of beyond
her own few samples of writing that survived
poetry and prose.
We were sort of reading between the lines
of the narratives of others, because after 1893,
we don't have anything in our own hand.
So we had to work very hard to
account for the last seven years of her
life.
And to do what we could to kind
of read between the lines and fill in
the gaps of that story.
Which you did, which you did really well,
because it goes between different people's accounts, which
is really important.
So it grows from her story to the
community.
This is from How I Became a Muhammadan,
September 1891.
It's in the appendix at the end by
Fatima E.
Cates, Liverpool Muslim Institute.
She says, when I was a girl about
19 years of age, I used frequently to
attend temperance meetings.
And it was at one of these meetings
I heard Mr. Quilliam, a well known in
Liverpool, and great advocate of total abstinence, deliver
a lecture on fanatics and fanaticism.
Up to this time, I'd always heard about
Muhammad, described as an imposter and a bloodthirsty
man who forced people to believe in his
religion by threatening to put them to death.
These libels and misdirects and lies are pretty
much here today.
Nothing's changed, has it?
I think that's right.
I think that Islam, the light of Islam
is covered over by a veil of lies,
calumny, propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, fake news, you know,
black propaganda, you name it.
You know, we live in an information world.
And I think, you know, we still there's
still this veil, but also there's the opportunity.
I mean, it's easier than ever today, than
ever before, to open your phone or your
laptop and listen to a devout Muslim talk
about Islam at the click of a button,
if you choose to listen to them.
You know, so the opportunity is there.
But also the veil of misdirection is has
also spread to the same online spaces.
So, you know, our work is still cut
out for us, I think.
You know, what's fascinating is it took one
speech for her to then she then she
goes, that's not what I thought.
Let me, Allah put curiosity in her heart
for Muhammad, peace be upon him, let me
go and find out for myself.
So to anybody watching or listening to this,
I would say, you know, you wouldn't find
out about bicycles and their uses and their
positive impact from a car salesman, you wouldn't
find you wouldn't go to a vegan restaurant
to find out the best cuts of lamb,
you know, come to the Muslim community and
search the sources for yourself.
They're wide and varied.
Okay, but to go to people who are
immediately critical and disliking and go, that's my
main source.
You're all liars.
That's problematic.
You know, we really must go to primary
sources.
And the primary source for news and truths
about Muhammad, peace be upon him, is the
Muslim community.
So, Francis Cates became Fatima Cates after a
couple of meetings.
I think there were only two converts at
the time, Brother Ali and Brother Abdullah.
Is that right?
Was she the first?
That's right.
Yeah, the first trio of founding converts who
form a society in July together, which becomes
the Liverpool Muslim Institute and the first functioning
mosque community.
So, Fatima was there at the beginning in
July of 1887.
Tell us about the rejection that she faced
at home.
Well, her mother Agnes was very devout.
And when she caught Fatima at home reading
a translation of the Quran, you know, she
basically tried to take it off her.
And Fatima ran into a room, locked it,
and said, I'm not going to reject anything
I haven't read and understood.
So, you know, I'm going to study this
book.
And as soon as they heard about her
decision, and obviously there was a little surprise
and anger and consternation in her family, they
tried to stop her going to meeting with
the other two converts.
You know, they intercepted correspondence from Quilliam, because
he was writing to her at this point,
with some fundamentals about the teachings of Islam,
as well as her self-study.
But she was dauntless.
You know, she just escaped home and went
across the Mersey and went to the meetings
in Liverpool.
And nothing deterred her.
She was dauntless, you know.
A quiet legend, if you know what I
mean.
You know, nothing held her back.
And she not only had challenges within her
family, she also had the early meetings of
the community were regularly disrupted by street toughs.
You know, people would waylay them, going to
and from the meetings.
Fatima was often accosted on the street and
held down, and horse manure was spread in
her face.
But this young woman of 22, she never
backed down.
She still went every single week for the
meetings at the rented premises that they had.
So, when they started out, they were renting
an upstairs room in one of the temperance
halls in Liverpool.
And they said it was really hard work
to get people to come at the beginning.
Often they said nobody was there but ourselves,
as we'd called people.
