I had a meeting at the home of Muzammil Quraishi and Yasmine Choudry on Sunday and, along with the reading I’ve been doing over the past few weeks, I now have a far clearer idea how to develop this project. Muz and Yasmine gave me a very succinct over-view of the history of the Islamic community in Rossendale. Muz has studied and written about this and I’m very grateful for him loaning me his book which deals, alongside much else, with this history.
Many of the immigrants to the Haslingden area were from the Chach region north of the modern day town of Attock in the Punjab, Northern Pakistan. Campbellpore (at the bottom of the map) is the old Raj colonial name for Attock. It’s north-west of Islamabad.
Another area from which people emigrated to Rossendale was around the city of Mirpur, in Kashmir, south-east of Islamabad. Here, development of dam projects drove many agricultural workers from their lands just as there was a demand for labour (especially for the dirty, night-shift work) in the textile mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and in the early 1970s these things coincided to direct male emigrants from this area to places like Haslingden.
(Map copyright YASIR Amin Hazrovi)
(Map copyright YASIR Amin Hazrovi)