Sadiya Ahmed has been busy during Britain’s latest COVID-19 lockdown. She has produced a podcast, created a heritage photography competition, and is working on setting up a Muslim History module to run alongside the national curriculum.
It is all part of this former tutor’s aim to ensure British Muslim history takes its rightful place within mainstream British history.
“Muslims aren’t just on the margins of British society, but are part of British society,” she says.
She wants to place their stories alongside the already documented “mainstream” British history in archives, museums and academia.
“It gives our communities an authenticated representation and claim to British history, as ‘our history’, one we are evidently part of.”
BENGALURU: Born Lady Eveyln Murray in 1867, Zainab Cobbold was the first Scottish noblewoman to convert to Islam in the Victorian era. She went on to become the first woman born in the UK to perform the Hajj, in 1933, when she contacted Hafiz Wahba then ambassador for the Kingdom of Hejaz and Najd to the United Kingdom who wrote to King Abdulaziz Al-Saud, who granted permission for her to perform her pilgrimage.
Cobbold died aged 96 and was buried on a hill in Scotland, facing Makkah, with words from the Qu’ran engraved on her tombstone.
Cobbold’s remarkable story is just one of many that are available on The Everyday Muslim Heritage and Archive Initiative, a platform that documents Muslim heritage in Britain through photographs, oral histories, films, artifacts, and heritage walks.
How Can Instagram People Keep The Past Alive? Published February 18th, 2021 - 10:27 GMT
Iraq Photo Archive - Sadiya Ahmed’s father with his geology classmates at the University of Baghdad, 1960s. (Instagram)
Highlights
Arab News talks to the founders of three social-media platforms dedicated to preserving personal histories
Born Lady Eveyln Murray in 1867, Zainab Cobbold was the first Scottish noblewoman to convert to Islam in the Victorian era. She went on to become the first woman born in the UK to perform the Hajj, in 1933, when she contacted Hafiz Wahba then ambassador for the Kingdom of Hejaz and Najd to the United Kingdom who wrote to King Abdulaziz Al-Saud, who granted permission for her to perform her pilgrimage.
Published date: 28 January 2021 10:32 UTC | Last update: 1 month 2 weeks ago
About 30km southwest of London, the commuter town of Woking happens to be home to western Europe s largest cemetery. Its size isn t its only accolade; Brookwood cemetery has also been the resting place of some of the world s prominent thinkers, creators, activists and royalty.
They include Edward the Martyr, who briefly ruled the country in the 10th century and whose remains were moved to Brookwood in 1984; John Singer Sargent, the American portrait artist who painted several US presidents; and, for a time, Dodi El-Fayed, the entrepreneur who died in a car crash alongside Princess Diana.