In order to contextualise the reality and place of Islam in Britain today, and, for the future, it is necessary to consider the history of the encounter between the indigenous peoples of the British Isles and Muslims.

This consideration reveals that in many ways the seeds for the future of Britain and its peoples – and not just Islam in Britain – were planted in this historical encounter.

In a sense what I want to do is weave a tapestry that brings us to this point in time.

To do so I will look at the history of Britain and its encounter with Islam to the present day, legal, political and economic developments in Britain and the current social landscape which is emerging and shows the way forward.

Although Islam is generally thought of as being a recent arrival in the United Kingdom, there has been contact between Britons and Muslims for many centuries.

An early example of this contact was the decision of Offa, the eighth-century King of Mercia (one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms existing at that time), to have gold coins minted with the declaration in Arabic that “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah” and “Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, Who sent him (Muhammad) with the true faith to prevail over every other religion” engraved around the margin of the coin. These gold coins were copies of coins issued by the near-contemporary Muslim ruler Al-Mansur. It is thought that they were minted to facilitate trade with the expanding Islamic empire in Spain.

Muslim scholarship, especially early Islamic philosophy and Islamic science, was well known among the learned in England by 1386, when Geoffrey Chaucer was writing. In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, there is among the pilgrims wending their way to Canterbury, a 'Doctour of Phisyk' whose learning included Al-Razi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd. Ibn Sina's The Canon of Medicine (1025) was a standard text for medical students well into the 18th century. Roger Bacon, one of the earliest European advocates of the scientific method, was inspired by the works of early Muslim scientists. In particular, his work on optics in the 13th century was largely based on the Book of Optics (1021) by Ibn al-Haytham.

The publication of "The Islamic Origins of the Common Law" in the North Carolina Law Review, Professor John Makdisi's puts forward the premise that English common law was inspired by medieval Islamic law. Makdisi drew comparisons between the "royal English contract protected by the action of debt" and the "Islamic Aqd", the "English assize of novel disseisin" and the "Islamic Istihqaq", and the "English jury" and the "Islamic Lafif" in the classical Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence. He adds that these institutions were transmitted to England by the Normans, "through the close connection between the Norman kingdoms of Roger II in Sicily — ruling over a conquered Islamic administration — and Henry II in England." Makdisi also argued that the "law schools known as Inns of Court" in England (which he asserts are parallel to Madrasahs) may have also originated from Islamic law. He states that the methodology of legal precedent and reasoning by analogy (Qiyas) are also similar in both the Islamic and common law systems. Other legal scholars such as Monica Gaudiosi, Gamal Moursi Badr and A. Hudson have argued that the English trust and agency institutions, which were introduced by Crusaders, may have been adapted from the Islamic Waqf and Hawala institutions they came across in the Middle East. Dr. Paul Brand also notes parallels between the Waqf and the trusts used to establish Merton College by Walter de Merton, who had connections with the Knights Templar.

Therefore there lies in what remains of the legal heritage of Britain an encounter with Islam which continues to this present day.

Following the Crusades when the anti Islamic sentiment they had inspired had subsided Britain established relations with some Muslim countries. Queen Elizabeth the first asked the Ottoman Sultan Murad for naval assistance against the Spanish Armada.

The first recorded English convert to Islam mentioned by name is John Nelson.

Captain John Ward of Kent was one of a number of British sailors who became pirates based in the Maghreb who also converted to Islam. Later, some Unitarians became interested in the faith, and Henry Stubbes wrote so favourably about Islam that it is thought he too had converted to the faith.

From 1609 to 1616, England lost 466 ships to Barbary pirates, who sold the passengers into slavery in North Africa. In 1625, it was reported that Lundy, an island in the Bristol Channel which had been a pirate lair for much of the previous half century, had been occupied by three Turkish pirates who were threatening to burn Ilfracombe; Algerine rovers were using the island as a base in 1635. Around 1645, Barbary pirates under command of a Dutch man Jan Janszoon operating from the Moroccon port of Salé occupied Lundy. During the time of the occupation there were reports of captured slaves being sent to Algiers and of the Islamic flag flying over Lundy.

Several delegations from Morocco visited Elizabethan England around 1600.

A document from 1641 refers to a “sect of Mahomatens” being “discovered here in London”. There were also a number of recorded conversions to Islam during this period, and, in 1649 came the first English translation of the Qu’ran by Alexander Ross.

