Yahya Parkinson (1874-1918), Scottish Muslim poet, essayist, and critic, was born in Kilwinning, Ayrshire, Scotland, of Irish descent. Born John Parkinson, he adopted the name Yehya-en-Nasr after privately converting to Islam in ca.1901 after a correspondence with Abdullah Quilliam in Liverpool. Recognising his talent, Quilliam quickly appointed him Vice-President of the Liverpool Muslim Institute. Although relatively isolated in Scotland, Parkinson maintained contact with the Institute between 1901 and 1908 which helped to establish his literary reputation by publishing his early work, after which he developed connections with literary and learned Muslim circles in British India (in Lahore, Calcutta and Rangoon), as well others closer to home in London and Woking, Surrey.

 In 1906, Parkinson composed a long epic poem which he styled the Osmanli Nameh, in imitation of Firdawsi’s Shah Nameh, in praise of the Ottoman Sultans from Osman, the founder of the dynasty, down to Sultan Abdul-Hamid II. A bound copy of the Osmanli Nameh was presented to Abdul Hamid by Quilliam, for which Parkinson was awarded the fourth class of the Order of the Medjidie. Parkinson's formal investiture later took place at the Liverpool Muslim Institute. Currently this and other of Parkinson's epic poetry remains lost except for a few published fragments, although perhaps one day it may be rediscovered in the archives of Istanbul or Rangoon.

Parkinson's published books and pamphlets included Lays of Love and War (Ardrossan, 1904), Muslim Chivalry (Rangoon, 1909), Essays on Muslim Philosophy (Rangoon, 1909), Outward Bound (Rangoon, 1909) and Al-Ghazali (Woking, ca.1913). He was a regular contributor of poetry and prose to a number of journals including The Islamic World (Liverpool), The Crescent (Liverpool), Journal of the Moslem Institute (Calcutta), Crescent (Lahore), The Review of Religions (Qadian, Punjab) and The Islamic Review (Woking). Parkinson worked for nearly all of his adult life as a wool-spinner at the Busby Spinning Company with a two-year sojourn in Burma as a deputy editor of a Rangoon newspaper in 1908-10; ill-health forced him to return to Scotland. With the Liverpool Muslim Institute having collapsed during his time abroad, Parkinson became Vice-President of the British Muslim Society (later renamed as the Muslim Society of Great Britain) run from Woking and headed by Lord Headley. He died in December 1918 after a short bout of pneumonia.

While he achieved some fame within local and some international Muslim literary circles, Parkinson has been largely forgotten until a recent revival of interest in his work among historians including Timothy Winter (Cambridge), Yaqub Zaki (Scotland) and Brent D. Singleton (California). Singleton recently republished a number of Parkinson’s poems in an anthology of poems by Muslim converts during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, The Convert’s Passion (2009), and a number of them have also been set to music by Abdal Hakim Murad in Muslim Songs of the British Isles (2005).

Parkinson's unmarked grave was located in 2021 by Omar Sheikh, founder of the pioneering Colourful Heritage based in Glasgow. As you walk into the cemetery, you will see a low wall at the back, go through it into a second section. Turn right and go to end of the second row. In the cemetery the practice was to bury three people in one plot over time. The gravestone right at the end of the second row, marked by John and Ann Dodds's headstone, also marks Parkinson's as yet unmarked (as of 2023) resting place.