About The Book

The Collected Poems of Abdullah Quilliam brings together the secular and religious poetry of Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932) in a single volume for the first time.

Best known as the founder of Britain's first mosque community, this collection covers his entire four-decade poetic output, and reveals much about his inner spiritual and emotional life, about the private man behind the public figure.

Ron Geaves is a retired professor of religion better known for his academic writing in the study of religion. He remains a visiting professor in the Centre for the Study of Islam in Britain based in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion at the University of Cardiff. In 2010 he published Islam in Victorian Britain: The Life and Times of Abdullah Quilliam (Kube Press) and in 2017 Victorian Muslim: Abdullah Quilliam and Islam in the West (Hurst). In 2017 he published Rumi Weeds (Beacon Press), his first collected volume of poetry.

Yahya Birt is a community historian who has taught at the University of Leeds. He has an M.Phil. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. He has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles on Islam in Britain and co-edited British Secularism and Religion: Islam, Society and State (Markfield: Kube, 2016) and Islam in Victorian Liverpool: An Ottoman Account of Britain’s First Mosque Community (Swansea: Claritas Books, 2021). He lives in West Yorkshire with his family and two cats. He likes walking and being grumpy about the state of the world.