Besides scientific and philosophical works, a number of Arabic fictional works were also translated into Latin and English during the 17th and 18th centuries. The most famous one was the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), followed by Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, which was translated into Latin as Philosophus Autodidactus by Edward Pococke the Younger in 1671 and then into English by Simon Ockley in 1708. The English translation of Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, set on a desert island, may have inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe, considered the first novel in English, in 1719. Later translated literary works include Layla and Majnun and Ibn al-Nafis' Theologus Autodidactus.

In the 18th and 19th centuries a number of the English upper classes accepted Islam including Edward Montagu, son of the ambassador to the Ottoman caliphate.

The practice of Islam in Britain was legalized by the Trinitarian Act 1812.

The next significant encounter with Islam for Britain came about 300 years ago when the first large group of Muslims arrived in Britain. They were sailors recruited in India to work for the British East India Company, which explains why the earliest Muslim communities were found in port towns. Naval cooks also came, many of them from the Sylhet Division of what is now Bangladesh. One of the earliest Bengali Muslim immigrants to Britain was Sake Dean Mahomet, a captain of the British East India Company. In 1810, he founded London's first Indian restaurant, the Hindoostane Coffee House. There are other records of Sylhetis working in London restaurants since at least 1873.

The first Muslim community to permanently settle in the United Kingdom consisted of Yemeni sailors who arrived in ports such as Swansea and South Shields shortly after 1900. Some of them migrated to inland cities like Birmingham and Sheffield, where records show that there were 23,819 Muslims in the early 1900s.

Mosques also appeared in British seaports at this time; the first mosque in Britain is recorded as having been at 2 Glyn Rhondda Street, Cardiff, in 1860. From the 1950s onwards, with considerable immigration to Britain from its former colonies, notably the Indian subcontinent and East Africa, large Muslim populations developed in many British towns and cities.

According to the 2001 census 1,536,015 Muslims are living in England and Wales where they form 3% of the population; in Scotland they number 42,557 and represent 0.84% of the population; and the Northern Ireland census indicated that 1,943 Muslims lived in the province.

Other estimates indicate that the number of Muslims is anywhere up to 3 million, with over half of them having been born in Britain.

In England 40% of Muslims live in London, where they make up 8.5% of the population. There are also large numbers of Muslims in Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford, Luton, Slough, Leicester and the mill towns of Northern England. In Scotland there are significant Muslim populations in Glasgow (17667, 3.1%), East Renfrewshire (1897, 2.1%), Dundee (2846, 2.0%) and Edinburgh (6801, 1.5%). In Wales most Muslims live in Cardiff (11261, 3,7%), but there are also significant numbers in Newport (3492, 2.6%) and Swansea (2167, 1.0%). Muslims are concentrated in urban areas, where they make up 3.3% of the population; in rural areas the proportion of the population is less than 0.1%.

Immigration of Muslims into UK was primarily started off by Indians during colonial rule. Following the end of colonial rule Muslims of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian origin emigrated to Britain, having legal status due to their entitlement to hold British passports – and therefore to become British citizens - as members of the British Commonwealth.

Apart from these peoples, a considerable portion of South Asian Muslims trace their origins back to South Asian communities in East Africa that either simply moved or were forced out from countries such as Uganda and Zanzibar.

Concentrated in the London area are communities of Nigerians, some of whom are Muslim, and Bosnian and Albanian Muslims from Kosovo. Since the Iraq War and the civil war in Somalia respectively, Britain has also seen an increase in the number of Kurdish, Somalian and Afghan Muslim immigrants. Kurds are concentrated in the Ravensthorpe area of Dewsbury while Somalis tend to be focused in the London and Sheffield areas.

The United Kingdom also has a large diaspora of African and Afro-Caribbean Muslims, hailing both from the Muslim communities in British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean and also from British-born converts.


What has been recognized as further significant development of Islam in Britain is the coming to Islam of Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi. I say this not only because of the awareness we have of the importance of his work. One contemporary writer has acknowledged Shaykh Abdalqadir as the father of traditional Islam In Britain.

The emergence from Shaykh Abdalqadir’s dawa and teachings has resulted in significant body of British Muslims amongst whom have translated many key works and who have been at the forefront of presenting the amal of Madinah as the way forward for Islam in this age. In addition to this is the work of Sidi Umar Vadillo in regard to understanding and presenting a critique of usury based capitalism.

