Editor: Jamie Gilham
Publisher: Bloomsbury 2024
Format: hardback
Pages: 264
Source: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/islam-and-muslims-in-victorian-britain-9781350299634/
This collection of eleven case studies “demonstrate the plurality of voices” and “complex web of motivations” to be found in the British experience of Islam and Muslims during the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). It serves as an excellent companion volume to Muslim Women in Britain, 1850-1950 (Hurst, 2023), that Jamie Gilham co-edited with Professor Sariya Cheruvalli-Contractor.
The book is divided in two parts. There are five chapters that examine “discourse about and representations of Islam and Muslims in Victorian Britain”; the second part presents six accounts that are a mixed bag of biographical accounts and community histories. The Liverpool Muslim Institute features in four of these, reinforcing Jamie Gilham’s remark, “Quilliam is, for the scholar of British Islam, the gift that keeps on giving.” The contributors are experts in their field. For example, much has been written about Queen Victoria and Munshi Abdul Karim, but Martin Wainright’s essay, ‘The royal family’s attitudes towards Islam and Muslims during the reign of Queen Victoria’ also highlights the interaction of the public and private dimensions, “as the matriarch of the world’s largest empire, she saw her relationship with Karim as the personal manifestation of her relationship with all her Muslim and Indian subjects.” In the same vein, Clinton Bennett – the doyen in the field since his publication in 1992, Victorian Images of Islam – brings to light that Victoria “even contemplated her daughter, Princess Louise (1848-1939) marrying the [Ottoman] sultan’s nephew and successor, Murad V (1840-1904).
The essay ‘Permissions to go and see the ancient city’: Women travellers’ encounters with Islam in the nineteenth century’ by Anne-Marie Beller and Kerry Featherstone’ is about four women: Lady Florentia Sale, Emily Eden, Lucie Duff Gordon and Amelia Edwards. The authors cite a perceptive observation about such English upper class women – they were “colonised by gender, but colonisers by race”. This alludes to Victorian England’s patriarchy and male hegemony, with the difficulty of discarding a sense of racial superiority. Nevertheless, the accounts bring out the “women travellers’ ability to access spaces closed to their male counterparts”. The essay is “less concerned with their understanding of, and attitudes to, the Islamic faith in its spiritual and doctrinal dimensions” – hopefully this is paving the way for a sequel.
Alexander Bubb’s erudite contribution ‘Translators, publishers and popular readerships: The Qur’an on the Victorian bookshelf’ considers the efforts of George Sale, John Rodwell and Edward Palmer in detail: “they differed so much in their choice of language, syntax and register, in organisation of the text, and in their attitudes towards Islam”. There is a short comparison of the beginning five ayats of Surah Al-Alaq (the Clot), the first revelation received by the Prophet, peace be on him. In Rodwell, the word iqra is translated as ‘Recite’, while in the others it is ‘Read’. Alexander Bubb then comments, “by way of justification, his [Rodwell’s] footnote points out that qaraat is the root of Qur’an – ‘the recitation’ – but the proclamatory bearing this gives the text is not quite consistent with the emphasis laid in the Clot sura on literacy. This may be the first step in Rodwell’s concerted effort to undermine the legitimacy and historicity of the Qur’an as a written document.” Alexander Bubb is spot on in this assessment, because Rodwell reordered the surahs in what he considered a chronological order, thus beginning with Al-Alaq. Moreover, the reference to ‘the pen’ strongly suggests the emphasis is on literacy. Rodwell intended his work to be used by missionaries to refute Islam. Its reissue in ‘Everyman’s Classics’ was apparently at the recommendation of George Bernard Shaw – who was disparaging of Muslims, as can be seen in his The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God (1932). With scholar’s luck, Alexander Bubb found a copy of Rodwell’s translation that was given as a school prize to a pupil in the East End in 1913. He makes the apposite comment, “It is not hard to imagine the reaction of today’s right-wing press were white school children to be presented with copies of the Qur’an for Christmas.”
In an amusing aside, Bubb refers to Sir John Lubbock’s inclusion of a Qur’an translation in his list of ‘One Hundred Best Books’, compiled in the mid-1880s, but which omitted the Bible. This was picked up by a petty thief, who then acquired it and corresponded with Lubbock on a verse he had read about man’s free will: “he is likely to have consulted the Qur’an in a public institution (unless he stole a copy).”
Clinton Bennett’s essay ‘Rival views on the Eastern Question, Muslims and Islam: William Ewart Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli and Anglo-Ottoman relations’ is at the heart of the politics that shaped British foreign policy and also the activities of Muslim associations and activists in Britain. Clinton Bennett has found no evidence that Gladstone ever held up a copy of the Qur’an in the House of Commons, with the declaration, that there would be no peace for the Empire, “as long as this book exists.” However, Gladstone was a Turcophobe who blackened the Ottoman reputation, notably with his influential tract The Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria (1876). Clinton Bennett notes, “his political rival, Disraeli, and supporters found themselves on the losing and unpopular side of a national debate.” Though not referred to by the author, there were British Muslim voices on the other side of the barricades: Lord Stanley of Alderley addressed a public meeting in Preston in October 1876, that condemned the “frenzy stirred up by Mr. Gladstone’s crazy rhapsodies,” and launched an appeal for the wounded Turks. Similarly, from the late 1880s through the 1890s (and beyond), the Islamic Society and the Anjuman-e Islam of London entered the ‘national debate’ by challenging the anti-Ottoman narrative through articles in the press and publishing pamphlets that brought to light atrocities committed by the Bulgarians on Muslims.
