Prophet Mohammad Archives - CrossFireArarbia

Fatima Cates: First British Muslim in Liverpool

CrossFireArabia
June 14, 2026

A Briton who embraced Islam in the late 1880s, is described as the first woman to convert to Islam in Liverpool. This is despite facing fierce opposition from her Christian family and social circle.

Her journey with Islam began during her involvement with the “Temperance Movement”, which advocated alcohol prohibition. There, she first heard the name of Abdullah Henry Quilliam who speak about Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), describing him as “the great Arab who abstained from intoxicants.” This sparked her curiosity and prompted her to learn more about Islam.

When she expressed interest in Islam, Quilliam advised her to begin reading the Quran and presented her a translated copy. Few weeks later she embraced Islam. Shortly after that, she, with Quilliam and another convert, Ali Hamilton, founded the Liverpool Islamic Society in 1887.

Despite the personal challenges she faced, as well as the campaigns of incitement and hostility directed at the Society, Fatima steadfastly continued her missionary work.

The Society contributed to introducing Islam to a growing number of Britons, and Fatima played a prominent role in inviting women to Islam, including her sisters Clara and Annie, along with other women who became prominent Muslim women in Liverpool society.

Early Life:

Frances Elizabeth Murray was born on January 5, 1865, in Birkenhead, England, into a strict Christian working-class family. Her father, of Irish descent, worked as a porter.

Despite modest living conditions, Frances was able to receive an education, benefiting from the compulsory education law passed in 1870, making her one of the first students to benefit from this educational transformation.

From her early childhood, she displayed an independent personality and an inquisitive mind, and was known for her courage in acting according to her convictions and defending them without hesitation.

In her early twenties, Frances became involved with the Temperance Movement, a social movement that sought to reduce alcohol consumption and ultimately prohibit it altogether. She served as secretary of the movement’s Liverpool branch.

During her Temperance Movement activism, she first met Abdullah Henry Quilliam, a preacher of Islam in Britain. She listened to him deliver a sermon in which he spoke of “the great Arab who abstained from intoxicants,” in reference to Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

From that moment, her curiosity about Islam began. Quilliam advised her to start by reading the Quran, giving her a translated copy and saying, “Don’t believe what I or others say about Islam. It’s better to discover it for yourself. Read the Quran.”

Within weeks, in June 1887, Frances declared her conversion to Islam, taking the name Fatima, despite fierce opposition from her family. Her mother even tried to take the Quran from her to burn it, and her family forced her into marriage, considering her a burden. She also faced severe social rejection; her home was pelted with stones, and its windows were repeatedly broken. However, this did not deter her from her decision.

The Liverpool Muslim Society was founded in July 1887 by Fatima, along with Quilliam and Ali Hamilton. Its aim was to spread the message of Islam and explain its teachings. Members met every Friday in a rented building to pray, recite the Quran, and study religious matters.

From its inception, the society faced significant challenges. Troublemakers and instigators would disrupt the meetings, even going so far as to smear Fatima’s face with horse dung on several occasions. Despite these obstacles, she remained steadfast. Within its first two years, the society attracted 11 new converts to Islam.

As the pressure mounted, they were forced to vacate their premises and moved in 1889 to a more spacious and attractive location on Brougham Terrace.

With the relaunch of the association as the Liverpool Islamic Institute, Fatima became its most prominent figure, representing it both nationally and internationally, especially as its presence grew outside Britain, particularly in British India at the time, where Fatima’s poetry and prose were published in the Allahabad Review.

Marriage and Later Years of Activism:

Fatima married Hubert Henry Cates and successfully converted him to Islam, along with her sisters Clara and Annie. Several other women also embraced Islam through her efforts, including Alice “Amina” Bertha Bowman, Hannah “Fatima” Rogda Robinson, Leah “Zuleikha” Banks, and Amy “Amina” Mukish.

Amidst this success, her marriage marked a turbulent period in her life. Although sources mention her husband’s conversion to Islam, this marriage did not end her suffering but rather added new challenges. She endured various forms of abuse at his hands, including an attempt on her life.

When she filed for divorce in December 1891, she encountered legal restrictions dating back to 1857 that denied women the right to divorce, and she was only able to obtain a legal separation for one year. However, their marriage was effectively over, and the couple lived separately until Keats’s death in 1895.

During this time, Fatima reduced her activity at the institute and spent periods away from Liverpool, traveling to the East and devoting some of her time to her hobby of landscape photography in southern England.

