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#1 [Permalink] Posted on 24th February 2016 15:30
BRITAIN’S FIRST FEMALE PILGRIM – LADY EVELYN (ZAINAB) COBBOLD

The History of Islam in the UK has not been extensively documented so many of it has been forgotten or overlooked. One such example is of Lady Evelyn Cobbold (Zainab Cobbold) who is considered to be the first British Muslim Woman to have travelled for Hajj to the holy sites of Makkah and Madinah. She is reported to have documented her travels in her book Pilgrimage to Mecca. It is important that her contribution to Islam in the UK is not forgotten.

Lady Evelyn Cobbold (1867 – 1963) was a Scottish noblewoman and convert to Islam. Born in Edinburgh in 1867, she was the eldest daughter of Charles Adolphus Murray, 7th Earl of Dunmore and Lady Gertrude Coke, daughter of the Second Earl of Leicester. Her birth into British aristocracy makes her conversion and travels as a Muslim all the more extraordinary.

Lady Evelyn spent most of her childhood in a Moorish villa perched on a hill outside Algiers. She learned to speak Arabic, and her favourite pastime was to escape her governess and visit the mosques with her Algerian friends.

A few years later, while staying in Rome, she had the opportunity to visit the Pope. She recounts in the introduction of “Pilgrimage to Mecca” that “when His Holiness suddenly addressed me, asking if I was a Catholic, I was taken aback for a moment and then replied that I was a Muslim… A match was lit and I then and there determined to read up and study the faith. The more I read and the more I studied, the more convinced I became that Islam was the most practical religion… Since then I have never wavered in my belief that there is but one God.”

Indeed, this belief in the Oneness of God never left her. And like many Westerners, Lady Evelyn was deeply touched by Islamic spirituality, the inner side of faith. Two years before her marriage to John Cobbold in Cairo, she wrote a poem in which she evoked the fundamental principle of Tawhid (belief in one God) in a prayer, “To Him, the One. The Essence of all” and “His Presence within and around.”

Lady Evelyn Cobbold was also known as Sayyidah Zainab, her Muslim name, and wrote an honest and sincere account of her pilgrimage to Makkah. She was excited to be the first British woman on record to have made her pilgrimage, but that gave way to a deeper emotion as she prayed in the Haram (the Holy Mosque) in Makkah. Lady Evelyn was able to see and describe the way women lived in Makkah and Madinah, something no writer had ever done before her.

One often overlooks the fact that becoming a Muslim in Europe was not easy. Islam dictated a way of life whose social norms and legislations were scrutinized by secular regimes. A citizen had the right to choose his faith, but was not given the means to follow it. Converting to Islam was also socially alienating, especially for practicing Muslims whose refusal to drink Alcohol was too often seen as a rejection of the most basic expression of Western hospitality.

Lady Evelyn’s conversion to Islam did not go well with her in-laws and worsened after the death of her husband. However, she hung onto her faith until the very end. She writes, “When I look into my journal I shall live it all again. Time cannot rob me of the memories that I treasure in my heart… the countless pilgrims who passed me with shining eyes of faith, the wonder and glory of the Haram of Makkah, the great pilgrimage through the desert and the hills to Arafat and above all the abiding sense of joy and fulfillment that possesses the soul.”

Lady Evelyn spent the last twenty years of her life quasi-secluded on her estate at Glencarron, and then in a nursing home in Inverness. Yet it is obvious that, despite the fact she had lost touch with other Muslims, she must have insisted on many occasions that her written instructions for her Muslim funeral be followed.

The Imam of the Woking Mosque was dispatched to Glencarron, in Scotland, to perform the funeral prayer on Monday Jan. 28, 1963. When he arrived, he discovered Lady Evelyn’s wishes. She had clearly instructed that a specific verse from the Surah Al Nur (Light), “Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth,” be inscribed on a flat slab and placed on her grave.

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#2 [Permalink] Posted on 24th February 2016 16:42
MashaAllah, what a great woman.

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Lady Evelyn Cobbold, Mayfair socialite, owner of an estate in the Scottish Highlands, was also the first British-born female Muslim convert to record her pilgrimage to Makkah.

