William Quilliam founded the Liverpool Mosque and Muslim Institute in 1891. He had converted to Islam in 1887. In 1894, the Ottoman Emperor declared Quilliam the Sheikh-ul-Islam of Britain.

Abdul Majid was the Imam of the Shah Jahan Mosque, Woking, and an editor of the Islamic Review.

Syed Ameer Ali was a lawyer, a judge, a political and social reformer, and a scholar of Islam. He wrote a number of books on Islamic law. He first arrived in the UK in 1869 initially to compete for the ICS. He was friends with the Fawcetts and attended female suffrage meetings in 1870. He was called to the Bar through the Inner Temple and returned to India to serve in the Calcutta High Court.

Syed Ameer Ali made frequent returns to Britain after 1873. In 1880 he met James Knowles, editor of The Nineteenth Century, and thereafter wrote a number of articles for the journal. On another visit back to the UK, he married Isabelle Konstam.

Syed Ameer Ali retired in 1904 and settled in the UK. His first task was to launch the London Muslim League (1908) and he took up the issue of Muslim representation. However, he resigned from the Muslim League in 1913 regarding it as too extreme. In 1910, he launched a project to build a mosque in London. And then in 1911 he formed the British Red Crescent Society because the British Red Cross was not helping injured Turks and Arabs in Italian attacks, addressing the need for an independent society to help the sick and wounded irrespective of race or religion. In 1909 he was appointed to the Privy Council, the first Indian member on the Council.

He died on 3 August 1928 at his home, Pollingfold Manor, near Rudgwick, Sussex and was buried in Brockwood Cemetery, Surrey. He had two sons who both studied at Oxford and both eventually retired to settle in Britain with their British wives.

Adbullah Yusuf Ali is best known as translator of the Qur'an. He first went to Britain in 1891 to study law at St John's College, Cambridge. He returned to India in 1895 having graduated from Cambridge, with an Indian Civil Service (ICS) post and was called to the Bar in Lincoln's Inn in 1896 in abstentia.

In 1900, Yusuf Ali married Theresa Mary Shalders in England. He returned to England in 1905 on a two-year leave. During this time he gave a number of lectures and was elected to the Royal Society of Arts and Royal Society of Literature.

In 1914, Yusuf Ali resigned from the ICS and settled in Britain. He had divorced his wife in 1912 and gained custody of their four children. He married Gertrude Anne Mawbey in 1920. He became involved in the Woking Mission and the East London Mosque. Seen as an imperial loyalist, Yusuf Ali had been vocally supportive of the Indian contribution to the war effort, and he was awarded a CBE in 1917. In the same year he joined the School of Oriental Studies as a lecturer in Hindustani.

Yusuf Ali wrote for a number of periodicals on political, artistic, literary and religious matters. He attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and was in London at the time of the Round Table Conferences. He often wrote and spoke about Mohammad Iqbal, although they had differing political ideologies. In 1938, Yusuf Ali's translation of the Qur'an was published in Lahore while he was teaching at Islamia College. He died in 1953 in London.

Shah Abdul Majid Qureshi was born in a village in Sylhet, the eldest of three brothers and a sister. His father was forced to sell his land after spending much of his income on educating his sons, and the family lived in impoverished circumstances. To escape a life of hardship and help his family, Qureshi decided to follow the example of many of his fellow Sylhetis and try to get work on a ship with a view to migrating to America or Britain. With this in mind, he left for Calcutta in 1934. After various failed attempts, he finally managed to escape from a ship docked at Tilbury, making his way to east London where he found lodgings with other recently arrived Sylhetis.

Qureshi began his working life in Britain selling chocolates in pubs. He soon moved on to working in various Indian restaurants (including the Bengal Restaurant in Percy Street) and, in 1938, opened his first restaurant, Dilkush Delight, in Windmill Street, Soho. By 1944, he owned a different restaurant off Charlotte Street. This became known as the 'India Centre' because numerous politically active South Asians congregated there for meetings. During this period, Qureshi himself became involved in political and welfare activities concerning the South Asian community in London. He was an active member of the Hindustani Social Club and co-founder (with Ayub Ali) and President of the Indian Seamen's Welfare League. He also attended some India League meetings. A Muslim, Qureshi worshipped at the East London Mosque and helped form the London Muslim League with Abbas Ali.

