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Lady Evelyn Zainab Cobbold

(1867 ± 1963)
Lady Evelyn Murray Zainab Cobbold, daughter of the 7th Earl of Dunmore, embraced Islam and
in April 1933 performed the Pilgrimage to Mecca at the age of 66, being probably the first
British woman convert to Islam to perform this rite. In 1934 she published an account of this in
her book ¦
  
(Murray, London)

Lineage and family

According to information on the website www.william1.co.uk which traces the descendants of
William the Conqueror, she was descended from this famous French Norman conqueror of
England. A genealogical table of her family starting with her father Charles Adolphus Murray,
7th Earl of Dunmore (1841±1907), may be read here on this website.From there we learn that in
1891 she married John Dupius Cobbold who died in 1929.

  One of Lady Evelyn¶s daughters, Pamela (d. 1932), married in 1919 Sir Charles Jocelyn Hambro (d. 1963) of
the famous Hambro banking dynasty. He was a director of the Bank of England for many years and also served as
Chief Executive of the SOE (Special Operations Executive) during the Second World War.

We are making available here the following material about Lady Evelyn Zainab Cobbold.

|c eview by * 
  of her book ¦
  

. (From * 
 
  October 1934.)
|c Introduction to her book ¦
  
 in which she briefly relates how and why
she embraced Islam. (From * 
   January 1935.)
|c eviews from the British press of ¦
  
. (From * 
  
January 1935.)
|c Her speech at the function in honour of the birthday of the Holy Prophet Muhammad,
held by the Muslim Society of Great Britain on 14th December 1933 in London. (From
* 
   March 1934.)
|c An account of the funeral service and burial of Lady Evelyn Cobbold at her estate
Glencarron near Inverness in Scotland in January 1963, organised by Woking Muslim
Mission staff, Maulana Yaqub Khan and Maulana S.M. Tufail.

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 Goking Muslim Mission, England, 1913±1968

Marmaduke Pickthall on the true

concept of º

An explanation of the meaning of º in Islam given by Marmaduke Pickthall is
reproduced below, quoted from his biography  
 by Anne Fremantle. His view of
 is almost the same as the interpretation given by the Ahmadiyya Movement. It is,
therefore, highly unjust that we should be accused by the anti-Ahmadiyya 
 of rejecting
the Islamic teaching of  

Pickthall¶s view is recorded as follows:

³The error with regard to the common view regarding Islam arises from misapprehension of
the meaning of the word µJihad¶, a word which in the hands of the C.I.D. reporters has caused
much groundless fear to the British in India.

In English µJihad¶ is commonly translated µholy war¶, with a meaning like crusade. It
properly denotes the whole effort, individual and collective, of the true believer against evil,
beginning with the conquest of a man¶s own passions and ending possibly, but not
necessarily, in persecution and exile or upon the battlefield. Every prophet made Jihad in his
own way. That of Moses took the form of emigration to escape from evil. That of Jesus was
of a non-violent and passive kind. That of Muhammad shows three stages: first a non-violent
endurance of hostility and persecution while fulfilling his own mission, like that of Jesus;
second, when the persecution threatened to exterminate his people, emigration, the Jihad of
Moses; and third, when he and his followers formed an independent State, however small and
weak, and when the persecutors still persisted in attacking them, then and not till then he was
enjoined to fight.

The term µJihad¶ applies to all those stages, but in the minds of Europeans it is restricted to
the third. That is the reason for the whole mistake. The sort of Jihad prescribed for peoples in
a subject state differs from that prescribed for the same people in a state of independence.
And the Jihad for subject peoples who are persecuted is the Jihad of Jesus, which was
followed by Muhammad during thirteen years at Mecca.´

²  
 by Anne Fremantle, published by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., London 1938,
pages 323, 324.

The  indicated in the closing words, ³the Jihad for subject peoples who are persecuted is
 the Jihad of Jesus, which was followed by Muhammad during thirteen years at Mecca´, is
exactly the kind of   that Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad urged Muslims under British rule
in India to undertake, for which purpose he created his Movement.
This website is created and published by the xhmadiyya xnjuman Ishaµat Islam Lahore (U.K.), Wembley,
London,
the successor of the Woking Muslim Mission.
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