According to the 2021 Census, 1.4 percent of Scots are Muslim. Most live in Glasgow and other big cities, but they are present in the countryside too, and in the islands and Highlands. And they’ve been here for a long time – at least since 1504. There is evidence that King James IV of Scotland and his successors employed ‘black moors’ (Moorish) musicians and entertainers at that time. Mores or Moors was what Europeans called the people of North Africa, especially Morocco.
The message of Islam had a particular resonance for Victorian Britain, and particularly on Scots. A number of Scottish Muslims converted to Islam. One such was Lady Zainab Evelyn Cobbold – a Scottish diarist, traveller, and noblewoman who converted to Islam in 1915. She went on to become the first British Muslim woman to perform Hajj in 1933. She was buried according to her wishes on a remote hillside on her Glencarron estate in the Highlands, where she had lived during her last years. An imam conducted her funeral whilst a lone piper played the ‘Macrimmon’s Lament’ at her graveside. It was a ceremony in keeping with her dual identity as a Muslim and a Scottish aristocratic lady. Her graveside is marked with an inscription from Sura Noor of the Quran: ‘Allah is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth’.
Yahya (John) Parkinson from Kilwhinning, Ayrshire, also accepted Islam at the turn of the twentieth century. He maintained contact with Abdullah Quilliam in Liverpool, and later produced articles, a collection of poems titled ‘Lays of Love and War’, and books on Islamic philosophy. He was considered the Muslim equivalent of Robert Burns. A more recent well-known convert is Ian Dallas, now known as Sheikh Abdul Qadir. A scion of a Highland family, he accepted Islam in Morocco in 1968, and founded the world-wide Murabateen movement.
Aside from a small number of converts, the majority of Scotland’s Muslims are South Asians. Initially, before the 1947 partition, they came from India, but the majority of Muslims that settled in Scotland after 1947 came from the Pakistani side of the new border. One of the first reported Muslims in Glasgow was Sundhi Din, from a village called Balanda. He came to Scotland some time before World War I as a valet to a retiring Scottish Army Officer in whose service he had been for many years in India. Another was N.M. Tanda, joint owner of the warehouse ‘Tanda and Ashrif’, who came in 1916. Yet another was Nathoo Mohammed from Kot Badal Khan, who arrived in 1919. It is narrated that he went to Bombay around 1917 and signed on as a Lascar on a British Merchant ship. It is not known if Nathoo had a contact from the Lascar colony in the Anderston area or whether he had another contact already in Glasgow, someone such as Sundhi Din, who came from a village only seven miles from his own home village.
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