Southern Hemisphere Diasporic Communities in the Building of an International Muslim Public Opinion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This article draws a picture of a pioneering transnational network and sheds light on the motivations of some of its "translocal agents": Abdullah Quilliam of Liverpool, Joosub Moulvi Hamid Gool of Cape Town, and Hassan Musa Khan of Perth. These figures were staunch advocates of the mobilization of an international Muslim brotherhood, an ideology that received a very positive response among the diaspora of Indian traders. Their earnest "pan-Islamic" supporters often came from the northwestern parts of the Raj—Gujarat, Punjab, and North-West Provinces—and most particularly were drafted among the so-called Pathans.¹

The elite of Indian diasporic communities were in search of recognition of their religious specificity but also of their "Britishness," a colonial citizenship meaning equal rights and opportunities with white settlers in the Crown's colonies. Among the external signs of this Anglophilia—truly felt but, at the same time, conscientiously used as a political claim—was the English language that the Indian elite chose to use in their political expression. Before publishing their own Muslim papers in English, these Muslim activists expressed their opinion in letters published in local newspapers.² To nourish their discourse, they found useful information and rhetorical tools in the Muslim press published in Liverpool.

The International Influence of the Liverpool Muslim Institute

In examining the making of a communication linkage between South African and Australian Muslim communities, one first has to look at the pioneering work done by the Liverpool Muslim Institute in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The main character of British Islam at the turn of the century was a rather eccentric convert known as Sheikh William Henry Abdullah Quilliam (1856–1932). In his twenties, the young solicitor of the Supreme Court of Judicature made a first trip to Morocco and, at his return, was initiated into the Masonic Royal Oriental Order of the Sat Bhai. In 1887 he solemnly proclaimed himself a Muslim under the name of Abdullah and founded a Muslim society in his hometown of Liverpool. The publication of his pamphlet "The Faith of Islam" led to an invitation from the Ottoman regime to visit Constantinople, and in 1894 he was appointed by the sultan of Turkey and the emir of Afghanistan as "Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles." Visiting Liverpool in 1895, the son of the emir gave a sum of £2,500 that allowed the Muslim Institute to purchase its premises, rebuild the lecture hall, furnish classrooms, and create its own printing works.³ Two years before, Quilliam already started simultaneously to issue the Islamic World, a monthly publication "devoted to the interests of Islam throughout the globe," and an eight-page weekly titled the Crescent. Apart from these papers, the Liverpool Muslim Institute published several booklets and organized various public lectures.⁴ In the mid-1890s, the Liverpool Institute reached a peak in its activity, gathering the energy of converts such as H. Haschem Wilde, A. Hassan Radford, H. Yehya Johnson, and Nasrullah Warren and the Indians Jaffer Rahimtoola Kadderbhoy, Nasiruddin Hossain, and Maulana Muhammad Barakatullah.⁵

At the 1895 annual meeting of the Liverpool Muslim Institute were elected its honorary vice presidents, among whom were several foreign correspondents living in Hungary, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Afghanistan, India, Burma, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Morocco and three from the Southern Hemisphere. For Australia the honorary vice president was Hassan Musa Khan (Perth, Western Australia), for the Cape Colony Joosub Moulvi Hamid Gool, and for the South African Republic (Transvaal) Hajee J. Omar Chamberlain.⁶ Liverpool publications were regularly mailed to New Zealand, the provinces of Western Australia and New South Wales, and the towns of Johannesburg (Transvaal), Cape Town, and Kimberley (Cape Colony).⁷ In all these places, the Muslim population was steadily increasing.⁸ Cape Town saw the arrival of Gujaratis linked with the Bombay/Mauritius-based trading network, of Pathan ex-soldiers who settled after the Zulu and Boer wars, and of an increasing number of Konkanis.⁹ Indians were more and more visible, even if they made up an...