WORKS AND DAYS: A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW ZEALAND MUSLIMS 2026

Hajji Abdullah Drury

According to the most recent national census, the Muslim population of New Zealand exceeds 60,000 individuals. This figure reflects not a homogeneous constituency but a complex social formation shaped by successive migrations, refugee resettlement, conversion, and the maturation of locally born generations. Whilst first-generation migrants remain numerically prominent, refugee communities have introduced additional linguistic, ethnic, and theological diversity; converts to Islam (many of Anglo-European or Polynesian heritage), together with their New Zealand-born descendants, have further contributed to the emergence of layered and hybrid identities. The resulting demographic configuration complicates reductive accounts of religious minorities and highlights the fluid interplay between faith, ancestry, and civic participation. As Muslim communities consolidate institutional and generational continuity, they increasingly participate in national debates concerning pluralism, integration, and the place of Islam within the country’s constitutional and cultural framework.

The origins of an enduring Muslim presence in New Zealand can be traced to April 1854, when Wuzerah and Mindia migrated from India to Canterbury with their children. They entered the employ of Sir John Cracroft Wilson (1808–1881), a retired Anglo-Indian administrator. Settling in Cashmere, near Christchurch, the family contributed labour to local infrastructure projects, including the transportation of stone for the Anglican cathedral. In 1862, one of their sons, Piro, drowned—an event widely regarded as marking the earliest known Muslim burial in the country. Wuzerah himself remained in Canterbury until his death in 1902 and is interred in Sydenham, signifying nearly five decades of continuous Muslim residence in the region.

Further migration from Punjab and Gujarat gathered pace in the late nineteenth century. Early arrivals were predominantly male sojourners engaged in trade and labour; from the 1930s onward, family reunification gradually reshaped these communities into more stable domestic units. Organised religious life followed demographic consolidation. In 1950, the New Zealand Muslim Association was established in Auckland, becoming the first enduring Islamic institution in the country. At that time, the Muslim population numbered only a few hundred. Post-war displacement also affected New Zealand: refugees from Eastern Europe arrived in 1951 aboard the MS Goya, among them Avdo Musovich (1919–2001), who later served for many years on the Association’s executive committee. His son was the first identifiable Muslim to enter the New Zealand military, in the late 1960s. In 1959, premises in central Auckland were acquired as an Islamic centre, and in 1960 Maulana Ahmed Said Musa Patel (1937–2009), trained in Gujarat, became the country’s first formally educated mullah or imam.

Conversion to Islam formed another strand in the historical development of the community. Among the earliest recorded converts were the Marsack brothers of Remuera, educated at King’s School and King’s College in Auckland, who adopted the names Shemseddin and Boureddin. In 1965, the first interment in a designated Muslim section at Waikumete Cemetery was that of Victor Henderson, known as Abdullah Kassim. Subsequent burials included Ian Alvin Newman (Mohamed Musa Amin, 1941–1987) and William Pettingal Dyer (Mohamed Ali, 1928–1988), amongst others. 

In 1969, a Second World War veteran, Neil Dougan, embraced Islam whilst abroad and assumed the title and name Sheikh Abdullah Isa. Later he led a Sufi (esoteric) study circle in Auckland numbering more than 200 participants and wrote the first account of a New Zealander performing the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, in 1974. One member of his group, Abdul Salam Drake, designed the first purpose-built mosque erected by the New Zealand Muslim Association in Ponsonby in 1979.

Māori engagement with Islam began to emerge more visibly in the late twentieth century when several individuals embraced Islam during the 1970s. In 1985 convert George Te Heuheu was interviewed in the newly built Christchurch Mosque on Deans Avenue. More formal interaction developed in 1990, when the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand convened the first formal Muslim–Māori meeting at a Wellington marae. An informal Māori Muslim Association was established in Hamilton a decade later, with Te Amorangi Eshaq Kireka-Whaanga appointed as president. In 2003 he and other recent Māori converts participated in a “Māori Muslim Day” organised by the Christchurch Mosque management and hosted in part at the national marae, Nga Hau e Wha. Despite these initiatives, sustained institutional support from immigrant-led Muslim organisations remained limited. The Māori Muslim Association, maintaining an exclusively indigenous membership and orientation, did not receive the consistent backing required for significant development. Public discourse has also posed challenges. Media commentary frequently conflated the Māori principle of political self-determination with reductive interpretations of jihad, reflecting broader misunderstandings of both Māori aspirations and Islamic conceptual terminology.