But then eventually, slowly over about two years,
that band of three becomes 14 or 15,
you know.
So, incredibly hard work under very difficult circumstances.
Even sometimes the meetings themselves could be broken
up, you know.
And on one occasion there was violence, you
know, that was witnessed by Fatima and her
husband Hubert, who hadn't converted at that time.
He does convert later in 1890, but he
witnesses, along with her, the violence directed at
the Muslim community.
So, a small Muslim community as it was.
So, you know, she saw a lot, but
she, as I said, she was a pillar
of that community.
I wonder what lessons we can draw from
the way that they anglicized the sermons and
practices.
So, I've got a book that was given
to me by Sheikh Abdul Hakeem Murad in
Cambridge, and it is Muslim Hymns.
And it's taking on that idea that the
sounds from each area of the world, where
we come from, are really inside us in
a way that we can't fundamentally describe.
You know, the tonality of an Indian Muslim,
their understanding of tonality is very different from
the traditional hymns, you know, Jerusalem and things
like that.
In fact, I know that our Asian and
Arab brothers and sisters, because of their wavering
tonalities, they find our way of music very
boring.
But to us, you know, it raises our
iman.
It does something to us.
So, I know that kind of anglicized sermons
and practices.
Talk us through how that looked.
Yeah, I mean, I think that, as I
said to you before, they were on their
own in the first few years, and they
admitted themselves to Islam.
And all three of the first three converts
all came out of the temperance movement.
So, they had a meeting on a Sunday
evening, which to all intents and purposes looked
like a Protestant even song service, but with
Islamic content.
So, they had hymns.
They took popular hymns of the day.
They only changed the lyrics if they contravened
Islamic teachings or monotheisms, as they understood them
from the Quran.
And they had a kind of sermon that
was quite often quite either vehemently anti-Christian
or, you know, gave out some fundamentals about
Islam or the Prophet's life.
And they would have, you know, readings of
the Quran from the stage.
They would read prayers from the stage.
So, it would be a stage then with
chairs, you know.
And this set up, this arrangement, it was
carried over when they moved to their own
premises in 1889.
So, this carried on.
So, what changed was that they would call
the Adhan for the first time in England
out onto the street, first in Arabic, then
in English.
Then they would have this, what they originally
called Sunday Divine Services.
And then after that they would have the
namaz.
So, the Sunday Divine Service was open to
anybody to come in off the street.
And the namaz, which was at a fixed
time about eight or nine, something like nine
o'clock, it would be only for Muslims.
On a Sunday, not on a Friday?
On a Sunday, yeah.
You know what?
Something has just landed with me.
Because they were on their own, they kind
of made up what a service would look
like.
Did they know nothing about what a khutbah
should be or nothing about, you know, how
to, what was the actual namaz like?
How did they learn these things?
It's a little bit unclear, but the namaz
starts out off.
They did offer a namaz quite early on,
or a salah, but it was at a
fixed time.
So, the time remained fixed, or timetabled throughout
the whole year.
Was it five times a day?
Well, maybe individually.
I'm talking about collective services at the mosque,
which, by the way, was called the Church
of Islam for the first, you know, first,
I would say, five or six years.
It later gets called the mosque, or the
pro-mosque, provisional mosque.
I don't know what pro-mosque means, but
some of the Indian Muslims were calling it
a pro-mosque.
I don't know exactly what that means, but
there was a sign outside on the street
which said Church of Islam.
The thing is, you have to remember that
at this point in the early 1890s, they
were balancing between two things, two competing sets
of expectations.
Okay, so, going from a period of isolation,
being in a bubble, as you put it,
actually, you know, they're gaining huge exposure.
So, from about 1890, the word of this
community spreads throughout the Muslim world.
It's a sensational story.
So, people start to come to visit, and
come to try and help them, and so
on.
So, they had Orthodox Muslims coming, both Laskars,
you know, Muslim sailors who were coming onto
the docks.
So, working people, as well as, you know,
kind of law, you know, rich Indian law
students who would come to help them, okay,
educated.
And, in fact, one of them comes, Rafiuddin
Ahmed, and gets them to read the Shahada
with him when he first comes up to
Liverpool.
So, as I said, they admit themselves to
Islam, but later on, an Indian Muslim says,
look, I want to sit you down.