Bennett also notes that “Gladstone wrote in 1878 that he thought Disraeli’s ‘crypto-Judaism’ resulted in policies that were harmful to British interests.” Perhaps, here too, there is a lacuna in the narrative of Victorians’ dealings with Muslims. This is because Disraeli’s actions were of immense strategic benefit to the Empire: “the decision for which he went down in history and that had a direct bearing on the Palestine question was taken in just a few days at the end of 1875. When, through emissaries of the Rothschild and Oppenheim families, the news reached London Egypt’s khedive Ismail Pasha (1830-95) was bankrupt and thus willing to cede his shares of the Suez Canal, Disraeli understood that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity: five-sevenths of Her Majesty’s empire lay east of the Canal. Baron Lionel de Rothschild (1808-79), Disraeli’s best confidant, was the only option available to quickly obtain the £4 million requested by Ismail Pasha” (Lorenzo Kamel, Imperial Perceptions of Palestine, British influence and power in late Ottoman times, 2015). Disraeli died in 1881 after Gladstone won the general election.
Jamie Gilham in ‘Saiyid Mustafa Ben-Yusuf, an Arab Muslim convert to Christianity in Victorian Britain’, draws out from the lost recesses of history the strange life of an Algerian Jew who made a fortune by stage performances of his upbringing as a Muslim and subsequent conversion to Christianity. Riordan Macnamara’s ‘From Arab millet to British Islam: Syrian Muslims in Victorian Manchester’ records the links of the Mancunian and Liverpudlian Muslim communities – the reference to a salaat ul-janaza at the Victoria Park mosque in 1951 may inspire local community historians. The sad life of ‘The Last Nawab of Bengal: India and England, 1838-84’ by Lyn Innes prompts a reader to draw parallels with the years in gilded exile of Maharaja Duleep Singh, both in the cavalier way they were treated by officials and their choice of spouses. Brian D. Singleton’s ‘Feeding hungry Christians: The Liverpool Muslim Institute on Christmas Day’ will be of particular interest to researchers on British Muslim philanthropic activity and mosques’ efforts today in running soup kitchens. Matthew A. Sharp in ‘Authority and legitimacy in Victorian Liverpool: Re-evaluating Abdullah Quilliam’s title of Shaikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles’ proves that the honorific was self-assumed. Its usage was overlooked by the “opportunistic and pragmatic” Sultan Abdul Hamid to gain allegiance, while it provided Quilliam with prestige and legitimacy as a British Muslim leader.
The collection is dedicated to Emeritus Professor Humayun Ansari, the leading British Muslim historian. He is also a contributor with an essay on Maulana Muhammad Barkatullah Bhopali. Researchers will be indebted to him for drawing on sources in Urdu that establish the year Barkatullah came to England (1890). There is also new information on Police attempts to tarnish his reputation.
In the book’s foreword, Jamie Gilham makes an observation on current British Muslim historical work, “whilst the subject matter and the subjects must be considered in their own historical period, they help to contextualise contemporary beliefs about and attitudes towards Islam [. . .].” The contributor that takes up this ‘challenge’ most explicitly is Geoffrey Nash’s ‘Thomas Carlyle, Islam, empire and after’, who states, “I shall attempt to parallelise Carlyle’s views on society and belief with those of modern Islamism”. However, Professor Nash also writes, “one wonders why the comparison with Islamism is being invoked in the first place.”
Notwithstanding this ambiguity, Geoffrey Nash refers to the “congruent aspects” in the writings of Carlyle and Syed Qutb, where the latter is presumably the ‘Islamism’ exponent par excellence. Qutb’s work that is cited is Milestones (1964), though perhaps Fi Zilal al-Qur’an (In the Shade of the Qur’an) would have been truer to their temperaments. Milestones did advocate for a world that must be rid of jahiliyyah because it is one man’s lordship over another. It was written in the lived experience of a police state and imprisonment (and eventual gallows). For Nash, “Qutb in particular believed struggle and some coercion would be necessary to effect change” [reviewer’s emphasis]. Similarly, there is a hint later of a similar streak of intolerance, “But Islamism (in its absolutism?) is too certain what these [God’s laws] might be”. This is sailing close to the neo-Con good Musim/bad Muslim dichotomy, with the latter being the fanatical ‘Islamists’.
Perhaps there is a more productive exploration of ‘congruence’ to be made with reference to the writings of the distinguished sufi-philosopher-lawyer from Pakistan, Allahbuksh Khudabuksh Brohi (1915-1987). Nash points out Carlyle’s anti-materialism – John Stuart Mill walked out of one of his lectures. In his Testament of Faith (1975), Brohi often quotes Carlyle, observing that the dissident Victorian “was very much influenced by the Transcendental philosophy propounded by the German idealists of the 19th Century [. . .] Men of letters are a perpetual priesthood from age to age, teaching all men God is still present in their life.”
Jamie Gilham’s collection lives up to its title of offering new perspectives, but it is also opening up avenues for further enquiry.
JS/November 2024