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Al Shami restaurant was the site of Oxford's first halal butchers, and was established in the 1960s. Prior to its...
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Muslim History in Oxford
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Founded in 1921, City of Oxford Motor Services Limited was an important site of employment in the 1950s and 1960s...
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The Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies was founded in 1985 as a centre for the advanced study of Islam and...
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Lubna Arshad became the first Muslim Lord Mayor of Oxford, May 2023.
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On 3 December 1964, Malcolm X addressed the Oxford Union when he partook in the 'Queen and Country' debate. He...
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The Oxford Martin School was the sity of of the Oxford Indian Institute, which provided training to Indian civil servants....
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Site of the first mixed congregational prayer led by a woman (Prof Amina Wadud) in the UK, 18th October 2008....
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The association, which was founded in the 1960s by Sher Afzal Khan, was one of the first of its kind...
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Next to the Pitt Rivers Museum is the sire of current Oxford Islamic Society meeting space. There is a rich...
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Somerville College houses archival materials related to the Oxford Majlis, which was a student society modeled after the Cambridge Majlis...
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A mosque and welfare house opened in 1984 to primarily serve the Deobandi sect of Muslims living in Oxford. The...
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A major site of employment which attracted Pakistani Muslims from Sheffield and Bradford. According to the newsreel source linked to...
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Jamal's Tandoori Restaurant has been a significant place of networking for Muslims across the city. During the 1950s and 1960s,...
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Founded in 1678, the Ashmolean Museum features an Islamic and Middle East Gallery which exhibits a selection of artifacts made...
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This was an Ahmadiyya Mosque established in the 1980s. It was located on Cowley Road, but the precise location is...
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In trying to identify some of the earliest Muslim students to matriculate at the University after the enactment of the...
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The Bangladesh Islamic Centre was founded in the 1980s by the first generation of Bangladeshis to settle in Oxford. Today,...
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Founded in 1968, the Bath Street mosque was the first formal site of worship for Oxford's Muslim community, and largely...
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Central Oxford Mosque remains one of the largest places of workship for Muslims in the city. The mosque was founded...
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The Didicot Ordinance Depot at the Vauxhall Barracks, established during the First World War, was a major site of Pakistani...
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EMBS was founded in 1988 as a self-help business service for racialised minority groups in Oxford. One of its founders...
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An anti-racist organisation founded by University of Oxford students in 1956. Its purpose was "To arouse among members of the...
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Brothers Wasif Ali and Naseer Ali Mirza became the first racialised minority and Indian students to be enrolled at Trinity...
1960
Al Shami
Al Shami restaurant was the site of Oxford's first halal butchers, and was established in the 1960s. Prior to its opening, Muslim residents of the city had to travel widely to find halal products, or butcher their own meat. An interviewee - one of the first Pakistanis to settle in Oxford - remembered the difficulty of transporting chickens from local farms to his home in East Oxford, with one escaping on the bus. These businesses highlighted the embedded presence of Muslims in Oxford, as Muslim entrepreneurs navigated the local economy to create services which would support a more comfortable long-term settlement.
Notice that the earliest Muslim migration to the city was in Jericho. Until 1960s, this was where many immigrants and working-class people settled. Council-sponsored slum clearances in the late 1960s, however, pushed families into the East End of Oxford – various migratory trajectories, so to speak.
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Sources and Attribution
Interview with Mr Khuja, A Muslim History of Oxford (4 September 2024)
Shaw, A., A Pakistani Community in Britain (Oxford: Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
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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