Abdullah Quilliam, anti-Semitism and the Jews
Abdullah Quilliam was until recently a fairly obscure figure in British history. A solicitor who was from a deeply non-conformist Christian background in the port city of Liverpool. (1) His parents were strict Wesleyan Methodists (2) and he himself was a lifelong prominent Freemason (3) from a family of Freemasons (4) as well as a teetotal social crusading zealot. (5) He was also the creator of Great Britain’s first mosque and Islamic centre, which he did in his native Liverpool. His name has since been repurposed as the ‘native’ face of Islamism in the United Kingdom with the now defunct ‘Quilliam Foundation’ being named after him by its creator Maajid Nawaz.
The irony that Quillaim was himself something of a fraud as he is known to have been a polyamorous bigamist (6) as well as to have been struck off as a solicitor for lying to the court in a divorce case he was conducting was apparently lost on Nawaz, but I digress. Here I am primarily concerned with Quilliam’s view on the subject of jews. We know something of these as although he visited a synagogue in Princes Road, Liverpool as part of a delegation with the Lord Governor of Liverpool in November 1899. (7) He was also a violent opponent of ‘racism’ (8) and promoted miscegenation between individuals of different races. (9)
This makes it rather unlikely that Quilliam was ‘anti-Semitic’ but rather opposed to Judaism as is common in both the Christian and Islamic traditions.
Confirmation of this is found in the fact that Quilliam was offered a child by a jewess in the street in 1895 as long as he’d raise it properly in the faith in Islam. He accepted and called the child Ishmael. (10)
Therefore, to Quilliam jewishness was not something that was biological and the only identity that mattered was one’s religious confession. So, when Quilliam advised a Turkish wrestler that no Muslim should take jews or Christians as friends using a Quranic verse to that effect. (11) It was in the sense that a jew who had converted to Islam was an acceptable friend but a follower of any other religious belief system – particularly jews and Christians – would not be advisable to take as friends.
References
(1) Ron Geaves, 2010, ‘Islam in Victorian Britain: The Life and Times of Abdullah Quilliam’, 1st Edition, Kube: Markfield, pp. 7-8; 10-11
(2) Ibid, p. 25
(3) Ibid, pp. 108-109
(4) Ibid, p. 109
(5) Ibid, pp. 9-10
(6) Ibid, pp. 52-53
(7) Ibid, p. 94
(8) Ibid, p. 90
(9) Ibid, pp. 65-66; 90
(10) Ibid, p. 79
(11) Ibid, p. 102