Fluent in Arabic, Lady Evelyn performed Haj in 1933, as a wealthy 65-year-old. She published her account, ‘Pilgrimage to Makkah’, the following year. In it she promotes Islam for its simplicity and tolerance, describing it as ‘the religion of common sense’. Interestingly, she also provides the first description by an English writer of the life of the women’s quarters of the households in which she stayed. She lived another 30 years after her pilgrimage, and was buried as a Muslim on a remote hillside on her Glencarron estate.

Makkah News and Updates - MuftiSays (arabnews)
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#3 [Permalink] Posted on 24th February 2016 16:44
As posted by Sister Roukaya19 of Makkah News and UPdates thread:

Mayfair to Makkah


Lady Evelyn ''Zeinab'' Cobbold


Lady Evelyn Cobbold achieved celebrity at age 65, in 1933, when she became the first British-born Muslim woman to perform the pilgrimage to Makkah. She was a Scottish aristocrat, a grandmother and a Mayfair socialite, and an accomplished deerstalker, angler and gardener, and, uniquely, she was both a Muslim and an Arabic-speaker. Yet the story of her colorful career has been overlooked, as has her contribution to the literature of the Hajj. Nor has she been studied for what her life has to say about being a Muslim in a western society.

She was not born into a Muslim family, yet Lady Evelyn claimed to have been a Muslim from as early as she could remember. She disclaimed any moment of conversion, and there is no record of her having formally converted before an imam. She wrote:

“As a child, I spent the winter months in a Moorish villa on a hill outside Algiers…. There I learned to speak Arabic and my delight was to escape my governess and visit the Mosques with my Algerian friends, and unconsciously I was a little Moslem at heart…. Some years went by and I happened to be in Rome staying with some Italian friends when my host asked if I would like to visit the Pope. Of course I was thrilled…. When His Holiness suddenly addressed me, asking if I was a Catholic, I was taken aback for a moment and then replied that I was a Moslem. What possessed me I don’t pretend to know, as I had not given a thought to Islam for many years. A match was lit and I then and there determined to read up and study the Faith.”


On her 1933 pilgrimage, she became the first international traveler to record the buses that had recently begun service in Makkah.

Evelyn was born in Edinburgh in 1867, the eldest child of Charles Adolphus Murray, Seventh Earl of Dunmore, and Lady Gertrude Coke, daughter of the Second Earl of Leicester. Permanently short of money, and with an incurable wanderlust, Lord Dunmore found it both cheap and congenial to take his family to North Africa every winter. Evelyn and her siblings, as they arrived, thus grew up in the company of Algerian and Egyptian nurses and household staff. The impact on young Evelyn was profound. Steeped in the culture and language of everyday life in the Arab Muslim world, she came to feel completely at ease and at home there.

For a relatively poor aristocrat, Evelyn married rather late, at age 24, to John Dupuis Cobbold, scion of a wealthy brewing family in eastern England. They met in Cairo and were married there in April 1891. At her new home in East Anglia, she faced a future of domesticity, relieved by the frequent travels at home and abroad typical of her wealthy contemporaries. Three children arrived between 1893 and 1900, but it is fairly clear that Lady Evelyn found it hard to settle. And the clues to her restlessness have to do with Islam and the Arab world.

An untitled poem she wrote in Cairo in 1889 already evinces a spiritual longing for meaning in life and an affinity with Islam. In it, she wrote:

… The vague longings that filled my soul, Took the form of a prayer I upward sped, To Him, the One, The Essence of All….

And the weird cadence of the Mueddin’s cry Bid the faithful prepare for the day that was nigh….

By 1900, Lady Evelyn was journeying without her husband. She was back in North Africa in 1911, at the age of 43, traveling in Egypt with a female companion. Her book about the trip—Wayfarers in the Libyan Desert, published in 1912 —is a revealing diary, forthright in its admiration for Islam.

From this point on, it becomes increasingly plain that she regarded herself as a Muslim. She was making regular winter visits to Egypt, and a series of letters in Arabic survives from 1914 and 1915, from Arab friends there and in Syria. Some address her as “Our sister in Islam, Lady Zainab,” using her adopted Muslim name. Her friendship from 1915 with the British Muslim Marmaduke Pickthall, who produced one of the most respected renderings of the Qur’an into English, provides further testimony.

