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A philanthropic body under the Poor Law Reform Act of 1832. Built workhouses, housing, schools and hospitals, including the famous...
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104 Main Street in Kilwinning, Ayrshire, was the birthplace and primary residence of John Parkinson (1874-1814), Britain's founding Muslim poet....
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17 February 1874
Yahya Parkinson (1878-1918), Britain's founding Muslim poet, birthplace
104 Main Street in Kilwinning, Ayrshire, was the birthplace and primary residence of John Parkinson (1874-1814), Britain's founding Muslim poet. Both his parents were born in County Down in Ulster, Samuel, a quarryman, and Margaret, a dressmaker. Parkinson's mother died when he was only seven months and his father returned to Northern Ireland and remarried. Thereafter, Parkinson was brought up by his grandparents, but had to fend for himself from the age of 16, after they died in 1889 and 1890. From 14, he worked for the rest of his life at the Busby Spinning Company in Kilwinning, eventually rising to the position of foreman, but it was his extracurricular activists for which he became best known. Tutored by a local physician and dentist, Dr. A. Milroy, Parkinson became quickly adept as an amateur astronomer, botanist and linguist, picking up Greek within weeks. He also began to compose poetry, some of which was deemed sufficiently good to be included in John MacIntosh's anthology, Poets of Ayrshire from the Fourteenth Century down to the Present Day (1910).
His surviving poetry comes not only in his only published anthology, Lays of Love and War (1904), and in the second half of Muslim Chivalry (1909), but is also scattered in various Muslim periodicals published from Liverpool, Woking, Lahore, Calcutta and Rangoon. That said, aside from published sections, his epic poems on the Ottomans and the Muslim warriors who opposed the Crusaders are lost.
Parkinson's lifelong home at 104 Main St is marked by a plaque placed there by Kilwinning Heritage (pictured), which describes him accurately as a "poet and writer on Islam", although it doesn't mention that he was a convert to Islam. The plaque has a QR code but unfortunately the link at the time of writing.
Directly opposite Parkinson's home is Mother Grand Lodge of Kilwinning (pictured), Number "0", which claims to be the oldest Freemasonry lodge in existence, claiming its foundation date as 1140, the year that Kilwinning Abbey was built. Of course, the Muslims of the Liverpool Muslim Institute and Parkinson himself saw Freemasonry and Islam as perfectly compatible. In 1902, Parkinson joined the breakaway Freemasonry lodge, the Order of the Zuzimites, that Abdullah Quilliam had founded (prior to converting to Islam in 1886) in the 1880s or even earlier in the 1870s when he was a teenager. Like Parkinson, many of the other male converts to Islam in Liverpool were active members of the order.
For more on Parkinson's life, see the entry on his grave.
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Sources and Attribution
Birt, Yahya, "Abdullah Quilliam’s obituary of Yahya Parkinson (1874-1918)", Yahya Birt's blog, 15 July 2016, https://yahyabirt1.wordpress.com/tag/yahya-parkinson/.
Bowen, Patrick D., 'Abdullah Quilliam and the Rise of International Esoteric-Masonic Islamophilia', in Jamie Gilham, and Ron Geaves (eds), Victorian Muslim: Abdullah Quilliam and Islam in the West (2017; online edn, Oxford Academic, 24 Aug. 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190688349.003.0003, accessed 25 Aug. 2023.
Parkinson, Yahya, Selected Poems, selected and introduced by A.H. Murad (Cambridge: Cambridge Central Mosque, n.d.), https://cambridgecentralmosque.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ccm-poetry-parkinson.pdf.
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