I want you to read the Shahada to
me.
And, sorry, there was a bit of pushback,
wasn't there, from some of the Indian Muslims
visiting, who said, they didn't say, I don't
know if they said it's kufr, but it's
like, this is nonsense.
You're not, you're not doing what you need
to do.
Yeah, they're saying it's nonsensical, and, you know,
it doesn't make much sense.
And, even some of the Ottoman sailors said
the same thing.
I didn't put all the sources in, but
basically, I'm saying you've got Orthodox minded Muslims
saying, you know, this is all a bit
strange, and dodgy.
We're glad you've become Muslim, but, you know.
And then you had the passers-by on
the street, hearing the Adhan, and then they're
calling people in, and they want them to
get something that they're culturally familiar with.
So, the hymns are hymns that the people
who come in off the street would have
grown up listening to.
So, they're caught between, sort of, the hostile
slash curious passer-by on the street, because
the first mosque was on a very busy
road, the West Derby Road, going into the
city.
Lots of foot traffic, carriage traffic, and so,
you know, anybody could be passing that little
mosque, which was just in a little Georgian
terraced house.
And, at the same time, word is spread
in the Muslim world, and they're getting visitors.
So, they've got two competing sets of expectations
here at this point.
So, what you find is the community that's
on a journey.
It's a transitional movement from Protestant Christianity to
Sunni Islam, if you see what I mean.
So, by about 1906, you know, 15 years
later, the mosque itself issues a prayer manual
that is basically Hanafi fiqh.
I mean, for tahara, for purity, and for
prayer.
Even Aquilliam's introduction says, you know, really, does
God really want us to say prayers in
language we don't understand?
You know, isn't it better still to say,
offer our devotions in English?
So, he was never really entirely sure about
it, but the prayer manual was written by
a muazzin of the community, Ahmed Brown.
So, you know, and also the Indians provided
imams to come up to guide the community.
So, Mawlana Barakatullah Bopali was there in Liverpool
between 1892 and 1893.
But I always felt that there was always
a kind of complicated thing going on, where
they still wanted to keep the appeal to
the people coming in, because it was a
dour-minded institution, and the primary mission was
to get people to convert to Islam.
And they didn't want to make it seem
too strange to them.
So, you know, you have to remember there
are very few Muslims in Britain at this
time, under 10,000.
And so, you know, it's not like today.
You'd probably meet a Muslim every day in
this country now, wherever you live.
But or seen one, but it was different
back then.
So, I think that, as we see in
Fatima's story, there were a lot of misconceptions
flying around about Islam.
So, you know, I think that it's something
we need to be straight about, these sort
of dilemmas, but at the same time view
them with the eye of charity, I think,
because they didn't have much to go on,
didn't have any resources or knowledge.
But what they did with the little that
they knew was remarkable, I think, even if
it's not what we would do today, because
we're in a totally different circumstance.
But I think we have to sort of
say, well, you know, they did it with
a lot of bravado and confidence.
And, you know, they just, you know what
I mean?
They gave it a shot.
They gave it their best shot.
I think that's fair to say, you know.
You know what's interesting is that you see
that Abdullah Quilliam, he talked about temperance as
a way of reaching people in this really
torrid kind of scene of drunken sailors and
Protestants and Catholics firebombing each other in the
street and poverty and, you know, industrialization and
things changing.
He said temperance and calm, and here's the
man who practiced calm, so let's move towards
calm.
Now, Fatima, may Allah be pleased with her
and bless her.
She really went out and talked about the
difference between Islamic marriage and, you know, Protestant
or specifically Catholic marriage, this idea of being
tied to life.
And she did that from a place of
pain and determination.
Talk to us about how she was trying
to educate people about marriage whilst going through
something herself.
Well, you know, Fatima, I mean, this is
a remarkable thing, you know.
As I said, the period we're talking about
here, 1889, 1890, 1991, this is when she
was at her most active in the Muslim
community in Liverpool.
She was the pillar calling other women to
Islam.
So, we profile some of the women in
the book.
There were women that she met and invited
to Islam who came to Islam at her
hand.
She was a leader, I think, of the
women in the community, for sure.
