Muslim Women in Britain is a groundbreaking and timely academic endeavor that provides a unique focus on the past lives and experiences of a selection of Muslim women who have been, in the main, overlooked in the existing literature. Indeed, there appear to be no comparable titles published so far. By locating these women’s individual stories within the wider framework of modern Britain, this edited collection sheds welcome light on the kinds of contributions that could be made by Muslim women even though—more generally—many of them at that time belonged to precarious communities, disproportionately experiencing poverty and uncertainty. It draws collective attention to the active and inspiring ways in which Muslim women from diverse backgrounds could shape the history of lived Islam within what was increasingly a multicultural Britain. Time and again, we see their actions directly subverting widespread contemporary assumptions and images of Muslim women’s passivity and inferiority.

Underpinned by feminist history approaches, Muslim Women in Britain shares the life stories of both Muslim women who converted to Islam within the British Isles and those who traveled to or away from Britain from the Victorian times to the years immediately after the Second World War. It constructs a fascinating, suitably complex picture of their myriad relations with wider society and so develops a more nuanced appreciation of their active engagement with the sociohistorical and cultural contexts in which they operated.

Written in an eminently readable style, Muslim Women in Britain represents a joint-editorial effort between a sociologist and a historian, with contributions from scholars belonging to a variety of disciplines (history, sociology, law, international relations, literature, and cultural studies). This interdisciplinary exchange results in a very effective synergy. Acutely aware that British Muslim women’s contributions have largely remained sidelined at best, the editors have drawn on feminist historiography to make Muslim women highly visible. By situating the contributions in their wider societal contexts, the editors have ensured that the whole is greater than the sum of its various parts, the value of the individual chapters notwithstanding.

The collection comprises eight biographical essays. Take the following five, which offer a fascinating analysis of the intersection of gender, religion, ethnicity, and class. Forensically researching scattered archives, Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor offers an absorbing account of the life of the working-class Olive Salaman, who, defying family and community expectations, married a Yemeni, converted to Islam, and became the celebrated “mother of the Cardiff Yemenis” (21). Hamid Mahmood’s essay on Fatima Cates—one of the first known female converts to Islam in Britain; a writer, public speaker, poet, and founding treasurer of Liverpool Muslim Institute—is a moving story of her trials and tribulations, including brutal treatment from her unfaithful husband and being subjected to violence in the streets. Jamie Gilham delves captivatingly into the intriguing and enchanting life of the aristocratic Gladys Milton Brooke, a bohemian socialite celebrity who, through her marriage to Bertram Willes Dayrell Brooke, the last heir apparent to the Raja of Sarawak, became a member of the ruling “White Rajas of Sarawak.” Gilham takes us on her curious, flamboyant journey from Christianity to modernist Islam, starting with her conversion ceremony on an airplane travelling from Croydon to Paris in February 1932. Judith Bourne examines Bertha Cave, a woman of radical disposition from the lower classes who was the first woman to apply for enrollment at Gray’s Inn; she was rejected for lack of precedent. Similarly defying convention, she converted to Islam and wed a much older Indian. The marriage ended in failure. Bourne sympathetically illuminates a resilient woman of strong principles who fought for equality in public life. While much is already known of Noor Inayat Khan, the British spy captured by the Nazis in France and then tortured and executed at Dachau in 1944, Pir Zia Inayat Khan’s essay on his aunt offers a thoughtful appreciation of the variegated repertoire of her literary and artistic talents as evident in her short stories, of the ethical basis of her stories, including in Twenty Jakata Tales (1939), and of her life.

Given the relative lack of archival sources, piecing together most of these histories was always likely to be challenging. While the authors of the essays have approached their subjects with intellectual rigor, deploying due diligence in accessing and applying the relevant resources to their narratives, the link of some of the subjects to life in Britain can appear somewhat tenuous. For instance, Nafeesah Keep, an American who worked with Abdullah Quilliam at the Liverpool Muslim Institute for one year, later led an itinerant life in various countries, including Australia, where she died in 1925, having “seemingly rejected Islam” (72). The Begum of Bhopal, Nawab Sultan Jahan, who ruled the Indian princely state of Bhopal from 1901 to 1926, likewise only visited England for short periods of time, namely on two occasions in 1911 and 1925. Hannah Rodda Robinson lived as a Muslim for only a few months at most in England before relocating to the Ottoman Empire.

One British Muslim woman of considerable stature in the period covered by the collection who deserved to be studied more closely is Lady Evelyn Cobbold (1867–1963). While she is referenced significantly in the Introduction and then again in the chapter on Sultan Jahan, curiously, she did not merit a chapter of her own. Admittedly, like Noor Inayat and Sultan Jahan, Cobbold’s life is already well-documented, yet her own writings contain unique and fascinating insights regarding her engagement with Islam and Muslims in England and Saudi Arabia. A fresh examination of her archive might perhaps have shed new light on an unusual, even controversial, Arabic-speaking, Scottish aristocratic woman’s considerable intellectual vitality and Muslim rationalist-modernist perspective and practice, something that is arguably highly relevant to present-day twenty-first-century British Muslim discourses.

Given the debates and controversies surrounding Islam and Muslims globally, but more particularly in the West, Muslim Women in Britain will undoubtedly be of great interest and relevance not only to scholars and students specializing and researching in a variety of humanities and social sciences disciplines but also to socially, culturally, and politically aware lay audiences in multicultural contexts. There is no doubt that it will generate the impetus for further research on, for instance, the wives of Yemeni sailors who converted to Islam in South Shields and Cardiff in the early twentieth century and other less high-profile Muslim women, though scholars may well need to deploy creative historical methodologies to compensate for the lack of written archival resources so as to do justice to the wide range of women who actively helped to build British Islam during its formative decades.