This Digital British Islam archive collection explores Directories and guides utilised across communities.
The Muslim Directory, first published in the mid-1990s, was perhaps the earliest attempt to collate the details of mosques and providers of Islamically aligned goods and services for a growing population of Muslims in the UK. Since then, this area has grown significantly through the proliferation of online platforms and is now illustrated in online directories such as Sapiir Alcohol-Free 2022 (foodguide.org.uk) and many commercial Islamic websites and halal Lifestyle blogs.
Ensuring halal food is a central feature of the growing Muslim lifestyle sector that caters to a global commercial sector. These sites aim to make it easier to source halal meat suppliers and where halal eateries are located geographically in Britain.
This collection has a selection of directories and databases representing the diversity of mosques and ethnic Muslim organisations in the UK. The Masjid/Mosque Directory, the most comprehensive web directory on the web, claims to be the most detailed database of mosques in the UK. It has a number of other features that enable the identification of institutions by city and ethnicity, providing you with a comprehensive view of the Muslim community in the UK.
There are other specific ethnic focused database such as the CSO Member Organisations, possibly the largest directory of Somali-led organisations, covers 200 institutions in 12 cities in the UK.
This archive collection is a work in progress. We intend to expand our analysis and content tagging in due course, connecting different aspects of the project. We will make further inroads into collecting and drilling down on content as Digital British Islam progresses.