Abdullah Quilliam (Henri De Léon) and Marmaduke Pickthall 73
a Liverpudlian physician and lay Methodist preacher. Quilliam was educated
at the Liverpool Institute and in 1872 at the age of seventeen he left school
to work in a lawyer’s office, funding his way through to qualify as a solicitor
by working as a satirical journalist until 1884 for the well-known Porcupine
magazine, feared by the rich and successful in Liverpool with skeletons in their
cupboards. He had also become a well-known figure in Temperance circles,
frequently lecturing on the social and moral ills of alcohol across North-West
England. In addition he developed a reputation as a formidable defence lawyer,
representing the accused in a number of high profile murder cases.1
Abdullah Quilliam’s interest in social justice extended beyond his tem-
perance activities and legal work, he was also a campaigner against capital
punishment, a supporter of Negro rights in the usa, a political lobbyist against
the Alien and Migration Acts and one of Britain’s early trade unionists.2 How-
ever, his burning zeal to support the temperance movement, his theological
shifting from Trinitarianism to Unitarianism,3 his knowledge of current Bibli-
cal scholarship and its critique of the origins of the Old and New Testament,
combined with a keen interest in Geology,4 all provided a genuine search
beyond the confines of Christianity to satisfy his need for a monotheistic faith.
Quilliam sought for an ideology that would provide an ally to his passion for
social justice and his concerns for the inequalities that existed in late Victorian
society. Above all, Islam would not only satisfy his spiritual concerns, but also
provide, in his mind, at least, an anti-discriminatory religion.
Abdullah Quilliam’s achievements between 1888 and 1908 on behalf of his
new-found faith were formidable, especially in the context of the changing
attitudes towards both Islam and the Ottoman Empire, in the same period.
In October 1896 The Sunday Telegraph reported that he had successfully con-
verted one hundred and eighty-two English men and women to Islam and had
1 October 1873 was articled to William Radcliffe of the firm William Radcliffe and Smith of
12 Sweeting Street, Liverpool. In November 1878 he passed his final examinations and was
admitted as a solicitor in December and commenced work for himself at the premises on 28
Church Street in Liverpool.
2 At various times Quilliam was solicitor to the Lancashire Sea Fishery Board and several trade
unions including the Mersey Railway Quay and Carters Union, The Operative Bakers Union
and the Upholsterers and Coppersmiths Societies. In 1897 Quilliam was appointed Presi-
dent of the 8,000 strong Mersey Railway Quay and Carters Union, on the resignation of the
previous president, Sir John Houlding JP who had been elected as the first Lord Mayor of
Liverpool. He was to hold this post until 1908. (See The Crescent, November 17, 253, 1893).
3 Ron Geaves, Islam in Victorian Britain: The Life and Times of Abdullah Quilliam (Leicester:
Kube Press, 2019),49.
4 Geaves, Islam in Victorian, 23, 36, 126.