Islam and Britain: Muslim Mission in an Age of Empire. By Ron Geaves
The history of British Islam before the Second World War has been an abiding concern of the religious studies scholar Ron Geaves.
In this follow-up to his biography of the British Muslim convert Abdullah Quilliam, Geaves offers a focused exploration of the origins and activities of the Muslim Ahmadiyya movement in Punjab and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The early chapters of the book trace the founding of the movement by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1889, emphasizing how British control of India and the widespread narrative of ‘Islam in danger’ shaped a range of Islamic reform movements in South Asia.
In some respects, Ahmad’s teaching aligned with orthodox… read more at source.
© The Author(s) [2019].
Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Description
Ron Geaves was professor of the comparative study of religion at Liverpool Hope University in England, retiring in December 2013. He was formerly Programme Leader and Chair in religious studies at the University of Chester in England and Head of Department at the University of Chichester. Wikipedia
In his meeting with Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, Khalifatul Masih V, Ron expressed his desire to write a book on the role of the Ahmadiyya missionary activity in Britain taking the starting point to be their arrival in England in 1912.
This book is one of its own kind as never before were the Ahmadiyya archives available to researchers, for the understandable reason that most of the archives from that time are in Urdu. Ahmadiyya Archive and Research Centre was founded by His Holiness Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, Khalifatul Masih V in London with one of its objectives being making archives available to researchers. Ron travelled to Rabwah and with the help of a team, went through the records, collecting any piece of information that could in any way be relevant to the early missionary activity in Britain.
Around three years of reading and two of writing has the bore the fruit that we have now in the form of this book. The book covers the vision of Hazrat Mirza Bashiruddin Mahmud Ahmad, Khalifatul Masih IIra, about the mission being established in the west, the guidance he had provided, the efforts of the missionaries to live up to his expectations and, of course, his own visit to London where he laid the foundation of the Fazl Mosque – London’s first mosque… continue reading at .alhakam.org