Intrepid Explorers?

Muslims are thought to be recent arrival in the historical memory of the British Isles. The reality is far more deeply rooted as people of the Islamic faith have encountered the natives of Britain for centuries through trade, travel, war, empire, immigration, and even maritime piracy. It appears that the earliest interactions between the Muslim world and England occurred in the eighth century, when the Anglo-Saxon King Offa of Mercia, minted a coin with the Islamic testimony of faith. Muslims continue to pop up in different periods of the national story as merchants, musicians, diplomats, translators, and literary figures. The earliest sustained contacts between Muslims and the Europeans occurred through travellers long before the Crusades and colonialism and are illustrated in archives and accounts by pilgrims, adventurers, and scholars. For instance, the English scholar Robert of Ketton provided the first Latin translation of the Qur’an in 1143, later on Muslims are mentioned in the in the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This connection between England and Islamic societies developed at the highest levels as illustrated in the well-known rivalry between King Richard I and Sultan Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, during the Third Crusade; and also when Queen Elizabeth I asked for the help of Ottoman Sultan Murad for naval assistance against the Spanish Armada. 

These different kinds of civilisational exchanges motivated the mutual interest in peoples from each place and resulted in the travel and study of each other’s culture and faith, and even resulted in religious conversion. The first English person to convert to Islam was John Nelson as documented in the book The Voyage made to Tripoli by Thomas Saunders. A sprinkling of other names appear in the historical record such as Thomas Keith, a Scottish soldier, who embraced Islam in that period and remarkably went to become the governor of Medina. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were a number of converts to Islam amongst the English upper classes, including Edward Montagu, son of the ambassador to Turkey. The concentration of conversions grows in the late nineteenth century with the emergence of the early Liverpudlian Muslim community formed around William Henry Quilliam, who was given the honorary title of ‘Sheikh ul-Islam of the British Isles’ by Sultan Abdulhamid of the Ottoman Empire.  Other prominent English converts of that era include Baron Henry Stanley of Alderly, Sir Archibald Hamilton, Baron Rowland Allanson-Winn, fifth Baron Headley, and Zainab Cobbold, the first British woman to perform the pilgrimage to Makkah. 

The most significant and enduring relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West was inextricably linked to the rise and conquest of Muslim lands by the Europeans during the colonial era. A by-product of which was the creation of what came to be known as Orientalism – the study of Eastern languages, theology, philosophy, literature, arts, culture that was often instrumentalised in the service of Empire. These different fields carried their own epistemic assumptions, typologies and terminologies that created and sustained particular views of the Orient and Islam. Muslim peoples were both romanticised and ridiculed, interesting but inferior to Western civilisation. Orientalism and it’s racial and religious myths left a legacy that continues to shape the modern study of Islam and Muslims and informs the ways in which the Islamic World is perceived and dealt with by the West today. For early modern enthusiasts, the curiosity and desire to learn about the Muslim lands and cultures could not be fulfilled by only reading about it and they therefore had to experience it directly through travel and writing about of their journeys. 

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