AL-IHSAN, ITS HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

London is a metropolitan city with diverse communities and cultures. It houses people from whole walks of life. The ideals of openness, dignity, and freedom are the prime factors which attract people to this city. As a capital city of United Kingdom, it accommodates more than thirteen million inhabitants. The substantial variables which makes the city stands out from other cities are its multi-faceted performance in art, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional service, research and development, tourism, and transportation.

The city houses historic World heritage sites which includes Tower of London, Kew Gardens, the Palace of Westminster, and the Royal Observatory of Greenwich and so on.  There are many other landmarks which attracts aspiring tourists around the world including Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Piccadilly Circus, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, and the Shard. The capital also hosts many museums, galleries, sporting events, and other cultural institutions including British Museum, National gallery, Tale Modern and British Library. The motivated students around the world also harbours the city to peruse their further education in universities including Oxbridge universities, Imperial College, London School of Economics, Kings college, University of London and so on. These are the significant factors which attracted migrants to settle in this country including the migrants from the Indian subcontinent.

Looking back to the history of immigrants in London, the first migrants from the Indian subcontinent who settled in London traces back to 19^th century. The most of them were from north Indian descents. They served in the British army and British Indian army in the first world war. Nonetheless, most of the south Indian community, from Kerala arrived in London in 1990s. the immigrant policy in that time helped them to make their transition easier in big numbers. The language they communicated, the culture they shared, food and custom they entertained were substantially different from other Asian communities. Hence, their distinctive diaspora distanced and settled in scattered provinces of the city. They lacked a religious and spiritual mentorship from their own community. Subsequently, the Almighty Allah blessed them with the advent of a group of religiously and materially educated scholars who would sincerely engage with them with pastoral care and chaplaincy services required in the hour of need. With the purpose of taking this collective responsibility in mind, after collaboratively reflecting with the elderly people from the community, the leaders decided to form an organisation; AL-IHSAN in 2008.