Musings on the Britannic Crescent
The first full biography of Abdullah Quilliam, appointed Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles by Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1893, has just come out. It’s a fascinating read and exhaustively researched and written in an accessible way by Ron Geaves, Professor of Comparative Religion at Liverpool Hope University. It can be ordered online from Kube [...]
It is now a commonplace to observe that “Britishness” and “Muslimness” have become polarised: by seeking definitions against “the Muslim threat”, “true” Britishness, it is felt, can be retrieved.
Yet the evidence shows the opposite: most of Britain’s ethnic groups emphasize both religious and national identities together, a trend most noticeable among Muslim Britons. Polling usually [...]
What was the status of the Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles? Evidentially there is no definitive answer to this and my tentative conclusions are provisional as I do not have the immediate means to get to the bottom of what most would probably regard as an “historical footnote”.
The office has only had one incumbent: Sheikh [...]
The choice of Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932), ennobled as the Sheikh of Islam of the British Isles in 1894 by the Ottoman caliph and by the Emir of Afghanistan, as a symbolic flag-bearer for British Islam is less straightforward than it might appear. One recent appropriation of his legacy presents him as a kind of proto-Brownite [...]
Herman Melville (1819-1891), the American novelist, essayist and poet, from his vantage point of the nineteenth century, speculated about America’s future role in the world. He defined two faces that America could show to the world:
Intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but a savage at heart, America is, or may yet [...]
It has become commonplace to suspect the loyalties of British Muslims, and all the more so after the London bombs in 2005.* British Muslims are constantly asked to deny their alleged sympathies for terrorism. Their feelings of Islamic solidarity are thought to equal at best indifference or at worst hostility to patriotism. Although there has [...]
There’s a new ‘intervention’, to use the correct ‘arty’ jargon, at Tate Britain (normally dedicated solely to British art of the last 500 years), ‘East-West: Objects between Cultures’ which
explores Christian-Muslim encounters and exchanges over the past five hundred years by introducing a selection of related objects into the Collection displays. […] The variety of objects [...]
In a wonderful, lyrical work, In an Antique Land, the novelist-anthropologist Amitav Ghosh charts the story of his fieldwork in the Nile Delta. Calcutta-born and Oxford-educated, Ghosh embarks on two parallel journeys. One records his attempt to ‘understand’ contemporary Egyptian village culture, which he always sees as fumbling, somehow an ‘impossible’ stab at cross-cultural ‘translation’ [...]