By the 1920’s, anecdotal information suggests that Lady Evelyn’s attachment to Islam had become a cause of estrangement from the Cobbold family, and in 1922, she and her husband formally separated. She received a generous financial settlement, including the deer forest of Glencarron in the Highlands, making her a very wealthy woman in her own right. For much of the 1920’s, she was occupied by a cavalcade of grandchildren and by the field sports at which she excelled. But in 1929 her husband died, and it seems that she now began seriously to contemplate performing the pilgrimage to Makkah.


Lady Evelyn’s permission to make her pilgrimage was arranged by Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in London, Shaykh Hafiz Wahba, shown here during one of the visits to England (probably 1935) by HRH Prince Sa’ud ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. Wahba stands on the left and slightly behind the prince; Wahba wrote the original introduction to Lady Evelyn’s Pilgrimage to Mecca.


Lady Evelyn announced her intention to perform the Hajj to Saudi Arabia’s minister in London, Hafiz Wahba, who wrote to King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz in Riyadh requesting formal permission. But, typically for her, she did not wait for a reply, relying instead on a social contact in London to send a letter of introduction to Harry St. John (‘Abd Allah) Philby in Jiddah. Philby had became a Muslim in 1930, and he and his wife, Dora, duly received their unsolicited guest. They introduced her to Jiddah’s small expatriate social circle and even invited the prince (and future king) Faisal to tea to meet the prospective pilgrim. While awaiting permission from the king for Lady Evelyn to go Makkah, Philby arranged for her to travel by car to Madinah, organizing accommodation with a family there.

February 28, 1933: The King is away at Riyad, his capital in Nejd, sixteen days’ camel ride from here, so I fear he will not get the letter his Minister in London wrote him for some time…. Till that letter reaches the King, I must possess my soul in patience, and my time is pleasantly spent bathing in the warm sea within the coral reefs, for fear of sharks, or in motor drives in the desert….

March 2: How I envy the pilgrims we meet on their way to Mecca, while we return to the social life of Jeddah, which would be very pleasant if one were not aware of the mysterious City of Islam hidden in the hills only a few miles from us. Why do we always long for the unattainable, for the Blue Bird which hovers just beyond our reach?

March 9: The Emir Faisal arrived punctually at five o’clock…. It was impressive to see his tall figure enter the doorway clad in a brown and gold Abba over a flowing white robe and the picturesque headdress of Nejd, the Koffeya of diaphanous white bound round his head by black and gold chords—called the Aghal…. The Emir is slender and exceedingly graceful in his movements and, like most Nejd Arabs, has an air of distinction and good breeding….

March 15: Two hundred and fifty miles [400 km] from Jeddah to Medina took us fifteen hours to accomplish and I take off my hat to the little Ford that gallantly carried us through those sandy wastes…. Besides the pilgrims on camels, we met many on foot, toiling slowly through the scorching desert with water jugs in their hands clad in their Ihram (or two towels), and, as they were bare headed, many carried umbrellas. Ten days is the usual time it takes a camel to accomplish the journey between Medina and Jeddah and three weeks for the pilgrim on foot….

As a visiting notable, Lady Evelyn found conditions were not nearly as hard as they were for ordinary pilgrims. The Saudis treated her with extreme courtesy, as befitted her status. And once permission arrived, she would be allowed to go to Makkah—some 70 kilometers (45 mi) away—by car, Philby once again providing her with a vehicle, guide and driver.

March 12: Today the news has come through that I am permitted to do the pilgrimage to Mecca and visit Medina. I had for so long lived in alternate fits of hope and despair, that I can scarcely credit that my great wish is at last to be fulfilled. Preparations for my journey are in the hands of my host…; while I prepare…my pilgrim dress which consists of a black crepe skirt, very full, and a cape and hood in one, to be worn over ordinary dress when I visit Medina, also a black crepe veil entirely obscuring my features; but for Mecca I shall be entirely in white, no colour is allowed in any garment….

Lady Evelyn arrived in the Hijaz at a historic juncture in Saudi Arabian history. Only just before her arrival, in September 1932, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had been proclaimed. Oil had not yet been discovered, and the world economy was mired in the Great Depression. The country had no source of income apart from pilgrimage receipts, and in 1933 pilgrims from abroad would slump to an all-time low of just 20,000—down from around 100,000 in the late 1920’s. But economic salvation was in the offing. Lady Evelyn’s visit to Jiddah coincided with the presence of American and British oil company negotiators, and in May 1933 King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz would sign the key concession agreement with the Americans that heralded the end of hard times for the Saudi economy.

