The Victorian Muslims of Britain

London, UK - When Londoners elected Sadiq Khan as mayor of their city, it sparked fresh debate about the place of Islam and Muslims in Britain.
Khan became one of the most popular Muslim politicians in Europe when he won 57 percent of the votes in London's mayoral election as his Conservative opponent, Zac Goldsmith, faced accusations of running a divisive campaign.
Today, Britain has a large and diverse Muslim population with just over 2.7 million Muslims living in England and Wales. 
In the late Victorian era, Britain presided over a vast empire in the East, which included millions of Muslims. When some of the most privileged sons and daughters of that empire embraced Islam, it was met less with hostility than mild curiosity and slight bemusement. 


In 1913, the Daily Mirror newspaper responded to Lord Headley's conversion in a story headlined "Irish peer turns to Islam".

"That the lure of Eastern religions is affecting an increasing number of Europeans, is again shown by the announcement that Lord Headley, an Irish peer, who spent many years in India, has become a convert to Islam," the article stated.
Like Headley, many of the early British converts to the religion were young aristocrats or the children of the mercantile elite. Some were explorers, intellectuals and high-ranking officials of empire who had worked and lived in Muslim lands under British colonial rule.
The stories of these converts, says Professor Humayun Ansari of Royal Holloway, University of London, reflect the turbulent times in which they lived, as well as the profound questions that were being raised about religion and the nature and origins of humanity.
"There was the carnage and chaos of the First World War, the suffragette movement, the questioning of imperialism and the right of the British and other Western empires to rule over vast numbers of people," says Ansari. "In many ways, [those who converted] were living in a very troubled world. In Britain's wars in Sudan and Afghanistan, and later Europe, they saw terrible slaughter, with armies and governments on all sides claiming God was with them.
"They had experienced what they saw as the peace, the spirituality and simplicity of Islamic societies, and it appealed greatly to them," Ansari adds.
These stories point to an era when Islam could be seen in a far different light in the West than it often is today. These scholars, travellers and spiritual explorers could, in what were times of great upheaval and conflict, look to the East and see in the Islamic faith a religion which one convert, Lord Headley, characterised as being of "peace, brotherhood and universal values".
They may be figures of a now distant era. But their personal journeys and their quests to understand Islam and the East reveal how questions and conflicts we may see as unique to our times were, in fact, being raised over a century ago.