AT the age of 65, Lady Evelyn Cobbold made a mark in both Western and Middle Eastern history when she became the first British Muslim to perform Haj in 1933. In 1934 an account of her trip was published in London entitled “Pilgrimage to Mecca”.
In the republished book “Pilgrimage to Mecca” by Lady Evelyn (introduction by William Facey and Miranda Taylor, and notes by Ahmad S. Turkistani) readers are taken on the journey that the British woman undertook more than 70 years ago.
Thanks to Lady Evelyn’s notes on her trip and Taylor, who discovered she was her great–great-great-aunt, the book saw the light this year with more details and explanations of Lady Evelyn and her observations throughout her journey.
The book gives an insight into how Lady Evelyn was brought up in Edinburgh in 1867 and how she took after her father in his passion for traveling, especially to North Africa where she learned Arabic and found out, as she writes in her notes, that “unconsciously I was a little Moslem at heart.” She added, “This is not so strange when one remembers that Islam is the natural religion that a child left to itself would develop. Indeed, as a Western critic described it, Islam is the religion of common sense.”
She did not hide her Islamic beliefs, yet she did not reveal them until she wrote her book “Wayfarers in the Libyan Desert” in 1911. Four years later she was already receiving messages from her Arabic friends calling her by her Islamic adoptive name Zainab.
At the age of 24, Lady Evelyn got married in one of Suffolk’s brewing families. In 1922 she separated from her husband and the father of her three children, John Cobbold, because his family did not welcome her attachment to Islam. Her divorce earned her a generous settlement in which she enhanced her country skills, became the first 14-point stag deerstalker and excelled at salmon fishing. When Cobbold died nine years later she was determined to perform the Haj.
The book continues to narrate Lady Evelyn’s true fairy tale from Jeddah to Madinah to Makkah and then return home. Of course, being a first timer, Lady Evelyn had to go through paper and permission procedures to get into Saudi Arabia but that did not stop her. She already had British friends who helped her find a suitable accommodation until permission was granted. Hence, her privacy was respected and she was accommodated in spacious quarters with a personal pilgrim guide assigned to her in every holy city she visited.
The press at that time made an Arabian Nights celebrity out of her. Because most of her work was lost, she failed to be included among women travelers and was not even mentioned at the UK’s 2004 National Portrait Gallery titled “Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers.” The book of the same title that accompanied the show deals with all the usual Middle Eastern traveling ladies, including Evelyn’s contemporaries Gertrude Bell, Isabelle Eberhardt, Rosita Forbes and Freya Stark. According to Facey none of these of course were able to visit the inner sanctums of Arabia, the Muslim holy cities of Makkah and Madinah, the goal of so many male explorers. Nor did these women even get to the Hejaz. Lady Evelyn, the sole Western woman to have performed this notable feat, rated not a mention, either in the exhibition or the book. So the story of her life and her contribution to the literature of the Haj has been completely overlooked until now.
Neither has she been studied from the point of view of what her life has to say about Islam among the British. Perhaps, as Facey said, because she was not a serious traveler and her three publications reflected her personal and heartfelt experiences.
Lady Evelyn might not have had her life as she wished but that did not stop her from doing what her heart guided her to do. She died in 1963 and, as requested, was buried at her Glencarron estate. A Qur’anic verse from Surah Al-Noor (The Light) was also engraved over her grave, as she desired.
According to Facey, since the republishing of the book in May 2008, only one person has ever claimed to be the first Briton to perform Haj. He is not yet quite sure about the validity of the claim. But if anyone can come up with any others, he says he would be delighted to hear about them. But, for the meantime, at any rate, he said, “I’m sticking to my guns that Lady Evelyn was the first!"
