Hadith literally means a report or a saying. For Muslims, it is a report documenting the sayings, actions, physical features, and tacit approvals of the Prophet Muhammad.

The absence of black people from mainstream histories of Britain, and the lazy assumption that the presence of African and Caribbean people began with the SS Windrush docking at Tilbury, east of London, in 1948, means few today know there were black Romans, black Tudors, and black Stuarts here hundreds of years earlier.

I lived in Paris for most of the 2000s. For much of that time my then girlfriend worked overseas, and I ended up befriending her mother: a diminutive, chatty, and sharply analytical Egyptian woman in late middle-age.