The British Muslim Convert Lord Headley 1855–1935

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, London: 2020, 280pp. ISBN: 9781350084438.

This book makes a valuable addition to the growing literature on early British Muslim communities in the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras. It explores the life and times of the fifth Baron Headley, Rowland George Allanson-Winn, (1855–1935), one of the most significant pioneers of Islam in Britain in the early 20th century. His story is less well known compared to his contemporaries Abdullah Quilliam (1856–1932) and Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1875–1936), but he was arguably the most prominent British Muslim in the UK between the two World Wars. Headley penned various booklets and articles in the monthly Islamic Review, the journal of the Woking Mission, was President of the British Muslim Society, London and Chairman of the Woking Mosque Trust and worked tirelessly to promote Islam in his time.

The author Jamie Gilham is an independent historian who has also authored Loyal Enemies: British Converts to Islam, 1850-1950 and is co-editor of Victorian Muslim: Abdullah Quilliam and Islam in the West. Gilham has reconstructed Headley’s biography using contemporaneous public sources such as newspapers, diaries, magazines, journals, and has been able to break new ground by accessing previously unpublished private papers from surviving family members, friends and colleagues, as well as archival material discovered in the British and India Office records. The biography is structured over twelve chapters, after the introduction, chapters one to three discuss Headley’s life before converting to Islam and chapters four to nine examine his postconversion life as a public Muslim figure.

In the early chapters we learn that Headley had Anglo-Irish ancestry, was raised as a Protestant, and came from a relatively well-off background which allowed him to be educated at Westminster School, London and to study at Trinity College, Cambridge University. He briefly worked in journalism, becoming Editor of the Salisbury and Winchester Journal and dabbled in politics before settling for a career in civil engineering. His professional expertise led to his first contact with Muslims in British controlled India in 1896 and he played a key role in overseeing the construction of a major road project – the Baramula-Srinagar Road in Jammu and Kashmir. At the height of the imperial power, the English characteristically reproduced the comforts of middle-class society in what they called a “pleasant colony,” in the heart of Srinagar, where they could attend church, visit the library and play cricket, golf and polo, which of course was not open to local Kashmiris.