Quilliam at the Sublime Port — An Eyewitness Testimony
Among the great gaps in contemporary scholarship on Abdullah Quilliam is a thorough examination of the Ottoman archives. That said, some work has already been done. Professor Mehmet Şeker of Dokuz Eylül University has made what seems to be a preliminary survey of the archives on Quilliam but — to my knowledge — has not yet published anything substantial on them, except for one short article in a monthly history magazine.[1]
Şeker describes the archival material as covering the period 1890–1910. The first document from 1890 is a translation of an interview with Quilliam in Abilli Khak Hamid’s British Star newspaper (this being the means that Quilliam first came to Abdülhamid II’s attention in 1890 for protesting Hall Caine’s London play Mahomet). There is correspondence on or by Quilliam to the Sublime Port, about his activities, the Liverpool Muslim community, news and commentary on the Liverpool Muslims in the British press, and even on Quilliam’s personal family matters, for which Quilliam on occasion signed off as “His English Muslim servant”. In amongst these documents, Mehmet Şeker has discussed the Ottoman letter of appointment for Quilliam’s investiture as Sheikh al-Islam of the British Isles, which he presented on at the 2012 Quilliam Awards ceremony in Manchester. In the short article noted above, Şeker also remarks that Abdülhamid trusted Quilliam and even gave his family titles and medals. Like the historian M.A. Sherif, Şeker finds confirmation in the archives of Quilliam’s bigamy in his marriages to Hannah and Mary.[2]
However, this archival material is yet to be contextualised or assessed to any great extent. Barbaros Akıncı has discussed two assessments made of the Liverpool Muslim community and its leader — by İsmail Lütfi Efendi in 1891 and Mustafa Halil Efendi in 1898 — the former appreciative and sympathetic and the latter more sceptical.[3] The latter certainly did not make much difference to Quilliam’s deepening relations with the Sublime Porte over this period. Michael Talbot has found that the archives confirm the details given in The Crescent about Ottoman recognition of Yehya Parkinson’s poetry and the award given to him at a ceremony at the Liverpool Muslim Institute, presided over by Quilliam, acting in the caliph’s stead.[4]
To this slowly emerging picture another small piece can be added — although not one from the Ottoman archives. This is an eyewitness account of Quilliam and his relationship with the caliph at court. It comes from Sir Henry Felix Woods (1843–1929), otherwise known as “Woods Pasha”. A Royal Navy man, he attained the rank of Navigating Lieutenant, before being attached to the British Embassy in Istanbul. With British permission, he subsequently joined the Ottoman Navy in 1869, rising to the rank of Admiral and later served as a trusted aide-de-camp to Abdülhamid II, inter alia representing him at the coronation of Edward VII. Woods began with the training of cadets at Halki College and then later helped with the re-organisation of the Ottoman navy, establishing and commanding new torpedo and coastal defences, and surveying and buoying the Dardanelles and its approaches. After the Young Turks Revolution, he remained in post and witnessed the coronation of Mehmed V in 1909. In retirement, he wrote a two-volume account of his life, Spunyarn, which was published in London in 1924. As a close and longtime observer of the Hamidian court, Woods had this to say about Quilliam:
Abdul Hamid took a great interest in the Liverpool Mussulmans — of whose existence he had learned through a paragraph in an Arabic paper. Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam, as he called himself, the founder of the Community, was invited to Constantinople by the Sultan and received much honour at his hands. He was treated as an imperial guest, and one of his secretaries who spoke (120) English was attached to him as “mehmendar” (guide). This official was Hakki Bey, who after the Constitution became a Minister, and subsequently appeared in England as the Special Envoy sent to negotiate a treaty for the completion of the German railway from Bagdad to Bassorah. He was also for a time Turkish Ambassador to Berlin. Quilliam had brought his youngest son with him and I was present at a concert given one Friday