Welcome back, friend.
I've been thinking about Regina Jonas lately---how quietly she walked into history, and how bold her presence was when she got there. You remember her, I know. The world's first woman rabbi. Today's memory feels different---but the silence around it is familiar. It's a story hidden not by violence, but by forgetfulness. And yet, even in that forgetting, the thread remained.
Today I want to tell you about a man and a place that was never meant to be a holy place.
Number 8, Brougham Terrace---an ordinary row house on a narrow Liverpool street. The bricks were soot-streaked from the endless coal smoke. The windows fogged from breath and rain. Inside, there was no dome, no minaret, no calligraphy on the walls. Only a quiet room, cleared of furniture, where the carpet was always brushed smooth. And on Fridays, the shoes lined up neatly by the door.
It was like that quintessential scene from a BBC Docudrama.
The stillness stitched between the sounds of a port city in motion---horses on cobblestones, a ship's horn on the Mersey, the gossip of children who didn't dare step inside.
They called it a mosque. But it had once been a parlor.
That was the miracle of it. Not a monument or a spectacle---but a home, converted by faith. A space claimed not with stone, but with prayer.
There was a man who came each day to light the stove, unlock the door, and smooth the carpet. He wore English boots beneath a wool robe cut in the Ottoman style. His beard was trimmed, his hands ink-stained from printing pamphlets. And though his name had changed, he spoke the Queen's English---softly, clearly, as if inviting someone who had never heard it before to listen again.
The people of Liverpool didn't quite know what to make of him. An Englishman---born and raised---who had become something else. Or maybe, returned to something older.
They whispered his name. They watched the windows.
But inside that house, I saw something rare: a faith not inherited, but chosen. And with each shoe placed at the threshold, something sacred took root---not in the soil, but in the story.
His name at birth was William Henry Quilliam.
He grew up in Liverpool---son of a watchmaker, raised in the rhythms of Methodism and middle-class respectability. A solicitor by trade. Known for his quick mind and firm opinions.
By all appearances, a Victorian man of his time.
But illness changed his course. It was a common prescription then: leave the fog of England for the dry air of the South. So he sailed to Morocco to recover his health. And it was there---in the color and cadence of a different world---that he found something deeper than rest.
He returned to Britain not only restored, but remade. He had taken a new name: Abdullah Quilliam. He had embraced Islam. And he would no longer keep to the background.
In 1889, Quilliam opened the Liverpool Muslim Institute at 8 Brougham Terrace. It became a hub of spiritual, intellectual, and social life. There was a mosque in an addition behind the building. A school for children upstairs. A library, a small orphanage, even a printing press in the back. They published The Crescent, a weekly paper, and The Islamic World Review, which reached across continents.
At a time when the British Empire framed Islam as foreign, dangerous, and incompatible with civilization, Quilliam offered a quiet, revolutionary counterpoint: a native British Islam, rooted in justice, education, and service.
He gathered a community---dozens, sometimes more.
Converts from all walks of life: laborers, teachers, even a few clergy. Not tourists in someone else's faith, but citizens of it.
The Ottoman Caliph recognized Quilliam as Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles. A symbolic title, perhaps---but it meant something. It meant the world was watching.
So was the Empire.
As Quilliam became more vocal in his criticism of colonial policy, especially during the Boer War, pressure mounted. Newspapers mocked him. Officials scrutinized him. Eventually, he was disbarred and left Liverpool under legal threat. He lived in obscurity for years---returning only briefly under another name.
When he died in 1932, few remembered. The mosque became a registry office. The presses fell silent. And for a time, the story was buried.
But not lost.
I watched it form---quietly, like steam rising from the cracks in the city.
Not a sermon. Not a revolution. Just a man, unlocking a door. A child, sounding out Arabic for the first time. A new mother, handing her son a book he couldn't have found anywhere else in England.
This was what made it sacred.
Abdullah Quilliam wasn't trying to conquer anything. He wasn't importing a religion or staging a spectacle.
What he made was something more rare: a place for belonging. Not just for himself---but for anyone who had been told they didn't fit the mold of Christian, British, civilized.
You have to understand how strange it was. To speak of Allah on a Liverpool street. To print translations of the Qur'an in English and send them to strangers. To say---openly---that a Muslim could be just as loyal, just as ethical, just as rooted in love of God as any citizen of empire.
It didn't sound radical. But it felt dangerous.