The 1960s and 1970s were marked by institutional proliferation. The International Muslim Association of New Zealand emerged in Wellington during the early 1960s, and the Muslim Association of Canterbury was formed in 1977. Migrants from Fiji, including Abbas Ali and Hajji Mohammed Hussain Sahib, played a pioneering role in introducing commercial halal slaughter processes within the meat industry, linking religious observance with export economics. Additional arrivals from South Asia, the Balkans, Fiji, and elsewhere broadened the social base of local associations. The first visit of the Tablighi Jamaʿat occurred in 1969, and annual national gatherings were convened from the mid-1970s, reflecting transnational religious networks.

By 1979, the Muslim population had reached approximately 2000. That year witnessed the creation of a national coordinating body, the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand. Its inaugural president, Mazhar Krasniqi (1931–2019), a perspicuous Kosovar Albanian refugee and entrepreneur, was succeeded by Hajji Abdul Rahim Rasheed (1938–2006) of Fijian origin. In 1982, Sheikh Khalid Kamal Abdul Hafiz (1938–1999), educated in Saudi Arabia, settled in Wellington and became a senior religious adviser to the Federation. From 1984 onward, the Federation administered halal certification for export meat, institutionalising a system that combined theological oversight with significant economic implications.

Immigration intensified during the late 1980s and subsequent decades, particularly from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Population growth stimulated the expansion of educational, charitable, and cultural institutions, especially in Auckland and presently there are over 30 Muslim agencies and mosques in the city. For instance, the Islamic Education and Dawah Trust, founded in 1990, established Al Madinah School and Al Zayed Girls College in Mangere, embedding Islamic schooling within the state-integrated sector. Sectarian diversity also became more visible; in 2008, Auckland’s Shia community, organised through the Fatima Zahra Charitable Association, publicly commemorated ʿAshura on an unprecedented scale.

Amongst the many Muslim refugees to arrive in the 1990s were the entire Kafedzic family from Sarajevo in Bosnia-Hercegovina, whose ordeal was detailed in the first book of its kind Goodbye Sarajevo (2011). Also hailing from Bosnia, Jusuf Dzilic arrived a few years later and carved out a career in New Zealand as a musician under the provocative moniker “Genocide”.

Regional consolidation continued beyond the main metropolitan centres. The Muslim Association of Canterbury constructed the South Island’s first mosque in the mid-1980s and later hosted a national conference for converts in 2004. The Otago Muslim Association was formally registered in 1995, followed by the Southland Muslim Association in 2008, demonstrating the geographic diffusion of Muslim settlement and organisation. 

A watershed moment occurred in March 2019, when coordinated attacks during Friday congregational prayers at two mosques in Christchurch resulted in the deaths of more than fifty worshippers. The iniquitous perpetrator, an Australian national, was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. This atrocity, whilst exposing the precarity faced by visible minorities, also elicited widespread public solidarity and international attention. It situated the history of Muslims in New Zealand within broader global narratives of migration, minority citizenship, and the challenges confronting plural democracies.

Taken together, these developments, predilections, and proclivities together chart the transformation of a small, scattered population into a nationally organised and demographically diverse religious community. Through migration, institutional innovation, and generational succession, Muslims in New Zealand have become an established—though continually evolving—component of the country’s increasingly complex social fabric.

Hajji Abdullah Drury is a Hamilton Muslim and author of the book:  A History of Christchurch Muslims – Integration and Harmony (2024).