Religious spaces
London Mosque
Interwar London was a famously white, imperial space, the coordinating hub for a worldwide Empire. However, it was also a cosmopolitan and diverse city. Through the docks to the east passed the people and goods of empire, while international communities settled throughout the city. Muslim migrants to Britain had been increasing since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and in 1889 Britain’s first purpose built mosque was opened in Woking. It was the Imam of this mosque who conducted evening prayers over the body of Maulana Mohammad Ali, a Round Table Conference delegate who died during his work in January 1931. The London Mosque had been completed in 1926, funded by the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in India, and was the first in the capital. During the Round Table Conference it hosted an afternoon tea party for delegates and this image is from a New Year card sent to a government official. It would host visiting Muslim dignitaries, including the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in 1935. In 2018 the building achieved grade II listed status, down to its ‘gentle and harmonious fusion of formal and decorative traditions of mosque design with restrained 1920s British classicism’ and for its significance for the ‘Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s missionary activities’, reminding us that London was also target for non-western internationalist movements.
Further information:
Film footage of the opening of the mosque in 1926 https://www.britishpathe.com/video/islam-in-london-version-1-of-2-cuts
The heritage listing of the mosque https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1454338
The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and the mosque today http://www.loveforallhatredfornone.org/londons-first-purpose-built-mosque-listed-grade-ii-for-historic-architectural-and-cultural-significance/
Abyssinian Baptist Church, Harlem, New York
From 1905 Harlem’s black population increased rapidly as part of the Great Migration. So much so, that by the 1920s and 1930s the area became associated with a cultural and artistic movement, known as the Harlem Renaissance, and a new geographical consciousness shaped by emergent forms of Pan-Africanism and Black internationalism. Harlem’s churches were important spaces to facilitate and shape this new politics, and none more so than the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the largest black church in New York. The church’s opening in 1923 was a national event, and it quickly became a co-ordinating centre for many national black organisations. Celebrations were held when, in 1928, the 12-year mortgage that had financed the construction of the building was cleared, less than five years after it had been taken out. The Church’s pastors, Adam Clayton Powell Snr and Adam Clayton Powell Jr, were leading figures in African American life and the latter would become the first black Congressman from New York City. Sites like these became sites of major international events and gatherings, including the 1927 4th Pan-African Congress. They offered spaces to conceive of different kinds of internationalism from that associated with large, governmental organisations.
Further information:
Website of the Abyssinian Baptist Church: https://abyssinian.org/
Hriday Kunj, the Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad, India
MK Gandhi’s Indian nationalism was based on swaraj (self-rule), but his was also an internationalist vision of peace and nonviolence. He was not an ardent anti-imperialist. Rather he wanted the nations with the British empire to choose to associate together freely, brought together by mutual self-interest and friendliness. Gandhi trained his followers in these traits at ashrams (spiritual settlements) across India, most notably the Sabarmati Ashram. Participants would focus on spinning cloth, prayer, bodily discipline and good neighbourliness. Here satyragrahis (those trained in the force of truth) would be developed who would lead the fight against social inequality and against political oppression. But these ashrams also became sites of international pilgrimage, including for Muriel Lester, a British pacifist and social reformer, who had established the Kingsley Hall community centre in Bow, East London. She visited the Sabarmati Ashram, including Gandhi’s residential quarters (Hriday Kunj), where she stayed with over 200 others, and later wrote of Sabarmati and her Kingsley Hall in East London as ‘the two ashrams’. In both, she claimed, ‘there was the same sharing of the housework, the same absence of class distinctions, the same ignoring of sectarian labels, the same sleeping out of doors, the same gaiety that voluntary poverty brings, the same joy that comes from breaking down all national barriers, the same sure hold on reality that comes from constant prayer’ (Lester 1932, 2). Gandhi stayed in the latter during his London visit for the Round Table Conference, finding in the poverty of the east more evidence of the incivility of imperialism.
Further information:
On the Gandhi memorial ashram site at Sabarmati: https://gandhiashramsabarmati.org/en/
On the politics of Gandhi’s ashram: Ajay Skaria (2002) “Gandhi’s politics: liberalism and the question of the ashram”, reprinted in Saurabh Dube (ed. 2009) Enchantments of Modernity (London: Routledge): https://apps.cla.umn.edu/directory/items/publication/307551.pdf
Muriel Lester’s (1932) Entertaining Gandhi: https://archive.org/details/ENTERTAININGGANDHI_201807