Anjuman-i-Islam, London

Pan-Islamic Society of London

Central Islamic Society

The Anjuman-i-Islam, London was one branch of a pan-Islamic society with further branches in India and several Muslim countries. By the turn of the century, the branch was in decline, but in 1903 the barrister and Edinburgh University graduate Abdullah Al-Mamun Suhrawardy revived it under the name of the Pan-Islamic Society. This took place in the context of a decline in British support for the Ottomans and a concomitant determination on the part of Muslims in Britain to mobilize against British foreign policy and advance the ummah.

The Pan-Islamic Society was renamed the Central Islamic Society in 1910 when Syed Ameer Ali succeeded Suhrawardy as President. It served to focus Muslims on issues affecting the Islamic world. While accused by some of fanaticism, it claimed, through the organ Pan-Islam, that it was concerned with defending Islam from misconceptions and influencing official policy on Muslim countries. It secured some white British allies, including Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, to speak on behalf of its cause.

It also served to advance the needs of the Muslim community in Britain. As the Central Islamic Society, its stated aims included:

to promote the religious, moral, social, and intellectual advancement of the Muslim world...to afford a centre of social union to Muslims from all parts of the world...to provide facilities for conducting religious ceremonies in non-Muslim countries...to collect subscriptions from all parts of the world, in order to build a mosque in London, and to endow it; and to extend the burial ground for the Muslims in London.

(Muslim Protest, cited in Qureshi 1999, p. 50, fn233)