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- Qatada -
02-24-2008, 03:30 PM
Book on Islam in Scotland to be Launched at Scottish Parliament

IslamToday.com

http://islamtoday.com/showmenews.cfm...ub_cat_id=1781





21 February 2008

Bashir Maan explains in his new book, The Thistle and the Crescent, how Scotland's links with the Islamic world can be traced as far back as the seventh century AD, and over the centuries have been maintained through amicable trade and scholarship, as well as less enlightened crusade and empire-building.

The book comes with the endorsement of history professor Tom Devine, who describes it as "a pioneering study of Scottish-Islam relations, which will be of deep interest in today's world", and withthe endorsement of Alex Salmond, the First Minister, who will launch it at the Scottish Parliament today.

Maan, 81, a former Glasgow councillor and current convener of the Muslim Council of Scotland, was prompted to write it by what he perceived as a yawning gap in historical accounts. "We didn't have any record whatsoever about Scottish-Islamic relations," he says, "and after 9/11, when Islam was… shall we say, accused of being terrorist and this and that, I was stimulated to do something about it."

He embarked on his research with the help of a fellowship from Glasgow Caledonian University.

Substantial connections between Scotland an the Islamic world have been discovered in the form of fragments of fifth-century Egyptian and North African pottery in south-west Scotland, suggesting trading links. By the seventh century AD, the institution of pilgrimage to the Holy Land was well established: a Frankish bishop by the name of Arculf, who had gone on such a journey, was blown off course while returning to Gaul and ended up in Iona, where his accounts were recorded by A****an, the ninth bishop of Iona, in what was in effect a guide book for pilgrims, the De Locus Sanctis. Maan points out that, although Arculf refers to the Muslims as "Saracens", "unbelievers" or "infidels", his account is notably free of animosity and records no instances of harassment of Christian travellers.

Tantalising evidence of Islam making its mark – in this case quite literally – on the British Isles, if not specifically on Scotland, appeared a few years ago with the discovery in England of a coin stamped on one side with the head of "Offa Rex", the eighth-century king of Mercia, and on the other the Arabic inscription "La ilaha ill Allah – "there is no god but Allah". That, says Maan, leaves "a real conundrum" as to why an English coin should be stamped with the Islamic creed at a time when the religion was still emerging in the east.

Other tell-tale coinage has turned up in Scotland – 9th-century silver coins bearing the name of the Baghdad caliph al-Mutawakkal ala Allah, and silver dirhams from Tashkent and Samarkand found on Skye, both hordes probably left by traders or Viking raiders.

By the 16th century there were numerous Christians happy to convert to Islam, such as "Inglis Mustapha", a general in the Ottoman army who was actually a Campbell from Scotland. Then there was the Perthshire girl Helen Gloag who, in the 18th century, ran away from home, boarded a ship bound for America, was captured by Moroccan pirates and sold to slave traders but eventually became the favourite wife of the Sultan of Morocco.

The first Muslim visitor to Scotland of whom we have any record was one Ishmael Bashaw, during the 18th century, although Maan cites circumstantial evidence that there were Muslims here from at least the 15th century. But Islamic culture made a real impact on these shores with the arrival of the "Mahometan berry": Scotland's first coffee house opened in Glasgow in 1673, despite opposition from the clergy and press, who regarded it as an inducement towards Islam. Their fears were possibly intensified by the fact that, around the same time, the Koran was first translated into English by a Scotsman, Alexander Ross.

For centuries before that, however, Scots scholars had been investigating the riches of Islamic culture and science, a notable example being "the wizard", Michael Scott, or Scot, a renowned scholar and philosopher who studied in Moorish Spain and translated Arabic works into Latin. Maan's book shows a carving of Scott at Melrose Abbey, sporting what looks very like a turban.

Others drawn to Arabic culture included the early 17th-century traveller William Lithgow who, at a time when Jews were suffering under the Inquisition, noted in his wonderfully titled Rare Adventures and Painful Peregrinations the religious tolerance and hospitality he encountered in Muslim countries.

A number of Scots converted to Islam in the 19th century. Some of them did so in India while working in the British colonial administration. Many others, however, did so in Scotland. Yahya en Nasr, born in Kilwinning, Ayrshire, in 1874 and baptised John Parkinson, converted simply because he felt spiritually moved to do so. His studies of biology and astronomy led on to an interest in philosophy and religion, and in 1901 he converted and became known as a poet, often writing about Islam. He died in 1918. Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton, from Roxburghshire, an Edinburgh-trained medic who was knighted in 1900, also converted, as did Sir Charles Hamilton (later Sir Abdullah Archibald Hamilton Bart), who was of royal descent.