In 1900, Fatima contracted influenza, which developed into pneumonia and led to her death. She was given an Islamic burial at Anfield Cemetery, but her grave remained neglected for a long time until a Muslim man named Hamid Mahmood tracked it down and rebuilt it. A Muslim woman from Liverpool named Amira Scarsbrick raised the necessary funds, and the grave was rebuilt on November 4, 2022.

The marble headstone bears a verse from Fatima Keats’s poetry: “Let us always heed the warning God has given, so that we may walk safely on the path that leads to heaven.”

Aljazeera.net

Features

Wounders of Arabic

CrossFireArabia
February 20, 2026

EDITOR’S NOTE: I wrote this article “On Arabic” in 2008 and posted on hackwriters.com. I am reprinting it here for relvance and archival use

Compared with English, Arabic is an easy read if it is written well. When you look at English, the perception of the language, written and oral, took centuries of development from archaic structures associated with the old English of Geoffrey Chaucer, passing to Shakespeare and Christopher Marlow to George Elliot, Charles Dickens, Virginia Wolfe as well as many others and not mentioning the new contemporaries.

With Arabic it’s different. Although there may have been stages of development through out the centuries, it seems the clarity of the Arabic language was a one-time affair, represented in the Holy Koran brought down from the skies through Angel Gabriel to Prophet Mohammad in the 7th century and passed on to the Muslim community.

The Koran represented a basis for the Arabic language as it is spoken and written today. Unlike English, back in the 7th century Arabic was written in a clear, transparent, effective tone that involved action, and designed from every member of the social community, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, a source of knowledge and speech and continued to be so as it passed down through the centuries.

With English it was different. First if all, the language itself was derivative from other linguistic structures like Germanic, Latin, and French, many of which have said this is what made it stronger; Secondly English was helped by the issue of economic development as new inventions, processes and way of doing things required the development of new words, terminologies and syntax which evolved from the 17th century onwards.

Today some have been known to criticize Arabic for failing to be innovative, or developing to meet the needs of modernization and even globalization, with its inability to produce new words and terminologies to pace with the development going on in the region and the world.

However, one of the points that has to be clarified is that as these inventions came from the western countries and as communicated in English, the language proved more flexible in coming up with new words and terms, as opposed to the Arabic language that adopted a reactive approach with linguists from the region acting haphazardly in their word formations rather than following a methodical pattern.

In the process as well, we tend to get used to hearing the words and terminologies in say the English language and when we hear their equivalents in other languages such as Arabic, as there is a sense of word creation even in translations, it becomes odd and foreign simply because our ears have got used to the English pronunciation.

But this is a different view related to globalization, how much are we as Arabs integrated into the international system, how much we take from it, what do we take, what do we buy, our consumer habits and trends and indeed, how much do we produce and contribute to world society.

While this in turn becomes related to our language, its use, how much we mix words, English-Arabic, Arabic-English, the fact of the matter is that the language itself, spoken by about 300 million people in 22 Arab countries and about a 1.5 billion in Muslim countries who read the Koran in Arabic, says a great deal.

Arabic is a cogent force, its simple, attractive and gets the point across in as a logical manner as possible. It’s easy to read and to understand. It’s structure is less complex as say French and German which are grammatically more demanding than the English language.

However, just like any other language, writing in Arabic has to be learnt, it’s a professional skill; that’s why today there is an endless beating about the bush were getting the idea across is deliberately pumped and inflated and there is much hankering because of political considerations relating to ruler, government, state, security apparatuses and so on.

These considerations are over-riding and smack directly with the professionalism of writing and the way the writing of Arabic should be as passed on and continued through out the holy Koran which is sometimes used as a source of criticism by western writers and pedagogics who claim the Arabic language lacks the basis for producing new words as do the other languages.

But when Arabic is spoken and written as part of the social community there is a sense of modernist continuum as expressed in its words, expressions, figures of speech and syntax found in the structure of the language.

Nowhere is this more emphasized than it is in the Koran. Written in the 7th century, the Koran is timeless in its spiritual message, a modernist document in its approach with words, phrases and expressions that apply as much today as when it was handed down, memorized and collectively written.

Words and expression apply as much then as they apply today. The word “car” for instance is used in one of its Suras (chapters) to signify a caravan route whereas its use today implies a vehicle, and striking the reader as if you are reading a modern document about social relations, economy, authority, and kinship.

The style of language appears to be modernist as well and not with case as it is say with the Bible that is written in old English, not as old as the language used by Chaucer, but is hard to fathom just the same.

That has proved problematic for the Koran. When translated into English translators often use the kind of language that is employed by the Bible, which does not reflect the actual modernist style of the Koran for the lucidness of the holy document becomes lost and replaced by an archaic and medieval structure once found in the language, although English has moved on tremendously.