Everyday Muslim Heritage and Archive Initiative

Everyday Muslim Heritage and Archive Initiative (EMHAI) was established in 2013 to create an archive collection to document and preserve the lived experience of Muslims in the UK.

The archive collection is an ever-expanding collection of video and audio recordings of oral history interviews from Muslims of diverse ethnic backgrounds across the UK. Alongside a wide-ranging depository of approximately 2000 digitised documents and photographs, that provide both a historical and contemporary narrative of the everyday lives and diversity of the UK's Muslim community.

Additionally, the collection contains video footage of conferences, presentations and other events curated by the EMHAI team.

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Khurshid Ahmed

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Altab Ali Park can be found on the intersection of Adler Street, White Church Lane and Whitechapel Road. This green...

Chanan and the Goat

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Trinity College

Brothers Wasif Ali and Naseer Ali Mirza became the first racialised minority and Indian students to be enrolled at Trinity...

Somerville College

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Oxford Union

On 3 December 1964, Malcolm X addressed the Oxford Union when he partook in the 'Queen and Country' debate. He...

Oxford Martin School

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Site of the first mixed congregational prayer led by a woman (Prof Amina Wadud) in the UK, 18th October 2008....

A major site of employment which attracted Pakistani Muslims from Sheffield and Bradford. According to the newsreel source linked to...

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Noor Inayat Khan GC

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3 December 1964

Oxford Union

Posted in:

Academia

Author:

EMHAI

On 3 December 1964, Malcolm X addressed the Oxford Union when he partook in the 'Queen and Country' debate. He was invited by Eric Abrahams, a Rhodes Scholar from Jamaica and president of the Oxford Union. The motion for the debate was 'extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue'. Before his visit to Oxford, Malcolm had travelled across Africa and the Middle East, where he encountered Algerian resistance fighters and African nationalists. He also went to Smethwick, where he was invited by Avtar Singh Jouhl of the Indian Workers' Association, where racialised minority residents were regularly confronted with racist violence, and were contending with the election campaign of Conservative MP candidate Peter Griffiths, in what is now dubbed as the most racist election campaign in British history.

Malcolm was experiencing an intellectual and ideological transformation which culminated with his trip to Oxford, months before his assassination. The debate was also moment of national significance, as it was filmed and broadcasted by the BBC.


The Oxford Union has long been a site of intellectual exchange in which student activists have often engaged, by partaking in debates or protesting the presence of controversial figures. The Middle East Society, for example, proposed the motion 'Israel's refusal to the political rights of Palestinians has been obstructive to peace in the Middle East' in a joint event with the Oxford Union Michaelmas 1987. Their speakers included Edward Said. The only other event they hosted that term was a lecture titled 'The Role of Women in Islam', delivered by Cambridge professor Bassim Mussalam.

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Sources and Attribution

See: Stephen Tuck, The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union : A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

JMOX SOC Box M9, Middle East Society Michaelmas 1987 term card, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Oxford. 

Aleena Din - Aleena is a historian of gender, class and race in modern Britain. Her DPhil research, which was completed at Balliol College and the Faculty of History in 2022, focuses on the migration, settlement and labour experiences of working-class British-Pakistani women who settled in Middlesbrough and Oldham between 1962 and 2002. Aleena is the co-investigator of the community history project 'A Muslim History of Oxford', in collaboration with the national heritage organisation 'Everyday Muslim'. In addition, she is a postdoctoral research associate for the digital humanities project, 'Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830 to the Present' at the University of Bristol (2025).

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