The Guardian Newspaper’s research department conducted research on British Muslims and concluded that:  

Approximately 800 mosques have been established in the UK.

30,000-40,000 British Muslims travel to Mecca for Hajj annually 

There are 5,400 Muslim millionaires - measured by cash and stocks but not property and so the number could be considerably higher.

The influence of the Muslim population in other spheres of British life cannot be underestimated.

There are Muslim members of Parliament both in the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

It is a well-known phenomena that the diet of the country has changed. The cuisine of the sub-continent now providing one of the, if not the, most popular dishes of Britons today.

Inter-marriage between Muslims, descended from emigrant Muslims, to indigenous Britons is a common phenomenon.

A conservative estimate indicates that there are 60 recognized Muslim schools in England. There are madrassas operating in the main mosques of all the major towns and cities – and much more informal teaching that takes place in houses by community members.

The position, especially politically, of the Muslims in Britain differs from Muslims in other parts of Europe in that they are recognized citizens and have formed a significant body of businessmen and academics within British society. Their position also differs in that, by in large, what one would once have termed the indigenous Britons (Muslims now also being indigenous Britons), accepted the influxes of immigration and accommodated their new neighbours.  

I would now like to move to an assessment of the current legal, political and economic reality of Britain, which sets the context for the role that, Muslims can play in British society.

A picture of the landscape in Britain is essential to understand the future for Britain and its ongoing encounter with Islam.

Civil liberties in the UK have been considerably eroded under both Conservative and Labour administrations. From the 1980s onwards legislation has been brought into force which increased state power over the individual and communities and which attacks the right to silence, the right to a fair trial, freedom of association, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, the right to protest and the presumption of innocence.

The pace of undermining civil liberties accelerated following the terrorist attacks in the United States and in Britain led to the Magna Carta and the right of habeas corpus being abandoned – centuries of legal heritage wiped away in support of the legally unsustainable war on terror – now largely forgotten in the current economic crisis.

To push the legislation through, which undermined these liberties, the government had to suspend Britain's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to liberty.

The jingoistic phrase of a War on Terror, legally unsustainable, resulted in the war with Afghanistan and Iraq, both in reality wars of occupation.

Today Britain’s most senior military commander Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith has publically stated that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won. He added that a deal might have to be struck with the Taliban to bring peace and that “That should not make people uncomfortable”.

He further stated that there would be no “decisive military victory”.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman commented “We have always said that there is no military solution”.

As British Muslims we should be asking the government why the lives of our troops are needlessly being lost and why our resources are being squandered in order to participate in a war with no victory.

Following the terror attacks on the London Underground the government quickly called in the ‘experts’ from the broad spectrum of stakeholders and commissioned them to develop practical recommendations for tackling violent extremism.   The year 2007 saw Prime minister Gordon Brown pledging 70 million pounds over the next three years to prevent violent extremism within the UK.  As a result, a pot of gold was available for those who could create and deliver projects to prevent violent extremism specifically directed towards perceived Islamic terrorist.

The Home Office said, “The money is to support local authorities and community groups in improving the capacity of local communities to resist violent extremism. It will be spent on areas including:

• Developing leadership programmes for young people
• Strengthening the capacity of women's groups
• Local projects to build citizenship.”

A range of specialized units/departments has been re-grouped/created by the government to prevent violent extremism, some of these include:

Research, Information and Communication Unit – RICU (emerged rudimentarily after 9/11) Its aim is to tackle "the spread of radical Islamist ideas. The unit will also support 'alternative voices’ in the Muslim community.

Office of Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) Which provides advice to ministers, and develop policy and security measures to combat the threat of terrorism.  The Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) leads the work on counter-terrorism in the UK, working closely with the police and security services.

Some of their responsibilities include:

• Exercising the UK's response to a terrorist incident
• Developing legislation on terrorism here and overseas
• Providing security measures and protection packages for public figures
• Ensuring that the UK’s critical national infrastructure is protected from attack (including electronic attack)
• Ensuring the UK is prepared to deal with a chemical, biological, or nuclear release
• Liaising with government and emergency services during terrorist incidents or counter-terrorism operations

Developing and delivering the Government's counter-terrorism strategy involves stakeholders from across government departments, the emergency services, voluntary organisations, the business sector and partners from across the world.

The strategy is divided into four principal strands: Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare.