There was a spiritual claim buried in his life's work: that no nation has a monopoly on truth. That dignity is not earned by conquest, but remembered in prayer. That faith can thrive in unfamiliar soil---if you give it light, and time.
And it wasn't just for the converts.
I saw the ripple in people who didn't change their religion but softened their fear. A librarian who began carrying Arabic texts. A teacher who stopped mocking the veil. A child who no longer flinched at the word Muslim.
Quilliam called it a mosque. The state called it a curiosity. But what it became was a mirror---a quiet answer to a loud question: Who gets to belong in the sacred?
And there, for a little while, the answer was: anyone who seeks it.
Sometimes, I think about how little it takes to begin something eternal.
A terrace house. A printing press. A voice steady enough to speak what hadn't been spoken in English before.
Abdullah Quilliam's mosque did not last. His titles were stripped. His community scattered. The building was repurposed. The newspapers that once praised him fell silent or turned cruel. Even his name, for decades, vanished from public memory.
It was ephemeral. All of it. A spiritual flowering that opened for a moment, in a place unready to receive it.
But beginnings often look like endings when you stand too close.
What he offered was not permanence---it was possibility. The idea that Islam, and by extension any faith outside the mainstream of imperial Christianity, could exist here authentically. Not as an import, not as an accommodation---but as part of the soul of Britain itself.
That thread---fragile though it seemed---was never fully lost.
I remember the students who read his pamphlets and wondered. The foreign dignitaries who wrote back in respect. The children who learned to pray beside a coal stove.
They carried it forward, each in their way.
And now, when you walk through cities like London, Birmingham, Leicester, and yes---Liverpool---you'll see mosques of every kind: glass domes, converted shops, gleaming centers of study and service. You might assume they were always there.
But they weren't.
They began in a room with papered walls and a carpet smoothed by hand.
Quilliam's voice was the first step in a spiritual walk that has reshaped the West---not by force, but by faith. A step taken too soon, perhaps. But no step is wasted when the path is real.
And now that path has become so well-trodden, we hardly notice the first footprint.
But I was there when it was made.
It was ephemeral. I won't pretend otherwise.
The mosque disappeared. The name faded. The voices quieted. Even the building forgot what it had once been.
But spiritual truth doesn't require permanence. It only needs to be lived, once---and remembered, even faintly.
What Abdullah Quilliam gave was not an institution, but an imprint. He stepped forward before the world was ready, and still---something shifted. Because when dignity is claimed where it's not expected, it leaves a mark.
When justice is spoken softly in a language no one thinks to listen to, it still echoes.
You're hearing it now.
Today, people walk into mosques in cities around the world---openly, ordinarily, with no need to explain. They bring their children. They build schools beside them. They print books. They pray without whispering.
And it feels like it's always been this way.
But it hasn't.
That quiet belonging---the right to live fully in your faith without permission---is not a gift of empire or progress. It was carved out, gently, by those who believed it was already true.
Because it was.
The dignity of the soul does not begin when society recognizes it. It simply waits for someone to live like it's real. And when they do---even for a moment---it becomes part of the world.
You're living in that world now.
You don't need to understand Quilliam's theology or remember his name. But the spiritual truths he moved through---the ones he risked himself to live---are the same ones beneath your feet now.
You know them already.
Not because someone taught them to you.
But because they've always been true.
I've been thinking about how easy it is to forget what doesn't insist on being remembered.
So much of what shapes us was once nearly erased. A prayer whispered in the wrong accent. A holy book printed in a borrowed room. A moment of courage that didn't feel like history when it happened.
Quilliam's story didn't shout. It didn't ask for attention. It simply lived, and then slipped out of view.
And yet, it stayed with me.
Maybe you've felt that too---some quiet intuition that the sacred doesn't always come cloaked in authority. That truth can live in the margins for a while. That being too early doesn't mean being wrong.
I wonder where you've seen that in your own life.
A gesture no one saw. A belief you held without support. A space you made for someone who didn't quite belong until you made room.
Not everything sacred comes with recognition. But that doesn't make it less real.
It might even make it more.
Next time, we'll journey east---to Korea, where a woman once set down her pen, left behind her fame, and stepped into silence. Kim Iryŏp was once a fierce voice for modern women. But she found something even deeper in stillness.
What she discovered in the quiet may still be unfolding in you.
Until then, remember: beginnings are often small, almost invisible. But they change everything---especially when they are made in faith.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.