Learning the mark of the Muslim: Britain's three waves of conversion to Islam

From what we can tell, conversion to Islam in Britain runs far more deeply through various historical pathways than we might at first assume.

Abdal Hakim Murad proposes that one of those conduits was the Reformation via various dissident Protestant sects from Socinianism to Methodism.

Another conduit was the Radical Enlightenment, which used the Ottomans and the figure of the Prophet to critique European religious intolerance and monarchical absolutism.

The third was “Barbary” and the enslavement and sometimes conversion of Englishmen at sea, willingly or otherwise.

The fourth was Empire, which, alongside all its prejudice and plunder, also created opportunities for the curious and open-minded to “go native” and embrace the Faith.

The most remarkable text to come out of this period was the Dissident Henry Stubbe’s positive Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism (circa 1676), only published in 1911 by an early network of Muslims in London.

"The first great era of conversion to Islam in Britain left a remarkable literary legacy in the form of the periodicals The Crescent and The Islamic Review, the poetry of Yahya Parkinson, Marmaduke Pickthall’s Quran translation and his Middle Eastern travelogues and novels, and the Hajj memoir of Lady Zainab Evelyn Cobbold"

Centuries of trade, travel, diplomacy and empire brought Muslim sojourners to Britain but converts also played central roles in the birth of an organised Islamic community in the key period between 1880 and 1920.

Alongside missionary-minded Indian Muslims and with Indian and Ottoman patronage, converts played leading roles in the first two mosques in Liverpool and Woking established during this period; a short-lived third mosque in London in the late 1890s aligned itself with Liverpool.

All three mosques were da‘wa-orientated and converts played leadership roles in all of them, heavily influencing the style and content of their Islamic public outreach.

This first great era of conversion to Islam in Britain has left a remarkable literary legacy in the form of the periodicals The Crescent and The Islamic Review, the poetry of Yahya Parkinson, Marmaduke Pickthall’s Quran translation and his Middle Eastern travelogues and novels, and the Hajj memoir of Lady Zainab Evelyn Cobbold.

Institutionally, it provided the Muslim Society of Great Britain, established in 1914 by Lord Faruq Headley, which brought together the convert leaders from Woking and Liverpool. It continued its work right into the 1960s.

The second great era of conversion to Islam in Britain came in the 1960s and 1970s. Prefigured in the crossover between jazz and Islam, the two great conduits in this era were the Black Power Movement exemplified by Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali and the return to Islam as part of Afrocentrism, allied with the Hippie counterculture which explored alternatives to Western materialism, the best-known expression of the latter being the Darqawi Sufi Order headed by Abdalqadir al-Sufi.

Others were the convert-focused work of Naqshbandi Sufis, Nazim Adil al-Haqqani and the lesser-known Abdullah Sirr-Dan al-Jamal (John Ross), as well as the tiny but influential Perennialist Maryamiyya Order.

This second wave of conversions left two mosque communities as its legacy: the Brixton Mosque in Gresham Road and the Ihsan Mosque in Norwich (as part of a global movement with communities in Cape Town and Granada).

In the late 1970s, there was an attempt to set up a rural community at Wood Dalling Hall in Norfolk numbering between 150‒200, but it was short-lived.

This era left us with the Islam-infused music of Cat Stevens in pop and Richard Thompson in folk, the classic texts, The Book of Strangers (1972) by Ian Dallas and Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources by Martin Lings (1983), and the intellectual and religious leadership of Abdal Hakim Murad and Hamza Yusuf, both of whom converted in 1977.

It also gave us the highly influential World Festival of Islam led by Ahmed Paul Keeler held in the UK in 1976. Divided by a common language, there has always been cross-influence between British and American converts and movements, and more so in the second and third waves.

Other American converts who have played influential roles religiously, culturally and institutionally among British converts include Zaid Shakir, Siraj Wahhaj, Daniel Abd al-Hayy Moore, and Usama Canon.

The first two conversion waves occurred when the born Muslim community was still relatively small. In the early 20th century it could not have numbered more than 10,000. Even in 1970, it was only a quarter of a million.

That picture has completely changed since, with just under a million in 1991, 1.6m in 2001, 2.7m in 2011 and 3.9m in 2021. As such, the third wave of conversion to Islam (1980‒present) in Britain has tended to come about through direct contact with Islamic revivalist movements in Britain that focus on preaching.

In terms of the sheer numbers converting, it dwarfs the two earlier waves, but an accurate total figure or even rate of conversion eludes us still (one estimate based on an earlier national census put the figure at 100,000 in 2010).

That said, the three most influential converting movements in the third wave have been the Salafi movement, the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ba‘Alawis.

"Knowledge and appreciation for the history of UK convert communities has grown with the scholarship and advocacy of Ron Geaves, Mohammed Siddique Seddon, Sadiya Ahmed, Ismael Lea South, Abdul Maalik Tailor, and Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor among others"

The years after 1980 have seen the first steps towards institutionalisation and building a nascent convert community, after the pioneering efforts of the Association of British Muslims, established in 1976 by Daoud Rosser-Owen, which drew inspiration directly from the first wave.

The primary institutionalising step has been the emergence of some 30‒40 local convert care networks around Britain, following on from the pioneering efforts of the New Muslims Project, first mooted in 1985, led by Batool Al-Toma, which provide the building blocks for a community based on compassion, care and service.

Both Yusuf Islam and Ibrahim Hewitt have made major institutional contributions to education (Islamia School, Association of Muslim Schools), advocacy (Interpal) and charity (Muslim Aid).

Dawoud Pidcock and Sahib Mustaqim Bleher established the short-lived Islamic Party of Great Britain in 1989. Sarah Joseph edited the youth-orientated Trends and later the lifestyle magazine Emel.

Aisha Bewley has been the major figure in the translation movement to bring classical Islamic literature into English, translating dozens of texts over the course of fifty years.

Since 2002, Bristol’s spoken word poets Muneera Rashida and Sukina Abdul Noor have opened up new avenues of convert cultural expression.

Sophie Gilliat-Ray established the Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK at the University of Cardiff in 2005. Among others, Abdurraheem Greene and Yusuf Chambers established the international da‘wa organisation, iERA in 2009, headquartered in the UK, which works on six continents.

Abdal Hakim Murad established the Cambridge Muslim College in 2009 and the award-winning eco mosque, the Cambridge Central Mosque in 2019.

Knowledge and appreciation for the history of UK convert communities has grown with the scholarship and advocacy of Ron Geaves, Mohammed Siddique Seddon, Sadiya Ahmed, Ismael Lea South, Abdul Maalik Tailor, and Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor among others. Leadership in the development of a new philosophical theology is being led by Ramon Ibrahim Harvey, Hasan Spiker and Rebecca Masterson among others.

As for the future of Islam in Britain and its future opportunities and challenges, Muslims converts or otherwise, believe it lies in Allah’s hands.

We might end by affirming Abdullah Quilliam’s 1894 poem and prayer, even if “bigoted creed” means something very different today in England that is becoming post-Christian (the Census of 2021 showed that for the first time since the seventh century only a minority of the British – 46% – identified as Christian):

That England may soon be reclaimed

From its present bigoted creed,

And follow the teachings of Ahmed,

God’s prophet in truth and in deed.

Yahya Birt is co-author with Hamid Mahmood of the new biography, Our Fatima of Liverpool: The Story of Fatima Cates, the Victorian woman who helped found British Islam. It is available from Beacon Books in Oldham.

Follow him on Twitter: @YBirt