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4 December 1877

Balliol College

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Academia

Author:

EMHAI

In trying to identify some of the earliest Muslim students to matriculate at the University after the enactment of the Universities Test Act in 1871 – which ended religious discrimination at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham – we realised that student records did not include information about religious background. It meant adopting a somewhat crude approach of using surnames to identify Muslim students, which posed ethical problems yet seemed to be the only viable way in which we could account for the presence of Muslims at the university.

Amongst the earliest names we encountered was Ahsan Uddin Ahmed. Ahmed was born in Calcutta and was the third son of Nawab Ameer Ali of Khanbahadur. He was admitted to Balliol College on 4 December 1877, aged 18. We know little about Ahmed’s life at the college, and there is no indication that he left the university with a degree. Nonetheless, his matriculation is one of the few concrete pieces of evidence we have about the long presence of Muslims in Oxford.

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OUA/UR 1/1/9, Matriculation form Ahsan Ahmed, Balliol 1877, Bodleian Library, Oxford University Archives

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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