In 1933, Lady Evelyn Cobbold - also known as Sayyida Zainab - became the first British woman to perform Hajj after accepting Islam. In her diary, she wrote:
“If I never see Arabia again, always will live the cherished memory of these wonderful days, of Mecca...
#Hajj2022
.. alight with the torch of a living faith, Medina and its gardens, its peace, its charm.’
She was born Lady Evelyn Murray in Edinburgh on July 17, 1867. She was eldest child of the Scottish peer, Charles Adolphus Murray, 7th Earl of Dunmore, and Lady Gertrude Coke, daughter..
...of 2nd Earl of Leicester. It was in her early travels as a child that the seed of faith was planted, which later blossomed into a tree of conviction:
‘As a child I spent the winter months in a Moorish villa on a hill outside Algiers… my delight was to escape my governess...
and visit Mosques with my Algerian friends and unconsciously I was a little Moslem at heart…’
‘I didn’t know when the truth of Islam dawned of me. It seems that I have always been a Moslem’.
In 1929, she was granted permission to visit Mecca and perform Hajj by Saudi King.
On Islam and women’s rights, she wrote:
‘The improvement effected in the position of women by the Great Prophet of Arabia has been acknowledged by all unprejudiced writers, and it is false calumny to assert that Islamic system lowers the status of women and denies them a soul’.
In 1934, Lady Zainab published a book titled 'Pilgrimage to Mecca' in which she described her feelings after seeing the Kabah for the first time as "simple majesty". Performing Tawaf was "making a circuit round the house of [your] beloved."
Lady Evelyn also highlighted the debt that West owed to Islam through its advancement of science and medicine:
‘It will be remembered that the Moslem physicians were the first to establish hospitals in which patients were grouped in separate wards according to their diseases’
Her book Pilgrimage to Mecca in 1934 is the first Hajj account by a Scottish Woman and her diary also is the oldest record of a trip during the Hajj, when she went by car from Mina to Arafat. She travelled widely all her life and also wrote another book, Kenya: Land of Illusion.
Indeed, her attachment to the Qur'an was so deep, that she specified in her will to have the Verse of Light (24:35) inscribed on her grave:
“Allahu nur-us-samawati wal ard”
(Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth).
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