March 2: We return to Jeddah and dine at the New Hotel, which was where the American engineers, who have come to try to obtain the oil concessions from the King, are now staying. Their wives, Mrs. [Lloyd] Hamilton and Mrs. [Karl] Twitchell, welcome us and give us an excellent dinner, and the party includes Mr. [Stephen] Longrigg, the English representative of the Iraq Oil Company, who is also here trying to get the concession. Rivalry does not appear to spoil the friendly relations existing between all parties….

The fact that her son-in-law was a director of the Bank of England may also have played a role in winning permission for Lady Evelyn to make her pioneering Hajj, according to Sir Andrew Ryan, then Britain’s minister to Saudi Arabia, who cast a somewhat jaundiced eye on her visit. “Lady Evelyn Cobbold…has been even more successful than anticipated,” he reported. “…If [King] Ibn Saud receives her, her cup of blessing will be overflowing.” In the event, Lady Evelyn did not meet the king, although she saw him when he arrived by car on the day of the Standing at ‘Arafat, a key ritual of the Hajj.

March 26: I am in the Mosque of Mecca, and for a few seconds I am lost to my surroundings because of the wonder of it. We are walking on white marble through a great vault whose ceiling is a full fifty feet above us, and enter pillared cloisters holding the arched roof and surrounding an immense quadrangle…. I had never imagined anything so stupendous…. We walk on to the Holy of Holies, the house of Allah [the Ka’bah] rising in simple majesty. It would require a master pen to describe the scene, poignant in its intensity of the great concourse of humanity of which I was one small unit, completely lost to their surroundings in a fervour of religious enthusiasm…. I felt caught up in a strong wave of spiritual exaltation….

Pilgrimage to Mecca, published in 1934, is Lady Evelyn’s fascinating account of her journey to the holy cities. As much a record of an interior experience of faith as a conventional travelogue, the book is remarkable for its sympathy and vividness. It takes the form of a diary, punctuated with lengthy digressions intended to help her readers understand Islam. They address topics such as the Qur’an, the life of the Prophet, Islamic history and science, the position of women, King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s achievements and Islamic principles relating to warfare and tolerance.

March 21: Having discoursed on the subject of tolerance, we pass on to discuss the crisis the world is now facing, and the emancipation of women. The sheikhs show some amusement, tempered with admiration at the methods adopted by the Western woman to win herself a place in the sun; their sympathy is all on the side of the ladies. Though I occasionally caught a twinkle in the eye of Sid Ahmed, and both the sheikhs often smiled, I never heard them give way to loud laughter….

Most remarkable about her book, however, is that as a lone female Muslim, she was able to witness something veiled from every western traveler before her: the female side of domestic life in the two holy cities. This, and her religious commitment, set the account apart from all other English-language descriptions of the Hijaz that had gone before.

March 27: My hostess had already initiated me into the secrets of the harem or women’s quarters; the bakehouse where the bread is baked to supply the needs of the large company at present inhabiting the house; the great kitchen where she, the ladies and slaves all help in cooking and preparing the food; the laundry where more slaves are busy washing; while the three pretty nieces are ironing and folding away the household linen; the work-room where they sit sewing and gossiping….

April 1: As I have been granted the great privilege of being received as a guest in this Mecca household I feel it is up to me to refute the false impressions that still exist in the West about the harem. Not only in this house, but in every harem I have visited in Arabia I have found my host with only one wife. Far from being a sensuous life of ease these ladies are busy with their household duties; at the same time living a happy, even a gay life, entertaining their friends and having their own amusements and festive occasions.

Uplifted but thoroughly exhausted by the rituals of the Hajj, Lady Evelyn received special dispensation from the king to end her pilgrimage before the usual culmination at the three-day Feast of Sacrifice, ‘Id al-Adha. Though she extols the egalitarianism of Islam and the way in which the Hajj symbolically makes all people equals before God, she was not averse to taking advantage of her social status. Her host at Makkah generously made available to her the entire roof of his rented house at Mina, where otherwise all his womenfolk would have slept for the sake of the cool night air. At the Standing at ‘Arafat, the same host invited her to share his tent, with its view of Jabal al-Rahmah, with his male guests. She readily accepted, not least because it was cooler, the women being consigned to a hot bell-shaped tent behind, where they could neither see nor be seen. When challenged by a pious passerby suspicious of her reading matter in the car on the way to ‘Arafat (it was Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta), her response was to declare robustly: “This is an English book, and I am an English Moslem and I am here on pilgrimage by permission of the King!” A lesser mortal might not have got away with it so easily. During her return voyage by sea, officials spared her the rigors of the full quarantine, giving her special quarters at Port Sudan and allowing her to leave after three days instead of the regulation five.

