2 - Muslim Women in Britain: A Changing Landscape

Summary

Introduction

There are records of Muslims in Britain revealing a history that extends over hundreds of years. Scholarship has tended to focus on the period after the Second World War when larger numbers of Muslims settled in Britain. However, there is a much longer and important history of Muslims visiting, living and working in Britain. This social history is connected with the story of empire. The East India Company, founded in 1600, became a powerful agent of British imperialism from the early eighteenth century. Some agents from the East India Company and their families chose to return to Britain, with Indian servants and ayahs (nannies), of whom many were Muslim (Gilliat-Ray 2010). Indian sailors, or ‘lascars’, often press-ganged into the East India Company, jumped ship and settled in Britain, with communities in the nineteenth century forming in maritime ports, such as Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, Hull and South Shields (Gilliat-Ray 2010: 41; Lawless 1997). Larger numbers settled in the capital city of London. The figures are not insignificant: 10,000–12,000 lascars were recorded in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century (Ansari 2004: 35). Muslim labourers, such as Yemeni steelworkers, also came to Britain as part of the movement of people under the British Empire at this time (Ansari 2004; Gilliat-Ray 2010; Halliday 1992a; Lawless 1997). Muslim seafarers arrived from India, Yemen, Somalia, Malaysia and Egypt. Among early Muslim settlers in Britain, who were usually male, there were marked differences of language, ethnicity and interpretation of Islam.

In part the history of Muslims in Britain is stratified by class and labour. There is a rich and respectful history of trade and learning with the so-called Islamic world, including documentation of high profile and popular Muslim visitors in the eighteenth century, with evidence of wealthy elites studying at universities, working as teachers and as traders (Gilliat-Ray 2010: 32). In particular, Manchester, Birmingham and Bradford attracted Arab and Moroccan traders, with evidence of around a dozen Moroccan families and 150 Middle Eastern merchant houses in Manchester by 1830 (Halliday 1992b). These traders and their families preserved language, religious identities and cultural norms. For poorer migrants, pressure on local employment following the First World War, with a decline in the coal trade and rising unemployment for seamen, as well as soldiers returning from war, is likely to have fuelled racial tensions.