Friday, January 24, 2014

What was Hamid Snow's real background?

This associate-turned-enemy of Alexander Russell Webb has always been said to have been a "Eurasian" of mixed Indian and European parentage. But this was called into question--as was his allegiance to Islam--in an Indian court...

*click to enlarge*


Thursday, January 16, 2014

FOUND: Ghulam Ahmad's First Letter to Alexander Russell Webb




Alexander Russell Webb, the first prominent American convert to Islam, initially became interested in the religion around late 1886. While there were several factors influencing this interest, one of the most important factors was his reading circulars and letters from Ghulam Ahmad, the future founder of the Ahmadiyya movement. Brent Singleton, for his book Yankee Muslim, had located and reprinted copies of some of the letters exchanged between Webb and Ahmad, but he apparently could not find a copy of Ahmad's first letter to Webb.

Just this morning, I found a copy.

I will be discussing this letter--along with several other previously unknown writings from the 1800s by and concerning Webb--in my forthcoming book "A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Vol. I: Early White American Converts" (Brill 2015)

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Quilliam = Henri M. de Leon (a great piece of evidence)

Ron Geaves' biography of Abdullah Quilliam, England's first prominent convert to Islam, provided a number of pieces of evidence that supported the by now well-accepted idea that Quilliam used the pseudonym Henri M. de Leon while living in London after 1912. However, despite the numerous pieces of strong circumstantial evidence presented by Geaves, I always felt that what was missing was a single piece of evidence that undeniably confirmed that the two men were one and the same.

I believe I have just found what I've been looking for.

Exhibit A: Quilliam's conversion story, as told by Quilliam to a reporter for a Muslim journal for an article that appeared in 1904.



Exhibit B: Henri M. de Leon's 1915 speech about his own conversion, which appeared in the January 1915 issue of the Islamic Review

(click to enlarge)


Now, Ron Geaves had already known about the 1915 speech, which he cited in his book (p. 271), and he knew that it had some general similarities with Quilliam's conversion story--but Geaves was not aware of the 1904 article, which contains the exact same, incredibly unique story as the 1915 speech: a Muslim in North Africa in the early 1880s pointing out to the future convert that the future convert's argument that Christianity is superior to Judaism because it's a later revelation can be used to say that Islam is superior to Christianity because it is an even later revelation.  

I'm finally satisfied.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

An International Moorish Secret Society from the 1910s




UPDATE: just found the following 1901 article that ran in an international Islamic journal