In 2010, the East London Mosque celebrated its centenary. One hundred years earlier, the Aga Khan and Syed Ameer Ali had convened a public meeting at the London Ritz Hotel, where they set out a strategy for the construction of a mosque in London that would be 'worthy of the capital of the British Empire'. The Mosque, however, took a long time to materialise. From the Commercial Road in the East End of London in which it was eventually first set up in 1941, it moved to Fieldgate Street and on to the Whitechapel Road in 1985. Through the lens of the original Minutes and related documents, Professor Ansari takes us on the fascinating journey of how the newly emerging confident Muslim community of the early twentieth century and major figures of the British establishment reached out to one another, each looking to nurture the development of this new multicultural society.
