Association of British Muslims

Brief History of the ABM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Daoud Rosser-Owen In 1889, the Shaykhu-l Islam of the British Isles, HE Shaykh Abdullah Quilliam Bey (born William Henry Quilliam in 1857 of Manx parents), a Liverpool solicitor (who famously, as borough solicitor for Bradford, inaugurated the new Town Hall at its Grand Opening with a recitation of the first surah of the Quran "Al Fatihah"), founded the English Islamic Association. He published a newspaper and a magazine, and wrote a number of illuminating articles and pamphlets on Islam - attracting some opprobrium from Stanley Lane Poole in the Letters column of The Times. He also translated some parts of the Quran into Manx Gaelic (Gaelg). After Quilliam and his community were forced to migrate to the Ottoman Empire in 1908, the Association fell into abeyance. Just before the outbreak of World War I, Quilliam (disguised as "Professor Henri Marcel Leon", sometimes "Haroun Mustapha Leon" under which name he is buried at Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking) returned to England. He revived his organisation on 20 December 1914 as the British Muslim Society, basing it at the Shah Jehan Mosque in Woking, with Lord Headley as President and Khalid Sheldrake as Secretary. The organisation was revived again in 1924 as the Western Islamic Association. By 1927, it was located in London's Notting Hill and the Amir was HE Khalid Sheldrake (né Bertram William Sheldrake, known as "the Pickle King"). In 1930 he had established a branch of it in South Shields. He was for a while in 1934 the Emir of Islamistan (Kashghar in East Turkestan) on the invitation of the Emirs of Khotan. It was located at 111 Campden Hill Road where there was a library, lectures were held, and the Friday Prayers led by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, the famous polymathic translator of the Quran. It absorbed the activities of the Muslim Literary Society (founded 1916 and headed by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, himself a famous translator of the Quran, classical scholar, and sometime Collector in the ICS) that had become effectively defunct after 1917. Since its gradual decline and virtual demise in the late 1940s with the death of Abdullah Yusuf Ali, there have been several attempts to revive it. In 1969, Daoud Rosser-Owen, Abdur Rashid Craig, Abdul Rashid Ansari, Dr Ya'qub Zaki, and Kamaruddin Peckham held meetings but received extreme opposition from nationality organised immigrant Muslim organisations that were accusing them of racialism. In 1975, no longer willing to accept further marginalisation of the converts, Rashid Craig, Daud Relf, Daoud Rosser-Owen and others went ahead and re-established it as the Association of British Muslims, with Shaykh Daoud Rosser-Owen as Amir, and the endorsement and authority of Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani. In 1978, on advice from Kamaruddin Peckham, Yusuf Islam and others, it was renamed the Association For British Muslims with Hajji Abdur Rasjid Skinner as Amir and Abdullah Ibrahim, rahmatu-Llahi 'alayh, as Secretary although it has continued all along using both names. This was the most recent revival of Quilliam's organisation. It has struggled to survive, and still functions with Shaykh Daoud as caretaker Amir. Conscious of the earlier accusations, but aware that activity by functional groupings was most effective and conscious of the Shari"i requirement for Muslims to engage with communities through their own people, the ABM affiliated to the "Union of Muslim Organisations in the UK and the Republic of Ireland" as an appropriate umbrella body soon after that organisation was founded.