Recent Times

When Maan first arrived in Glasgow from Pakistan in 1953, as a student of textile chemistry at the Royal Technical College (later Strathclyde University), he met Sundhi Din, who had come from India at the beginning of the century as servant to a retired Army colonel. When Maan met him, he was an old man, living in a "Lascar colony" in Port Dundas. Such colonies were where other early-20th-century Muslim immigrants settled, the first door-to-door hawkers, at a time when racism and prejudice were rife. As Indians and Pakistanis reversed the journeys taken by their colonisers in previous centuries, more and more arrived, taking up jobs, if they were able, on the buses, or working in factories; then, gradually, opening the corner shops and restaurants which would become ubiquitous.

Today, we Scots like to think of ourselves as more tolerant and less racist than elsewhere, yet, as Maan agrees, there is no room for complacency. Our understanding of Islamic culture remains imperfect, to say the least, at a time when mutual understanding has never been so necessary, to counterbalance the suspicion and fear engendered by extremist terrorist outrages.

Despite some occasional encounters with racism, Maan's Scottish experience has been a positive one: "For example, when I stood for election (as councillor for Glasgow's Kingston ward in the early Seventies), "nobody expected me to win. But they were all proved wrong – Scottish people voted for me against one of their own." And in 2005 he joined a joint Christian-Muslim pilgrimage to Jerusalem, organised by the former Glasgow Lord Provost Alex Mosson: "It was a wonderful exercise," he recalls. "The kind of thing that can really bring the communities together."

James Dickie, a Scotsman who converted to Islam in 1960 at the age of 15, and who features in the book, agrees.

"I think it's true," he says. "The Scots are not racist. People have often said to me there's some sort of affinity between Scots and Arabs. For a long time I dismissed this as a load of romantic nonsense, but of late I've come to think there's something in it."

He sees parallels between the old Scottish clan structure and Muslim tribal society. He also believes there are similarities in psychology between Muslims and Scots, as both have a heritage of being subjugated: "It may be that in accepting one another no act of condescension is involved." He no longer experiences open hostility when he tells fellow Scots that he has converted to Islam, but still does not feel entirely accepted: "It's latent, not explicit. It is an act of cultural betrayal, isn't it: white man gone native?"

Maan terminated his long-term membership of the Labour party in response to what he saw as the lies behind the invasion of Iraq, and he had effectively finished the book by last June, when a blazing car at Glasgow airport brought the threat of Islamic extremist tactics horribly to our doorstep. However, he was gratified by the reaction of the both the police and the Scottish Government, both of whom sent representatives to an emergency meeting called by the Glasgow Islamic Centre. "Whenever things seem to be getting better, something else happens," he says. "There was 9/11, 7/7, and we thought we were all right in Scotland, but we also had our unlucky day and these things do strain relations. There is still a lot of distrust about, unfortunately."

Which was, of course, prime motivation for him writing the book. "I wanted to show that Islam and the West have lived together for 14 centuries – sometimes in good ways, sometimes confrontational," he chuckles. "But they have to live together – now even more so, because we're not in the world of the 11th or the 14th or the 19th centuries, when nobody knew what was happening in other countries. We're in a global village."

The Thistle and the Crescent is published by Argyll publishing, priced at £12.99









Sources:

Jim Gilchrist, "Islam and Us" The Scotsman February 20, 2009

Rebecca McQuillan, "What drives a Scot to convert?" The Herald February 21, 2008
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- Qatada -
02-24-2008, 03:31 PM
:salamext:


it's really nice.. relating the history of Scotland with Islam - since the 5th Century CE!

Amazing.. subhan Allah. Might help with people getting along.. :)
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Cabdullahi
02-24-2008, 03:35 PM
Muslims and the british back then had relations,muslim turks helped elizabeth the 1st againsts the spaniards.You dont here this talked about or even taught to kids at school.
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Moon*Light
02-24-2008, 07:43 PM
:sl:

Nice to know :)

thanks for sharing
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Malaikah
02-26-2008, 07:50 AM
:sl:

Wow, I was just wondering about Muslims in Scotland earlier!
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