However, she revealed her fundamental sincerity while waiting to depart from Makkah on April 7 when, on her final return through the city, she found that she could not after all stomach Doughty because of his inability to fathom Islam. Instead, she took up the only other book she had brought with her, an Arabic Qur’an, and was “soon immersed in the beautiful sura ‘Light,’” she noted. She had found that, after all, the suspicious passerby might have had a point.

Even before she returned to London, the newspapers made her an instant celebrity. The popular press viewed her pilgrimage as something out of the Arabian Nights while, in 1934, the more serious papers gave Pilgrimage to Mecca a favorable reception.

But what sort of Muslim was Lady Evelyn, and how should we regard her today? Though clearly firm in her faith, there is no record, during her life at home, of strict performance of the five daily prayers, or of charity to the poor and needy. No doubt she had uttered the shahadah, or declaration of faith, on various occasions, and there is some anecdotal evidence of fasting during Ramadan. But, of the Five Pillars of Islam, going on the Hajj seems to have been the one to which that she paid the most attention.

There is a long history of British converts to Islam before her time, going back at least to the Crusades. But Lady Evelyn belongs in a later category: that of educated converts in Britain itself in the late 19th century. She was contemporary with various other eminent Muslims of this type—Abdullah Quilliam, Lord Headley, Lord Hothfield and Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, to name but a few.

Although Lady Evelyn lectured extensively in Britain about her book, there is no sign that she saw her faith as having special public and social implications. She apparently regarded Islam as a matter of private conviction and subscribed to it on her own terms. But there is no doubting that her faith was deeply held during her very long life. She lived for 30 years after her pilgrimage, dying in January 1963, one of the coldest months of the century in Britain. She was buried in arctic conditions but according to the precepts of Islam and, as she had stipulated, on a remote hillside on her Glencarron estate.

Her interment symbolized her two worlds: A piper, so frozen that he was hardly able to walk, let alone perform, played “MacCrimmon’s Lament,” and the equally refrigerated imam of the Woking Mosque in London declaimed in Arabic the surah “Light,” which she had found so moving in Makkah. A verse from the same surah adorns the flat slab on her grave, over which the deer undoubtedly wander, just as she had wished.
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#4 [Permalink] Posted on 25th February 2016 00:57
Unfortunately it seems the Islamic Cultural Centre in London due to the freezing cold winter were too Lazy to send Muslims to perform the Janaaza of Lady Evelyn who was a Sunni with connections to the Ulemah of Egypt and Algeria.

Her non-muslim relatives not knowing what to do then phoned the Woking Muslims which I believe was connected to Muhammad Ali Lahoris group of Qadiyanis at the time although I am not sure,....We probably need muslims to go and re-perform the Janaazah. Never the less the following is an interesting account.

Funeral of Lady Evelyn.


It was on the 26th January 1963 that at 8 p.m. there was a telephone call, asking to speak to the Imam. I answered it and found that the caller was a British woman who informed me that Lady Evelyn Cobbold had died at her ancestral home in Inverness. The caller said that as Lady Cobbold was a Muslim she had phoned the Islamic Cultural Centre in London to ask for help in organising the funeral, and they had given the contact of an undertaker. I said that the undertaker would not be able to conduct the janaza prayer and that prayer is the crux of the funeral. She said: This is why I have phoned you, because I know that for the funeral prayer an imam is required, not an undertaker. Undertakers can be obtained in Inverness, she said, but as I received no help from the Islamic Cultural Centre, this is why I am calling you.

