On a rainy Friday I found myself in Woking, Surrey. Surrounded by a good number of grad students entrepreneurial enough to sign themselves up on a faculty-funded field trip, we first visited the Shah Jahan Mosque, and then the Muslim section of Brookwood Cemetery. The history of British Islam is fascinating but oft-overlooked (even by many British Muslims), and the Everyday Muslim project exemplifies the promise of popular history projects in reaching out to wider audiences.
To people in Woking the history of the town is probably inseparable from that of British Islam. As the site of the first purpose-built mosque in Britain, it would have been the locus for worship of many nearby Muslims. It inspired some prominent converts, and even receives a mention in the earlier chapters of H.G Wells’ War of the Worlds. The nearby Brookwood Cemetery is a remarkable site in itself, with the 250,000 people buried inside making it Western Europe’s largest cemetery. Significant individuals have been laid to rest there — the last Ottoman sultana, Britain’s first Muslim burial, a Sultan of Oman (who has since been exhumed and reburied back in Muscat). Little connections abound everywhere: some were born in Perak, others were buried next to their Zoroastrian spouses. The project has developed some heritage paths that are extremely walkable (best done under good weather!) that capture the unique architecture and features of these sites.
Oral history itself can be finicky. Done wrongly it can be rambly and banal, but the kind recorded within the project explores many different perspectives from a variety of backgrounds. It would be quite pointless to reproduce their excellent research here, so do check it out at the project itself.
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