And despite all of this, and despite all
the opposition we've talked about, we'd have thought
that her husband Hubert, who himself was away
at sea often, would be a source of
comfort and support to her, because he himself
converts in 1890.
But the sad truth is that actually he
was a source of pain for her, because
he shortly after their marriage, maybe six months
after their marriage, it becomes a violent and
abusive marriage, and on two occasions he tries
to murder her.
She only escapes the second time because of
the help of her younger sister, Clara, who
also had converted by that time.
And she petitions for divorce, but she only
is granted a 12-month judicial separation.
As far as we know, they never lived
together again after that.
But in the middle of that struggle with
her husband, before she sues for divorce, she
is standing up for the rights of Islam
in the local press, saying that Islam grants
a divorce not as a sacrament, but as
a contract.
And under Islamic law, it would mean that
if that contract is breached, then a divorce
could be granted.
And so she was saying Islam is more
progressive in the matter of women's rights than
English law was at the time.
And she made that case in the local
press.
So we can see immediately how she is
looking to her faith to offer her support
against an abusive husband, and is looking for
and is finding resources that she can draw
on to help her in her life.
And she does get out, and she gets
a break.
She gets to go travel to the east
for at least six months.
We don't know exactly where she went, but
we think our best guess is that she
went to Beirut, and possibly on to Damascus,
with a stopover in Alexandria.
And she gets some kind of respite.
And what's really charming about her travel east
to the east is that she does it
with two other English Muslims, as well.
So Laika Banks and Amina Muqatish, which is
charming in and of itself, the idea of
the three Victorian working class women of the
north, going on a trip out east.
So that's kind of, you know, the kind
of thing the BBC should make a draw,
make a, you know, they should tell Fatima's
story, I think.
That is a challenge out there.
I'm going to read a little bit from
the marriage question.
April 1891, disappeared in the Liverpool Mercury.
To the editors of the Liverpool Mercury, gentlemen,
your correspondent in one of her recent letters
recommended one of your other correspondents to join
the Muslim Church of Liverpool, as their views
with reference to the control of wives would
be more in accordance with his, and thereby
insinuated that the state of the marriage laws
amongst Mohammedans was even more unsatisfactory than in
Christian England.
This is one of the vulgar errors into
which persons whose whole knowledge of Mohammedanism is
derived from reading books and pamphlets written by
bigoted Christian missionaries and others so often fall
into.
Therefore, permit me, as a Muslim lady and
wife, to at once say that Mohammedan ladies
enjoy, and have done so ever since the
time of the Prophet, much greater legal rights
as to separate property divorce than those enjoyed
by Christians up to quite a recent date.
I mean, that's a very spiky, determined response
from a tiny, tiny minority, isn't it?
Well, that's what I'm trying to say, that
why I think they're admirable is that they
show lots of courage and a lot of
gumption, you know what I mean?
And they're not, I think that's what I
find almost, that courage is what I find
most inspiring to myself.
You know, it stiffens my back, I think,
to read that, you know, because we have
so many more advantages than they had, you
know, and rather than converts become like professional
whingers, about the community doesn't do this for
me, and doesn't give that for me, and
there's these problems, and how converts are received,
and so on.
I just think we have to do it
for ourselves, and just get on with it.
Sorry, sorry to be, sorry to be blunt,
but you know, I just think, I think
that there's a strain of kind of you
owe us something, sometimes amongst converts in Britain,
which I think is unhealthy.
I think we just have to, we just
have to get on with it, and you
know, if there's a problem, let's try and
solve it ourselves.
You know, there are over a hundred thousand
converts to Islam in Britain, and you know,
we're big enough now to kind of organise
things, and solve things that aren't being solved,
you know, and just get on with it,
I think.
I'm not talking about a separate community, I'm
just saying an organised community, working with everyone
else, that we can deal with some of
the issues and problems that the convert community
faces today.
That sounds like a whole other interview, which
I would love to get into at some
point, but maybe, maybe not today.
I'll tell you what, let's end with how
Fatima, how her life ended, and then move
on to, you know, really how the history,
how that moment rather, for the first convert
community, how they vanished, how it didn't grow,
or did it?
