In the New English Review, Esmerelda Weatherwax recounts an incident from the 1930s where Muslim protestors took to the streets of London in reaction to a recent Hindustani translation of H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World:
Screen capture of the 1938 Muslim protest march in London from a British Pathé newsreel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADausiEe4pM
… my husband was at the Museum of London and spotted a very brief mention of this protest in 1938 on a list of 20th century London events. I did some research.
The book they objected to was HG Wells’ A Short History of the World. This was originally published in 1922 but in 1938 an abridged version was tranlated into Hindustani and published in India. His observations about the Prophet Mohammed did not find favour with Indian Muslims (and as you know pre-partition the area called India covered what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh). There were protest meetings in Calcutta and Mumbai (then transliterated as Bombay) and the consignments of the books that WH Smith the booksellers sent to Hyderabad mysteriously never arrived. Investigation showed that the Sind government banned its import. Protests spread to east Africa and were reported in Nairobi and Mombasa.
The paragraphs concerned said “He seems to have been a man compounded of very considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception, and quite sincere religious passion”. Wells concludes, not unfavourably, that “when the manifest defects of Muhammad’s life and writing have been allowed for, there remains in Islam, this faith he imposed upon the Arabs, much power and inspiration”.
There had been a number of Muslims living in east London for some years, sailors who came through the docks, retired servants, some professional men and in 1934 they formed a charitable association for the promotion of Islam called Jamiat-ul-Muslimin; they met on Fridays at a hall in Commercial Road.
On Friday 12th August 1938 a copy of A Short History of the World was, as apparently reported in the Manchester Guardian the following day “ceremoniously burned”. The main Nazi book burnings were over 5 years previously but I can’t but be reminded of them. I can’t access the Guardian on-line archive for 1938 as I don’t have a subscription, but I have no reason to doubt what they reported.
A few days later Dr Mohammed Buksh of Jamiat-ul-Muslimin attended upon Sir Feroz Khan Noon, the high commissioner for India. Sir Feroz tried to explain that in Britain we could (or could then) freely criticise Christianity, the Royal family and government as a right. He reminded Dr Buksh that Muslims were “a very small minority in England, and it would do them no good to try and be mischievous in this country, no matter how genuine their grievances were”.