Prevent

• The Prevent strand is concerned with tackling the radicalisation of individuals, both in the UK and elsewhere, which sustains the international terrorist threat.

Pursue

The Pursue strand is concerned with reducing the terrorist threat to the UK and to UK interests overseas by disrupting terrorists and their operations. It has a number of aspects:

Protect

The Protect strand is concerned with reducing the vulnerability of the UK and UK interests overseas to a terrorist attack. This covers a range of issues including:

• strengthening border security, so that terrorists and those who inspire them can be prevented from travelling here and we can get better intelligence about suspects who travel, including improving our identity management
• protecting key utilities by working with the private sector
• transport; reducing the risk and impact of attacks through security and technological advances
• crowded places; protecting people going about their daily lives

Prepare

The Prepare strand is concerned with ensuring that the UK is as ready as it can be for the consequences of a terrorist attack.

The emphasis of the strategy is based on the ‘prevent’ strand.  As a result a new toolkit for the education sector has been officially released to prevent and tackle violent extremism in schools, colleges and universities.  This toolkit is aimed at equipping head-teachers, management, stakeholders in education, teachers, etc with the right knowledge, provision and guidance on PVE.  It has come under much scrutiny and is widely viewed as a tool to monitor-police the emerging generation.

Most of these measures have been and should be supported by the Muslims of Britain - as citizens of the country they are as repulsed at acts of terror as are non-Muslim citizens.

A number of leading Muslim academics are working with the relevant institutions on these matters.

But with all of these strategies look at the mess they have got themselves into – prevent – protect – prepare etc. Remember all of these strategies are designed to try and protect and bolster the failing capitalist system.

And it continues in its failure.

The infringement of civil liberties however continues under the present Prime Minister. It has been revealed that the Government is to spend £12 billion on creating a vast data project to monitor the e-mails and telephone records of every single person in Britain. This follows the Governments £20 billion programme which will require every citizen to carry an identity card linked to a National Identity Register, the largest information bank of its kind in the world.

The Daily Express newspaper editorial rightly commented that both of these expensive steps sounded like something out of an East European communist regime of the seventies than the policy of a modern liberal democracy. Perhaps they need to see that modern liberal capitalist democracy is in its totalitarian nature no different from the communist regimes of the seventies.

What is interesting to note is that non-Muslims in Britain - the intellectuals –do understand what this Government has done, and its implications.

To sum up this brief consideration of the legal situation in Britain we can comment that the legal framework and heritage of Britain has disintegrated. 

There is no turning back from the act of declaring a war on terror, no turning back from the present Governments silence on Guantanomo Bay and its own complicity in acts of rendition. The present Government has shown that the Magna Carta and the right to habeas corpus can be dispensed with when it suits the interests of legally unsustainable wars to serve the interest of the banking and commodity barons.

It is also relevant to consider the current economic situation which has global impact but which also reveals the point of history at which we have arrived in Britain.

We are all aware of the talk of $700 billion dollar bail outs in the economy of the United States. In Britain the present Government has as one newspaper described it taken the biggest economic gamble of Britain’s history. The Government has taken the biggest intervention in Britain’s banking industry by putting forward a £500 billion rescue package to save the banking system. To put this sum of money into perspective the $700 billion injection into the American banking system is £100 billion less than the sum the British Government is injecting into its banking system. It will cost each British taxpayer the equivalent of £16000.00.

The Governments annual budget is £600 billion.

This money will be borrowed and we have heard from Habib Dahinden yesterday the exact implications of that in terms of who the lenders are.

Britain will be in the next few years emerging from the disaster and abject failure of a Labour administration that destroyed its legal heritage and its economic base. The present Prime Minister sold Britain’s gold reserves when the price of gold was at its lowest – and then proudly announced he had done so to the public.

We are aware in all of these matters what our din has to offer. And it is in the appearance of Allah’s fulfillment of his warning in the Qu’ran that this open’s up tremendous opportunities for the future of Islam in Britain.

Already there exist movements in Britain, which recognize that the capitalist system is in collapse. These movements – largely not Muslim in origin – advocate in the sphere of economics a return to a just monetary system. The parallels to what we as Muslims should be saying on these matters is an indication that Allah has in the inescapable web of events performed our da’wa for us.

I would like to read a short piece written by Tom Hodgkinson one of the leading commentators of this movement and from it we can see that these people are standing at the door of Islam - what remains for us in Britain is to show these movements the way through the door into Islam.