Britain’s First Muslims

It is with some degree of sadness that I undertake this particular book review due to the very recent demise of the author, Professor Fred Halliday (1946- 2010), who passed away in April of this year. Halliday was born in Dublin and attended school at Ampleforth College, Yorkshire before going on to graduate from Queen’s College, Oxford in 1967 with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, thereafter attending the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. From 1969 to 1983, Halliday was a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review and he published his first major book, Arabia Without Sultans, in 1974 going on to publish more than twenty books in the process of becoming professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE) for over twenty years. In 2002 he was elected to the British Academy. Halliday was a forthright figure who, whilst generally being an advocate of justice, human rights and socialist democratic values, courted controversy with his espoused belief that imperialism and capitalism were often progressive forces in some parts of the world. He supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the later US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq whilst at the same time criticising the failures of the US and Britain to establish any coherent and sustainable policies for their redevelopment. He also criticised the then pervading “clash of civilisations” theory and controversially challenged the notion that there was a systemic ‘othering’ of Muslims in the west through the phenomenon of Islamophobia in his book Islam and the Myth of Confrontation, (1996). Halliday’s interest in British Muslims began with the publication of his ethnographic study of the Yemeni community in Sheffield, Arabs in Exile: Yemeni Migrants in Urban Britain (1992).