Our Fatima of Liverpool

Fatima Elizabeth Cates (5 January 1865 ‒ 29 October 1900) was probably the first woman to convert to Islam in Liverpool. She came to Islam in 1887 at the hands of Abdullah Quilliam (1856‒1932).

Like many of the early Liverpool converts, she showed remarkable resilience and steadfastness in the face of considerable hostility and harassment from intolerant locals as well as her own family.

She played a leading role in the life of the Liverpool Muslim Institute, which she co-founded. She was active and successful in calling others to Islam, and representing the Institute both nationally and internationally. Fatima was the first treasurer of a mosque in Britain, serving for eight years between 1887‒1894. At the time it was charmingly but inaccurately claimed in her obituary in Manchester's Daily Dispatch, that 'she was the first lady ever converted to Islam in England'.

Born to a working class family in Birkenhead, Frances Elizabeth Murray showed signs of an independent and curious mind. She was unafraid to act on her convictions. She was in the first cohort of children to receive instruction under the Education Act of 1870.

By her early twenties she was secretary to a local chapter of the Temperance Movement, which campaigned to limit and ultimately end the consumption of alcohol. It was through this association that Frances first heard Quilliam speak on the 'great Arabian teetotaler', the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, in June 1887.

Frances still had more questions, but Quilliam advised her to read the Quran and make up her own mind. Despite the strenuous attempts of her family to frustrate and dissuade her, Frances became Fatima in a matter of weeks. In July, Fatima co-founded the Liverpool Muslim Society with Quilliam and another convert, Ali Hamilton, renting an upstairs room at Mount Vernon Temperance Hall.

In those first two years, through hard work they gained eleven more converts despite the ruffians who disrupted their meetings or waylaid them coming in or out of them. Fatima had horse dung smeared in her face on more than one occasion by them, but she was dauntless.

When the fledgling community moved to expanded premises at 8 Brougham Terrace in December 1889, Fatima became the face of the rebooted Liverpool Muslim Institute as its international profile grew, particularly in British India, where her poetry and prose was published in the Allahabad Review. And, despite her family’s opposition, she succeeded in bringing her husband, Hubert Henry Cates, and two of her sisters, Clara and Annie, to the faith.

In addition, she brought a number of other women to Islam, including Alice 'Amina' Bertha Bowman, Hannah 'Fatma' Rodda Robinson, Leah 'Zuleika' Banks, and Amy ‘Amina' Mokaiesh. Like Fatima, all four of these women either married other converts from the Liverpool community or married born Muslims.

It is all the more remarkable that Fatima’s greatest successes came at the moment of her heaviest trial. Throughout the first two years of her marriage, she had to contend with an abusive, violent and, at times, murderous husband. She sued for divorce in December 1891, but was only granted a year’s separation. Nonetheless, their marriage was effectively over and they lived separately until his death at sea in January 1895.

In this period, Fatima began to lessen her active involvement in the Institute and spent time away from Liverpool travelling to the East (probably to Beirut) and taking landscape photography in Southern England.

In October 1900, the community’s newspaper, The Crescent, dolefully announced the death and funeral of Fatima.

It claimed that she had spent the last years of her life as a lonely widow, living twenty miles away from the Institute in the coastal town of West Kirby where she lived with Cate’s posthumous son, Hubert Haleem, and ran a boarding house. However, this was a cover story.

In fact, the available documentary evidence indicates that Fatima became Quilliam’s third and secret wife in 1895 and that the boy was his. It was well known in the community that Quilliam advocated and practised polygamy, maintaining two separate households. On his birth certificate, Hubert Haleem is surnamed 'Quilliam Cates', and photographs show a remarkable likeness between Quilliam and his so-called fostered child. Quilliam was a doting if distant father to Hubert Haleem, and left him as an equal beneficiary in his will alongside his other surviving nine children.

It is fitting that, 122 years after her death, Fatima's unmarked grave in Anfield Cemetery was marked on 4 November 2022 with a marble headstone. The funds for it were raised by a local Muslim woman, Amirah Scarisbrick. It had the following inscription, featuring a stanza of Fatima's own poetry:

A faithful servant of Allah
Fatima Elizabeth Cates
1865‒1900
Then may we ever heed,
The warning God has given,
That so we may in safety tread
The road that leads to Heaven
FEC 1892

Yahya Birt is co-author with Hamid Mahmood of the new biography, Our Fatima of Liverpool: The Story of Fatima Cates, the Victorian woman who helped found British Islam. It is available from Beacon Books in Oldham.

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