Looking at the evidence as we find it,
it looks very likely that Fatima was actually
Abdullah Quilliam's secret third wife, and that the
child that she had was his, Hubert Halim.
She spent the last years of her life,
from 1895 onwards, living in West Kirby, where
she was renting out a boarding house, and
so she was, why was she distant?
I mean, we don't know, we don't have
anything in her own voice from 1893.
Maybe she wanted to get away from the
complexities of life in Liverpool.
Quilliam already had two other families, the two
wives couldn't stand each other, by all accounts.
Why would she want to be put in
the middle of that?
At the same time, Quilliam was also getting
a lot of criticism from the wider Muslim
community, and maybe he didn't need the attention
that a third wife would bring.
So, you know, there are plenty of motives
for her to move away, but we don't
know the exact reason, and she dies young,
you know, at the age of 35, had
been ill for a couple of years.
Quilliam adopts Hubert Halim and, you know, brings
him up.
So, you know, Fatima, like the rest of
the community, was largely forgotten.
The doors closed on the mosque in 1908,
and the community is no longer organised.
So, you know, there's no organised activities going
on in Liverpool.
That doesn't mean necessarily that that was the
end of everybody's faith, although I do think
there's evidence that not many of the children
remained within the faith, as far as we
can tell.
But many of the women in particular, and
some of the men, had moved away.
Some married and born Muslim men and settled
abroad in India and Turkey, for instance.
So, it's not necessarily the end of the
story, but that's a lot of work to
find out, trace all those families' histories.
So, we don't know the details.
Knowledge of this community was kept amongst the
small convert circles in Britain.
I'm talking about outside of the Quilliam family
itself.
So, there was a knowledge passed on up
to our times.
The main link person I knew was the
late Dawood Rosser Owen, who established the Association
of British Muslims in the mid-70s.
He knew people who had known Quilliam.
So, there was like a direct link, but
very little was practically known about the community
until the historical research that we've done in
recent years has undertaken.
So, there was a bit of knowledge.
And also, Liverpool Muslims rediscovered Quilliam by finding
copies of his journal in the local library
in the early 70s.
So, that's why you get the foundation of
the Abdullah Quilliam Society in the late 90s,
comes out of that local historical research that's
being done by Liverpool Muslims.
So, people are beginning to rediscover, but I
think really it becomes a big thing, I
think, in the last 20 years, really.
And by the work of many, many people,
including Ron Jeeves, biography, and then you get
the BBC covering, and the mosque reopens in
2014, and you get more and more media
attention.
And what we want to do with Fatima,
Fatima's grave was rediscovered in 2019.
We had a headstone put there to a
community fundraiser last Ramadan, and the headstone was
put up in November.
And then we had this marvellous commemoration in
January.
We had 13 convert associations come from across
the country to commemorate Fatima's life.
And it was a marvellous day, honestly.
I mean, there was a real sense of...
Were there tears?
I would have been crying.
It's very, very moving.
And Jumana Moon did an account of Fatima's
life that was incredibly moving.
Everybody felt...
We did prayers at her grave, finished the
Khatm of the Qur'an.
And we had people coming from all different
backgrounds, Sufis, Salafis, all kinds of different backgrounds,
everyone coming together and commemorating this remarkable...
Our founding mother, really, our mother.
I feel so moved about this, because converts
often leave nobody to pray for them after
they've passed.
So to our dear brothers and sisters watching
this, please, when you make your du'as,
add the converts and their children to your
du'as, just generically.
And oh Allah, all those who are struggling
in your past, all those who are new,
and all those in the past who sought
to keep the faith alive in far-flung
places.
Please, don't forget them.
Don't forget us.
Yeah, that's right.
And please, anybody listening, please remember Fatima in
your prayers as well.
And may Allah raise her rank for her
sacrifices that she made.
Because she is our mother.
For anyone who is a Muslim convert in
Britain, she's the pioneer.
She's the one who sacrificed, and she's the
one who laid the foundations.
Thank you so much, Brother Yahya, for spending
time today talking us through that.
This is the book, Fatima of Liverpool.
It's available online and all the places where
you normally get your books.
And it's a great read.
And as Brother Yahya said, please remember Fatima
and all the other Muslims in your du
'as.