afternoon for the entertainment of Baron and Baroness Calice, at which the Sultan took the youngster on his knee and caressed him. Quilliam, who belonged to an old Manx family, was an extraordinary person. I believe he was perfectly sincere in his conversion to Islam, and never received any gift from the Sultan for himself, save a decoration. He had never sought help from the Caliph, and had never been in communication with anyone in Turkey before he received this invitation from the Sultan. He was a clever writer and a smart solicitor, well up in the law, and a great student of theology and history. His case was a curious evolution from the chrysalis state of a Sunday-school teacher, and staunch upholder of Nonconformity, to that of a preacher of Islam. His conversion, I learnt from his own lips, was brought about by a journey to Spain, where he was sent to convalesce after a severe illness. He crossed over to Morocco, and was so struck by the way that the Mohammedans carried the observance of their religion into their daily life that he determined to study Islam. He was a total abstainer, had been so all his life, and the Prophets’ Law of Abstinence from Strong Drinks strongly appealed to him, as did also the sayings of the Prophet. It ended in his conviction that “Islam” (121) was the religion which contained the least errors, and so he formally adopted it. (122) [5]
A few matters stand out from Woods’ account. The first is that Woods judged Quilliam to be sincere in his relationship with Abdülhamid, and indeed in his conversion to Islam. The second is Quilliam’s relationship with İsmail Hakkı Bey, Quilliam’s designated guide at court (the caliph’s personal translator in English, French and German, trained diplomat, and later government minister after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908). Given Quilliam’s well-known anti-Young Turk proclivities, there is an interesting relationship to explore here.[6] Thirdly, it supports the view that the Sublime Port initiated contact and that Quilliam had not developed or initiated contact through other networks, such as Freemasonry. Finally, there is the charming human detail of Quilliam’s “youngest son” being dangled on the caliph’s knee in front of the whole court (although it is unclear as to which son or which visit).
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Yet, if truth be told, none of these snippets tell us a great deal that is new, which is why a proper survey and analysis of Ottoman archives on Quilliam is still so sorely needed.
Notes
[1] Mehmet Şeker, “Sultan II. Abdülhamid’in Ingiltere’ye Atadiği Şeyhülislâm Abdullah Quilliam”, Derin Tarih, May 2012, pp.22–24. The British Muslim historian Yakub Zaki is also working on these archival materials for his forthcoming work, The Shadow of the Crescent: Islam in Britain, 1770–1918.
[2] M.A. Sherif, “Rich histories of Muslims in Britain — Shrabani Basu on Victoria’s Munshi and Ron Geaves’ biography of Quilliam”, Salaam, April 2010, http://www.salaam.co.uk/knowledge/rich_histories_of_muslims_in_britian.php, in a review cites a text from the Ottoman Archives at Gulhane, Istanbul.
[3] Barbaros Akıncı, “William Henry Quilliam ve Liverpool İslam Cemiyeti”, Vakanüvis: Uluslararası Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi/International Journal of Historical Researches, vol. 1, no. 2, Fall 2016, pp.1–13, available at http://dergipark.gov.tr/vakanuvis/issue/24970/263498.
[4] Michael Talbot, “Scottish Muslims and Ottoman Pan-Islamism”, Ottoman History Podcast, 15 September 2014, http://www.docblog.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2014/09/scottish-muslims-and-ottoman-pan.html.
[5] Sir Henry F. Woods, Spunyarn From the Strands of a Sailor’s Life Afloat and Ashore: Forty-Seven Years under the Ensigns of Great Britain and Turkey (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1924), 2 vols, Vol. II, pp.120–2. The Baron Calice was the longstanding Hapsburg ambassador to the Sublime Port.
[6] For instance, İsmail Hakkı Bey served alongside Alexander Russell Webb as one of the few Muslim delegates to the Chicago World Parliament of Religions in 1893, see Umar F. Abd-Allah, A Muslim in Victorian America: The Life of Alexander Russell Webb (Oxford: University Press, 2006), p.216; Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017), p.256, n.34.
