Patrick Comerford
ITV’s exposure of Reform UK last night shows how deep-seated racism, prejudice, misogyny and Islamophobia are inside the far-right in Britain, despite all the pretences, protestations and bluster from Nigel Farage.
The language is vile and reprehensible. It seems to be acceptable among Reform’s elected representatives, candidates and the rank and file party members to claim Muslims have no place in British society and that they should be deported, whether or not they were born in Britain.
Alan Feeney, the deputy mayor of Solihull, said in last night’s exposure that the area was ‘infested" with Asian families, called them ‘absolute parasites’, and said no more than 1% of the UK population should be non-white. Other party members made comments that included extreme violence and shared deeply misogynistic and racist views, including a Bromley councillor calling King Charles a Muslim and calling for him to be killed. Feeney was filmed with other candidates talking about a planned local mosque and burying pig meat in its grounds.
There are references to Islamic scholars in the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1386), and there have been Muslims in Britain since the 16th century, when John Nelson became the first Englishman to convert to Islam in 1583. When I was visiting Holy Cross Church in King’s Cross recently, the story of the earliest vicar in the parish, Bishop Algernon Stanley, reminded me of two members of the aristocracy whose stories illustrate how Muslims have been part and parcel of British society for longer than most people are aware, and that the earliest Muslims here were very much a part of British culture and life.
Bishop Algernon Stanley was a younger brother of Henry Edward John Stanley (1827-1903), 3rd Baron Stanley of Alderley and 2nd Baron Eddisbury, and they were both deeply connected with the elite layers of society of the day, closely related to people like Bertrand Russell, Sir Winston Churchill, the Mitford sisters, and deans and bishops in the Church of England.
Henry Stanley, who preferred to be known as Abdul Rahman Stanley, was a senior diplomat when he converted to Islam in his 30s in 1859, and as Lord Stanley he became the first Muslim member of the House of Lords. He was also an historian who translated the works of 16th century Portugues explorers of the Age of Discovery, including Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Francisco Alvarez, Antonio de Morga and Duarte Barbosa.
Stanley was born on 11 July 1827 and was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. After a year at Cambridge, he entered the Diplomatic Service at the age of 20 in 1847, as an assistant précis writer to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, and he went on to become the British attaché in Constantinople in 1851. In January 1854 he was appointed secretary to the British legation in Athens, at a time when the British minister plenipotentiary or ambassador in Athens in 1854 was the Irish politician and diplomat Sir Thomas Wyse (1791-1862) from Waterford.
Stanley converted to Islam around 1859, abandoned his career as a British diplomat, and adopted the name Abdul Rahman. Using his new Muslim identity, he travelled as Shaikh Morad to British colonies in Asia, shocked colonial society in Ceylon and Singapore, and completed the hajj to Mecca. When his father, Edward Stanley, 2nd Lord Stanley of Alderley, read reports about him, he asked his wife rhetorically ‘that wretched fool Henry … Is he mad or what is he?’
Stanley returned to England in April 1860, and is the first recorded Briton to convert to Islam abroad and return to Britain as a practising Muslim. He inherited the family titles when his father died on 16 June 1869 and so became the first Muslim member of the House of Lords.
Stanley and his wife Fabia, a Spanish Catholic and the daughter of Santiago Federico San Roman of Seville, went through four separate marriage ceremonies. Their first wedding took place in Algeria in 1862 under Islamic law, and they remarried according to Islamic law in Constantinople in 1862 or 1863.
They kept their relationship secret until his father died. Then, within five months, they registered their third wedding on 6 November 1869 at a registry office in Saint George’s Parish, Hanover Square, and Fabia was received in polite society as his wife in Britain.
However, Fabia turned out to be the same person as Serafina Fernandez y Funes from Alcaudete in Jaén, who had married Ramon Peres y Abril on 30 September 1851, and she had two sons living in Spain, although it is not clear whether Stanley was aware of this background. This first Spanish husband did not die until 16 May 1870, so the first three marriage ceremonies were bigamous.
Finally, the couple were married for a fourth time and probably legally in a Roman Catholic wedding ceremony in Saint Alban’s Church, Macclesfield, on 15 May 1874, four years before his brother Algernon became a Roman Catholic. This wedding too must have raised eyebrows in many circles as Stanley was a Muslim and Fabia had remained a practising Catholic.
Because of the prohibition of alcohol in Islam, Stanley closed all the pubs on his estate in Nether Alderley in Cheshire. As a Muslim, he respected Christianity as a ‘sister faith’ of Islam and argued for the continuing establishment of the Church of England in Wales. He contributed significantly to new churches in Anglesey, including Saint Michael’s at Valley, near Holyhead (1887-1888), and paid for refurbishing and restoring four churches: Saint Patrick’s, Llanbadrig, Saint Mary’s, Bodewryd, Saint Dona’s, Llanddona, and Saint Peirio’s, Rhosbeirio.
He remained a sincere and devout Muslim throughout his life, reciting the five daily prayers and the midnight prayers, and it is said he was well versed in the principles of Muslim theology.
