rigorously researched book demonstrates their rootedness, and, by arguing that they have as much claim on this land as anybody else, represents a very welcome contribution to this discourse. Against the backdrop of racially-charged debates about immigration and questions of identity, especially since 9/11, Mohammad Seddon offers a timely exploration of how one particular set of Muslims have sought to establish themselves as an integral part of the British community over a period of 200 years. By focusing specifically on the history of these Yemeni Muslim sailors, he examines the long legacy of connections and interactions that have progressively bound their community to this country, and so locates broader present-day debates about the construction of British Muslim identities, religious belief and citizenship within a more textured historical frame. What we are provided with is a fascinating account of the economic, political, social and cultural dynamics of their lives, which is woven into the wider context of a rapidly changing imperial and post-colonial British society, where race, religion, gender and class intersect.
By investigating official and popular attitudes to their presence, and the differing responses of these Yemenis, this study challenges accepted wider notions of migration and settlement patterns, deepening our understanding of their contributions to British society as well as their role in the two world wars. It offers unique insights into their everyday lives, their internal organization and dynamics, into the links with their country of origin, and relations with their ‘host’ communities. In the process, it sheds fresh light on the nature of religious authority, representation and civic engagement, and successfully uncovers aspects of British history that have thus far remained in large part neglected. What emerges from fascinating narrative is a deeply informed understanding not only of the resilience of British Yemeni Muslims’ daily lives but also the dynamic of their institutions such as families, mosques, and religious leadership, and their social and political significance in today’s Britain.
This is a study written in the tradition of ‘history from below’; by making them, the ‘subaltern’, the subject of history, it represents an attempt to democratize history. It is also an attempt to understand a group of people considered to be incidental to the making of history and hence of little historical interest.
By seeking to get inside their minds to discover how and why they behaved in the ways that they did, what they achieved and how far their aims were realized, it is clear that the politics of Yemeni Muslim lascars were not marked simply by acquiescence, accommodation, compromise and negotiation but also by resistance. But the adoption of this historiographical approach does inevitably present challenges. How does someone write an historical narrative drawing largely upon fragmentary and scattered sources, such as scarce personal life stories and memories? Seddon grapples with these challenges with considerable success, enabling a more inclusive and arguably less biased account to emerge than would be possible through the ‘mainstream’ writing of history. Of course, while many questions are answered, new ones are inevitably raised, and much still remains to be researched on the experiences of Britain’s Muslim communities. In this respect, Seddon’s study has done its job – stimulating further interest in an important aspect of British history, namely the reconfiguration of Yemeni Muslim identities, constructed through different antagonisms and processes of enculturation, and the effect that this has had in locating them socially in multiple positions of marginality and subordination.
Humayun Ansari
Royal Holloway, University of London
November 2012
PROLOGUE
MUCH OF OUR KNOWLEDGE and understanding of Muslims in the UK is informed by the post-Second World War economic migration of post-colonial and Commonwealth single-male, South Asian workers and labourers to the factories and industries of late twentieth-century Britain. This is because this particular migration phenomenon has had the most significant impact on modern Britain, indelibly changing and reshaping our society across its social and political spectrums. The contemporary British ‘migration experience’ has also produced a plethora of academic writings engaged with a multitude of disciplines, producing many sociological theories all attempting to explain and quantify the effects of large-scale Muslim settlement on wider society. But where the end of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferated interest of Islam and Muslims in Britain and the West, not just through academic studies, but also through media representations, social debates and political legislation, the beginning of the previous century was instead marked by indifference and a degree of colonial cajolery towards the subjugated Muslim ‘other’ in imperial Britain.
Yemeni migration and settlement to Britain not only spans the breadth of these two historical events and particular migration experiences, it precedes both events by more than half a century. As a result of the early migrations to Britain, Yemeni communities in Cardiff and South Shields represent the oldest continuous Muslim presence in the UK. Yet, their story has remained largely unknown and virtually untold. In exploring the unique history of Yemeni Muslims in Britain, this study asserts that the generally-accepted beginnings of Yemeni community settlement in Britain, thought to be around the 1880s, needs to be revised to a point some 50 years earlier. As this book suggests, there is some evidence to challenge current received opinion.
Although the British Protectorate at Aden was not established until 1839, after its capture by the British East India Company (EIC), the company’s vessels had been visiting the port from as early as 1609 when it was then under Portuguese control. By 1829, the EIC considered making Aden a coaling station for its various steam vessels travelling from the Far East, India, Africa and Europe, transporting raw materials from the colonies and then shipping out finished manufactured goods from Britain to the world. In 1835, Captain Haines, an employee of the British East India Company, docked at Aden and prospected the port on behalf of the Company as a possible major strategic coaling station and entrepôt for British vessels and goods sailing to and from India and the Far East. Almost immediately, Company ships began docking at the port. In much the same way that Indian lascars1 found their way to British ports on EIC vessels from the ports of Calcutta and Bombay as early as the seventeenth century, it is reasonable to assume that Yemeni baḥriyyah (sing., baḥrī, meaning literally ‘of the sea’, but understood as ‘sailor’), extremely competent at negotiating the sea trade winds to India and China from the Arabian Peninsula for more than two millennia, also signed up on British ships either sailing from Aden, East Africa or India. What is certain is that, by the 1830s, Yemenis from the southern Yemen tribes, allied through treaties with Britain, would have joined British merchant vessels. This fact is also evidenced by the rapid population increase of Aden after the British occupation. Further, the Aden Protectorate was ruled by the British through the India Office from 1839 until 1937, when it finally received ‘Colony’ status and was then ruled as a separate entity from India. Before 1937, ‘Adenese’ subjects would have been administered and, therefore, considered as colonial Indian subjects, thus adding to the ‘invisibility’ of Yemeni sailors among the lascars residing in British ports. It is for the above stated reasons that the timeline for Yemeni migration and settlement in Britian needs to be located around 1836 rather than the 1880s.
0.1 – Saeed Hassan (al-Hubabi), his wife Josephine and their son, Saeed Kasseum in the living room of their family home in Liverpool, circa 1950.
But who are the Yemenis, from where do they originate and why did they settle in Britain? The publication before you is presented as a historical narrative that not only addresses the above important questions, but also captures the British Yemeni story by constructing a detailed and integrated account extracted from contemporaneous writings, newspaper reports, magazine articles, personal accounts, achieves and recollections collected through ethnographic research and both general and academic publications. The book is also largely informed by my own research on British Yemenis that