I asked her if the deceased Lady had left any instructions. She replied that the Lady had expressed the wish that when her body is laid in the grave her face should face Makka. Hearing this, I was deeply moved by the Lady’s strong attachment to the religion of Islam. I said that, however difficult it might be, someone from here must go to her funeral. Inverness is very far from here, like the distance between Lahore and Karachi, and even on the fast trains they have here it takes 16 hours. On top of that, the winter and snow here is making the whole country like Siberia.[1] After some thought, I said that in order for the face to be towards Makka the grave would have to be aligned in a certain direction. If the grave were to be dug as they are usually dug here, this instruction cannot be fulfilled. She understood this point. I asked her to phone again the following day, when we would have worked out what to do. Shaikh Muhammad Tufail had gone to London, and when I mentioned this to him the next day, he agreed to go. So when the woman phoned again, Shaikh Tufail obtained all the details from her about where to go and when to reach there etc.

Shaikh Tufail travelled in the sleeping carriage of the train from London on Wednesday night and arrived in Inverness at 8 a.m. the following morning. A man had come to meet him at the railway station. From there they had to travel 60 miles by car through the mountains. Lady Cobbold was the eldest daughter of the Earl of Dunmore of Scotland, and her estate was located 60 miles from Inverness, called Glencarron. The estate is so large that within its grounds it took nearly an hour even by car to reach the hunting lodge.[2]

The estate is in a mountainous area. The deceased Lady had chosen a high hill in the middle of the estate and instructed that she be buried at its peak. When Shaikh Tufail reached the lodge he found that there were 30 to 40 people gathered there, including landed gentry from that area. Earlier I had sent him a telegram from Woking with instructions about the direction of alignment of the grave. The grave was dug accordingly and was ready when the coffin was brought there from the lodge. She had further instructed, as Shaikh Tufail discovered upon reaching there, that:

No Christian minister should be brought to her funeral.
The funeral prayer must be in Arabic, with certain specified verses of the Quran being recited.
The face must be towards Makka.
The following should be inscribed on the gravestone in Arabic: Allahu nur-us-samawati wal ard.[3]
Accordingly Shaikh Tufail said the funeral prayer, and uttered it loudly so that the gathering may be aware that it was in Arabic. He also recited verses from the Quran and other prayers in Arabic.

She was an indomitable woman, and was a typical example of that class of the aristocracy of Scotland who are fiercely proud of their blood, descent and Scottish nationality, and consider the English to be inferior. Accordingly, just as Lady Cobbold fully demonstrated in her will that she was a Muslim, she also maintained in it the Scottish aristocratic tradition that the coffin was to be followed by a bag piper playing lamentful tunes.

This was the ceremony with which this 95 year old Scottish Muslim Lady was laid to rest, on the afternoon of 31st January 1963, on top of a hill within the grounds of her huge and beautiful estate.[4]

Every Muslim will envy her good fortune and raise hands in prayer for her that Allah may grant her high places in heaven also, just as she chose a high hilltop for her last resting place on earth. Glory be to Allah, what love for Islam! On the one hand there is the far off Scotland and an independent-minded, woman of authority — yet Islam possesses such great power as to capture her, and it is a capture by which Islam has planted on top of a high mountain in Scotland, in the midst of a gathering of the aristocracy and the nobility, the declaration:

Allahu nur-us-samawati wal ard

(“Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth.”)

Lady Cobbold was the first British woman to have the privilege of performing the Hajj. She has left a book of her experiences entitled Pilgrimage to Mecca. She also wrote another book entitled Kenya, A Land of Illusion. The newspapers of London, such as The Times and the Daily Telegraph, published her obituary. In the book Islam Our Choice, her photograph and story of acceptance of Islam are printed on page 171. We have also learnt that she once visited the Woking Mosque during the time of Maulana Sadr-ud-Din.[5] She had great interest in, and was skilled in, stag hunting. All the newspapers have mentioned this in particular. Shaikh Tufail also said that on a nearby mountain there is a forest of some two hundred deer that he saw.

In 1934 she performed the Hajj.[6] She could speak Arabic quite well. In the lodge Shaikh Tufail saw her library and found that it contained many books on Arab Sufi-ism as well as a copy of the 1917 edition of Maulana Muhammad Ali’s English translation of the Quran. She was widowed in 1929 and never re-married.

On 1st February 1963 the Scottish public read with amazement and wonder the following headlines in the Aberdeen daily Press and Journal:

Moslem Burial on Lonely Highland Hillside,
Lady Cobbold was Mecca Pilgrim
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#5 [Permalink] Posted on 3rd August 2020 06:58
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#6 [Permalink] Posted on 15th June 2022 18:02
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