Qureshi married on his first return trip to Sylhet in 1946 and eventually, in the 1970s, brought his wife and children to England where the family remained.

Ahmed Ali, best known for his acclaimed literary fiction, was born to Syed Shujauddin, a civil servant, and Ahmad Kaniz Asghar Begum in 1910. Ali attended Wesley Mission High School in Azamgarh and Government High School in Aligarh before beginning his studies in 1926 at Aligharh Muslim University where he met Raja Rao and their English poetry tutor Eric C. Dickinson (Ali’s first mentor), and published his first poem in Aligarh Magazine. Just a year later he transferred to Lucknow University, where he published his first short story and graduated, in 1930, with the highest marks in English in the history of the university.

In 1931, Ali gained his MA from the same institution and became a lecturer there. It was in this year that he also met Sajjad Zaheer and Mahmaduzaffar. With Rashid Jahan, the daughter of the well-known advocate of women's education in India, Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah, the three men produced an anthology of short stories titled Anghare ('Burning Coals') which, because of its political radicalism and also, according to some, obscenity, provoked considerable hostility and was eventually banned. In the wake of this controversy, the four writers became involved in the All-India Progressive Writers' Association which had its beginnings in London in 1934 but its first official meeting in Lucknow in 1936. Ali also published his own first collection of short stories, Sho’le (‘Flames’) in that year.

Soon after the inception of the AIPWA, a rift developed within it; Ali disagreed with Zaheer and others about the function of literature within society, arguing that it should not be reduced to political propaganda. He severed his connections with the association, departing for London in 1939 with the manuscript of his first novel Twilight in Delhi. He remained in Britain for just over a year. During this time, he mixed with writers, both Indian and English. Introduced to E. M. Forster by his distant relative Syed Ross Masood, Ali became good friends with him and was introduced by him into London’s literary circles and, in particular, the Bloomsbury Group. He was one of the editors of the magazine Indian Writing, had short fiction published in John Lehmann’s journal New Writing, and was successful in securing a publishing deal for his first novel, Twilight in Delhi, with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press.

On his return to India, Ali was appointed Director of Listener Research for the BBC, Delhi. In 1944, he left this post and was appointed Professor of English at Presidency College, Calcutta. In the following year, he attended the first All-India PEN conference in Jaipur, with Forster as chief speaker. Later, he founded Pakistan PEN with Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy. In China during the partition of the Indian subcontinent, Ali moved to Karachi in the newly formed Pakistan on his return and began a career in the diplomatic service which took him back to China and to Morocco. He was eventually retired from government service by General Muhammad Ayub Khan’s military regime in 1960, and went on to start up his own business. He was married to Bilquis Jahan and had three sons and a daughter.

During his lifetime, Ali published several more volumes of short stories in Urdu, as well as anthologies of English translations of Urdu poetry, the first anthology of Pakistani writing in English translation, the first anthology of Indonesian poetry in English translation, a study of China’s Muslim population, and his second and third novels (1964, 1985), continuing to produce new works until his death.

Attia Hosain was born into a wealthy landowning family in northern India. Her father was educated at Cambridge University, and her mother was the founder of an institute for women's education and welfare. Hosain attended the Isabella Thoburn College at the University of Lucknow, becoming the first woman from a landowning family to graduate in 1933. She also undertook private tuition in Urdu and Persian at home, where she was brought up according to the Muslim tradition. Influenced by the left-wing, nationalist politics of her Cambridge-educated brother and his friends, Hosain became involved with the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association, a group of socialist writers which included Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer. Encouraged by the poet and political activist Sarojini Naidu, she attended the 1933 All-India Women’s Conference in Calcutta, reporting on it for Lucknow and Calcutta newspapers. In this period, she also began to write short stories.

In 1947, determined to avoid going to the newly created Pakistan, Hosain left India for Britain with her husband, Ali Bahadur Habibullah, who undertook war repatriation work. The couple had two children, and Hosain chose to remain in Britain. She continued to write and began work as a broadcaster, presenting a woman's programme for the Indian Section of the Eastern Service of the BBC from 1949. During her time at the BBC, she broadcast on a wide range of topics, from art to music to religion to cinema. As well as reading scripts, she participated in discussion programmes and acted as a roving reporter for the Weekend Review. In 1953 she published her first work of fiction, a collection of short stories titled Phoenix Fled. This was followed in 1961 by her only novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column.