After formally announcing his conversion to Islam in the late 1880s, the Liverpool lawyer William Henry Abdullah Quilliam publicly propagated his new faith and established the first community of Muslim converts in Victorian Britain. Despite decades of relative obscurity following his death, with the resurgence of interest in Muslim heritage in the West since 9/11 Quilliam has achieved iconic status in Britain and beyond as a pivotal figure in the history of Western Islam and Muslim-Christian relations. In this timely book, leading experts of the religion, history and politics of Islam offer new perspectives and shed fresh light on Quilliam's life and work. Through a series of original essays, the authors critically examine Quilliam's influences, philosophy and outlook, the significance of his work for Islam, his position in the Muslim world and his legacy. Collectively, the authors ask pertinent questions about how conversion to Islam was viewed and received historically, and how a zealous convert like Quilliam negotiated his religious and national identities and sought to indigenise Islam in a non-Muslim country.

Jamie Gilham collates the work of leading and emerging scholars of Islam in Britain, Christian-Muslim relations and Victorian Studies to offer fresh perspectives on Islam and Muslims in Victorian Britain. The contributors reveal 19th-century attitudes and beliefs about Islam and Muslims to demonstrate the plurality of approaches and representations of Islam in Britain's past. Also bringing to life the stories and voices of early Muslim settlers and converts to Islam, this book examines the lived experience of Muslims in the Victorian period. Sources include political and academic writings, literature, travelogues, the press and other forms of popular culture. Intersectional themes include religion and religiosity, 'race' and ethnicity, gender, class, citizenship, empire and imperialism, and prejudice, discrimination and resilience.

Alexander Russell Webb (1846-1916) was a central figure in the early history of Islam in America. He wrote numerous books intended to introduce Islam to Americans, and served as the representative of Islam at the 1893 Worlds Parliament of Religions in Chicago. This is a biography of Webbs' life.

This is the first full biography of Abdullah Quilliam (1856–1932), the most significant Muslim personality in nineteenth century Britain. Uniquely ennobled as the Sheikh of Islam of the British Isles by the Ottoman caliph Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1893, Quilliam created a remarkable Muslim community in Victorian Liverpool, which included a substantial number of converts. Ron Geaves examines Quilliam's teachings and considers his legacy for Muslims today. Ron Geaves is professor of the comparative study of religion at Liverpool Hope University and has contributed substantially to the study of British Islam, religion in South Asia, and fieldwork in religious studies.

A landmark volume on the lives of Muslim women across a century of rapid change, restoring lost voices and enriching our picture of British society.

Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, Periodizing Secularization focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the first substantive account of secularization during the fin de siècle. A wide range of primary sources is deployed, many of them relatively or entirely unknown, and with due regard to their methodological and interpretative challenges. On the back of them, a cross-cutting statistical measure of 'active church adherence' is devised, which clearly shows how secularization has been a reality and a gradual, not revolutionary, process. The most likely causes of secularization were an incremental demise of a Sabbatarian culture (coupled with the associated emergence of new leisure opportunities and transport links) and of religious socialization (in the church, at home, and in the school). The analysis is also extended backwards, to include a summary of developments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and laterally, to incorporate a preliminary evaluation of a six-dimensional model of 'diffusive religion', demonstrating that these alternative performance indicators have hitherto failed to prove that secularization has not occurred. The book is designed as a prequel to the author's previous volumes on the chronology of British secularization - Britain's Last Religious Revival? (2015) and Secularization in the Long 1960s (2017). Together, they offer a holistic picture of religious transformation in Britain during the key secularizing century of 1880-1980.

In A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 2: The African American Islamic Renaissance, 1920-1975 Patrick D. Bowen offers an in-depth account of African American Islam as it developed in the United States during the fifty-five years that followed World War I. Having been shaped by a wide variety of intellectual and social influences, the ‘African American Islamic Renaissance’ appears here as a movement that was characterized by both great complexity and diversity. Drawing from a wide variety of sources—including dozens of FBI files, rare books and periodicals, little-known archives and interviews, and even folktale collections—Patrick D. Bowen disentangles the myriad social and religious factors that produced this unprecedented period of religious transformation.

Ibrahim Dellal is a leading Muslim figure and key person in Muslim history in post- WWII Australia. Born in Cyprus in 1932, Ibrahim established or helped establish many religious, educational, and cultural organizations, holding major roles in each since he moved to Australia in 1950. This book is a biographical work on the fascinating life of a person who devoted himself to community service and interfaith dialogue.

Muslim intellectuals may try to define something called British Islam, but the truth is that as the Muslim community of Britain has grown in size and religiosity, so too has the opportunity to found and run mosques which divide along ethnic and sectarian lines. Just as most churches in Britain are affiliated to one of the main Christian denominations, the vast majority of Britain's 1600 mosques are linked to wider sectarian networks: the Deobandi and Tablighi Jamaat movements with their origins in colonial India; the Salafi groups inspired by an austere form of Islam widely practiced in Saudi Arabia; the Islamist movements with links to religious political parties in the Middle East and South Asia; the Sufi movements that tend to emphasise spirituality rather than religious and political militancy; and the diverse Shi'ite sects which range from the orthodox disciples of Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq to the Ismaili followers of the pragmatic and modernising Aga Khan. These affiliations are usually not apparent to outsiders, but inside Britain's Muslim communities sectarian divides are often fiercely guarded by religious leaders. This book, of which no equivalent volume yet exists, is a definitive guide to the ideological differences, organisational structures and international links of the main Islamic groups active in Britain today.