Religion: London’s Mosque

“The intolerance of professed Christians is more than anything else responsible for my secession. You never hear Mohammedans speak of persons of other religions as we hear Christians talk of one another. They may be sorry others do not hold to the Mohammedan belief, but they do not condemn them to everlasting damnation.”

So said Rowland George Allanson Allanson-Winn, fifth Baron Headley, when in 1913 he renounced Christianity to embrace the Moslem faith. Lord Headley became president of the British Muslim Society, pre-eminent among the 200 or so Britons who held to the faith of Allah and his Prophet. A Westminster and Cambridge athlete who had written textbooks on boxing, he was a civil engineer, a road-builder in India, one of the world’s authorities on wave and tidal action and the protection of foreshores. Whether on a Christian or Moslem impulse, Lord Headley during the War urged that ten interned Germans be put to death for every British child or woman killed by bombs. He made his pilgrimage to Mecca, earned the title “Al Haj” in addition to his Moslem name Saifurrahman Sheikh Rahmahillah Farooq. In 1925 he was offered the kingship of Moslem Albania, declined it when refused $500,000 and $50,000 a year.

Lord Headley died at 80 two years ago. From London last week came word of a ceremony he would have enjoyed— the cornerstone-laying of London’s new mosque. To be built on a $140,000 site in West Kensington, the Nizamiah Mosque is so called because the biggest donation for it, $300,000, was wangled by Lord Headley from the Nizam of Hyderabad & Berar, “world’s richest man” (TIME, Feb. 22). Trustees of the mosque include the Aga Khan. The cornerstone was laid by the Nizam’s son, the Prince of Berar, to whom the present chairman of trustees, Sir Abdul Qadir, read an illuminated address.

With the possible exception of the mosque in Paris, which charges five francs entrance fee and contains two cafés, the Nizamiah Mosque—designed on Oriental lines by Sir Brumwell Thomas—will be the finest in any non-Moslem land. For U. S. Mohammedans there are two places for formal worship, a small, three-story frame building in Brooklyn and a temple in Michigan City, Ind., whose 80 Moslems plan to build a mosque when they acquire enough money. Elsewhere Moslems who cannot gather in large groups are content to worship in one another’s homes. Singapore has the world’s only mosque with a public address system, the muezzin’s call to prayer being heard a mile away through amplifiers in the mosque’s four 90-ft. minarets.