Stanley died during the month of Ramadan on 11 December 1903 and he was buried on 15 December 1903 according to Muslim rites in the garden of the Dower House on his family estate, Alderley Park, at Nether Alderley, Cheshire. The chief mourner at his burial was the first secretary to the Ottoman Embassy in London, and Islamic prayers were recited over his grave by the embassy’s imam. Abdullah Quilliam, another early convert to Islam, conducted a Janaza service in his memory at the Liverpool Mosque.
According to Nancy Mitford, at the funeral, his brother Bishop Algernon Stanley turned to the new Lord Stanley, Edward Lyulph Stanley (1839-1925), who had removed his hat out of respect, and snapped, ‘Not your hat, you fool, your boots.’
Fabia Lady Stanley died on 15 May 1905, and was buried in Saint Mary’s Churchyard in Nether Alderley.
Stanley was hardly a marginal figure in British society; instead was the very epitome of an English aristocrat, albeit an eccentric one. His father’s uncle was Edward Stanley, Bishop of Norwich and the father of Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster. His mother, the Hon Henrietta Dillon-Lee, was descended from a long line of Irish and English aristocrats who held the titles of Viscount Dillon and Earl of Lichfield. One of his sisters, Katherine (Viscountess Amberley), was the mother of the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), while another sister, Henrietta, was the grandmother of Clementine Hozier, who married Sir Winston Churchill, and great-grandmother of the five Mitford sisters, Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah.
Being so closely related to so many aristocratic families and to Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell and prominent bishops and deans certainly makes Stanley part of the establishment.
It is an irony that must be lost on many on the far-right today that one of the most prominent early English Muslims was also closely related to the Mitford sisters, with their connections to Oswald Moseley and even Hitler.
Stanley subscribed to the building of Britain’s first purpose-built mosque, the Shah Jahan Mosque on Oriental Road in Woking, which was built in 1889 and is now one of Woking’s great architectural treasures..
The mosque was built in the grounds of the Oriental College, founded by the orientalist Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner (1840-1899), and which gave its name to Oriental Road. It was funded mainly by Shahjehan, Begum of Bhopal (1868-1901), and was designed by the architect William Isaac Chambers (1847-1924). It has been described by the Pevsner Architectural Guides as ‘extraordinarily dignified.’
A prominent early member of the mosque in Woking was another Muslim member of the Houe of Lords, the Irish peer Rowland George Allanson Allanson-Winn (1855-1935), 5th Baron Headley, who was an early convert to Islam.
The title of Lord Headley, Baron Allanson and Winn, of Aghadoe in Co Kerry, dates back to 1797, when it was given to Sir George Allanson-Winn, a former Baron of the Court of the Exchequer and MP for Ripon, who married into the Blennerhassett family in Co Kerry. The third Lord Headley sat in the House of Lords as an Irish Representative Peer in 1868-1877, as did his son, the fourth Lord Headley (1883-1913). He was succeeded by his cousin, Rowland Allanson-Winn, as 5th Baron Headley.
Lord Headley was an Irish peer, took his title from Aghadoe, near Killarney, Co Kerry, and was once a Justice of the Peace for Co Kerry. He was born in London, and was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College Cambridge. He studied for the Bar at the Middle Temple, then switched to engineering and became a civil engineer.
For many years after qualifying as an engineer, he was engaged in foreshore protection work in Ireland. He superintended coastal defence works in Youghal, Co Cork, and Glenbeigh, Co Kerry, and carried out similar work on the coast to the north of Bray Harbour, Co Wicklow. He stood as the Conservative and Unionist candidate in South Kerry in 1892, but received only 86 votes. Later, from 1896, he worked on building roads in India, and in 1902 and 1903 he won the Silver Medals of the Institute of Civil Engineers of Ireland.
In 1906, the Arklow Harbour Commissioners in Co Wicklow appointed him the chief engineer for extending the south breakwater of the harbour, but his plans were abandoned the following year in favour of a different scheme proposed by John Purser Griffith.
He inherited his Irish peerage when his cousin Charles died in 1913, and with the title he inherited the family estates in Co Kerry. His homes in Ireland were at Inseidin, Coliemore Road, Dalkey, and Glenbeigh, Killarney. In the year he inherited his family titles and estates in Ireland, he also converted to Islam on 16 November 1913, and adopted the Muslim name Shaikh Rahmatullah al-Farooq. He set up the British Muslim Society in 1914, was the author of several books on Islam, and twice made the Hajj to Mecca.
Headley was declared bankrupt in 1922. A year later, he was offered the throne of Albania in 1923, along with $500,000 and $50,000 a year, but turned down the offer. He claimed to have been offered the throne of Albania on three occasions, but turned down each invitation, saying ‘the only thing that goes with it is trouble and the almost certainty of assassination.’
Lord Headley died on 22 June 1935, and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking. His cousin, Canon WN Manning, Rector of Bideford, ‘was unavoidably prevented from being present.’ The Headley title became extinct when his younger son, Charles Allanson-Winn (1902-1994), died in 1994.
The first Muslim MP was not elected until 1997, when Mohammed Sarwar became the Labour for Govan. Stanley and Headley came long before Lord Nazir of Rotherham and Lady Uddin entered the House of Lords in 1998 as the next Muslim peers.
