In this paper, Dr Shearmur will look briefly at the group of British converts to Islam, centred round the Woking Mosque in the period round, and just after, the First World War.  Those upon whom he will concentrate were people who contributed to the Islamic Review.  From this, emerges an interesting picture of the (varied) personalities and interests of those involved (who include Marmaduke Pickthall, the author of the English translation of the Qur’an: The Meaning of the Glorious Quran, and the Irish Peer, Lord Headley).  The material also includes statements about what it was that attracted a number of different people to Islam.  From this, and from other material in the Islamic Review, it is clear that their understanding of Islam was distinctive, and could well be described as ‘modernist’.  Their social practises accommodated themselves to the British upper middle class or even minor aristocratic character of the converts, who also included a fair number of interesting eccentrics.  At the same time, Pickthall identified himself as an orthodox Sunni Muslim, who favoured Hanafi jurisprudence.  He made sure that his Meaning of the Glorious Qu’ran had the endorsement of the Al-Azhar Mosque, in connection with which the English text was reverse-translated into Arabic, by way of checking its accuracy.  The secret behind all this, and behind the question mark in my title, is that the founder of this group was Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din – a distinguished Indian lawyer, but also someone who was a leading member of the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement.  While great care was taken that the character of the Woking mosque should not take on a sectarian character, and while the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement accept the orthodox interpretation of the finality of the prophethood, it seems nonetheless that these British Muslims’ views of Islam were influenced by the approach of the Lahore Ahmadiyya. 

Jeremy Shearmur is a former assistant of Karl Popper’s; he taught philosophy at Edinburgh, Political Theory at Manchester and the ANU, and was also Director of Studies of the Centre for Policy Studies (London), and Research Associate Professor at George Mason University. He has wide academic interests, especially in social philosophy and in ‘critical rationalism’. He has published The Political Thought of Karl Popper and Hayek and After, and was co-editor of Karl Popper, After the Open Society. He is currently finishing editorial work on Larry Briskman’s Problems and their Progress, working with Geoff Stokes on The Cambridge Companion to Popper, and also working on his own volume, Living with Markets. In 2009 he was a Senior Research Scholar in the Center for the History of Political Economy in the Department of Economics at Duke University, and he expects that work that he undertook there on Hayek’s intellectual development will be published in a series of papers.