84 Geaves
of Sunni Islam, the missionaries at Woking were from India, with a new centre
and focus in Lahore37 and consequently the ties to Turkey were much less.38
Yet both Pickthall and Quilliam/De Léon had strong allegiances to the Otto-
mans forged in the former through travel and personal experiences, and in the
latter through spiritual loyalty to a caliphate. In January 1914, Pickthall created
the Anglo-Ottoman Society to promote the values of the Ottomans and to lob-
by on behalf of Turkey. Not surprisingly the name of Henri De Léon appears as
the Vice-President until the outbreak of hostilities in November 2014 when he
resigned. As pointed out it was easier for Quilliam to divorce himself from loy-
alty to the Ottoman cause, as his main allegiance was to the Caliph overthrown
in 1909 by the Young Turk revolution. His version of Pan-Islamism was closely
linked to the idea of a united Sunni caliphate under the spiritual authority of
the Ottoman caliph, whereas Pickthall’s version was fixated on the Young Turks
as reformers of the Muslim umma. As a consequence Quilliam/De Léon passed
the war years in relative quiet even offering his services to the British intelli-
gence services in the war effort. In some ways, Quilliam was being true to the
principle that Muslims should be loyal to the nation of their birth, however his
stance might be seen as a compromise on his position that Muslims should put
faith over any other loyalty.39 Quilliam’s position can be best summarized in
37 The Ahmadiyya missionaries were the first foreign Muslims to participate in da’wa on
behalf of Islam in the West. Khwaja Kamal ud-Din, one of the early followers of the
Movement had arrived in London in October 1912 on legal business, but began to actively
promote Islam at Woking Mosque from August 1913. Chaudrey Muhammad Sayal was the
first missionary to be sent for the express purpose of propagating Islam and the unorth-
odox teachings of the Ahmadiyya Movement. He was active in assisting Kamal ud-Din
until he continued alone helping found the London Mosque in 1924.
38 South Asian Muslims in Britain were not totally unsympathetic to the Ottoman dilemma
during the war. Both the Central Islamic Society and the Islamic Information Bureau
organised meetings and wrote articles defending the Ottoman position (see Gilham,
Loyal, 124, 227–28).
39 Gilham, Loyal, 81. Quilliam advocated a number of positions in his fatwa that could be
perceived as subversive. In his first fatwas issued to the Muslim world he condemned the
British expeditionary force in Sudan and reminded Egyptian Muslim troops fighting for
the British in Sudan that it was forbidden to engage fellow Muslims in battle on behalf
of a non-Muslim power (see Geaves, 173). After the Battle of Omdurman and the mas-
sacre of the Sudanese dervishes by British troops he was even more uncompromising.
He called upon Muslims worldwide to shun contact with non-Muslims and quoted Al-
Imran’s command that Muslims should shun contact with non-Muslims (see Geaves, 184).
In 1896 he called for all Muslims to unite under the banner of pan-Islamism (as expressed
through loyalty to the Caliph) and subject their national identities to the wider Muslim
community. He accused the European powers of trying to colonise all Muslim powers