Lady Evelyn embarked on a journey through the Libyan Desert in 1911 with her American friend, Frances Gordon Alexander, in 1911.
She remarked that she considered Islam the religion "most calculated to solve the world's many perplexing problems, and to bring to humanity peace and happiness".
Evelyn achieved celebrity status in 1933 at the age of 65, when she became the first Muslim woman born in the United Kingdom to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Because of this there were restrictions in place for Europeans, but Lady Evelyn, who adopted the name Zainab, was granted permission to perform the Hajj.
This is her description in her diary of the first time she saw the Kabah and tawaf: "We walk on the smooth marble towards the Holy of Holies, the House of Allah, the great black cube rising in simple majesty, the goal for which millions have forfeited their lives and yet more millions have found heaven in beholding it … the 'Tawaf' is a symbol, to use the words of the poet, of a lover making a circuit round the house of his beloved, completely surrendering himself and sacrificing all his interests for the sake of the Beloved.
Lady Evelyn died in 1963 in Inverness and was buried, as she stipulated, on a remote hillside on her Glencarron estate in Wester Ross.
She had stipulated she wanted to be buried on a hill on her estate facing Mecca with the following words on her gravestone: Allahu nur-us-samawati wal ard ("Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth").
[20] The 2019 novel Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela (W&N, ISBN 978-1474600125) describes a pilgrimage by three Muslim women in search of Cobbold's grave.