[BITList] Muslim mission

[John Feltham]

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visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2010-07-28



Winn,  Rowland George Allanson  Allanson-, fifth Baron Headley  (1855-1935), civil engineer and convert to Islam, was born on 19 January 1855 in London, the only son in the family of four children of the Hon. Rowland Allanson-Winn (1816-1888) and his wife, Margaretta Stephana (d. 1871), second daughter of George Walker, of Overhall, Essex. Educated privately, save for a few months at Westminster School in 1868, he studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge (1874-8), where he became university boxing champion. Admission at the Middle Temple in 1879 did not presage a legal career. After a spell of tutorial teaching, he was for two years editor of the Salisbury Journal, a local newspaper, and for seven years private secretary to Sir Frederick Seager Hunt MP. Rowing, fencing, shooting, skating, golf, swimming, and fishing all engaged him. He wrote books on pugilism and on the use of the walking-stick in self-defence. This knowledge proved valuable on occasion, for, from 1888, he was heir presumptive to a 13,000 acre estate in Kerry, notorious for its bankruptcy, evictions, and violence. As Unionist candidate for South Kerry at the 1892 general election, he polled eighty-six votes. 

After a course at King's College, London, Allanson-Winn became a civil engineer, joining Spedding & Co. in 1896. He initially worked in Kashmir, overseeing the construction of the Baramula-Srinagar road, with 167 bridges and culverts in 33 miles. This began an interest in the science of water erosion that led him to specialize in coastal protection. He set up a consultancy in Dublin following his marriage on 27 October 1899 to Teresa St Josephine Johnson (1870/71-1919), youngest daughter of Henry William Johnson, sometime governor of Leh and Jammu. Youghal, Glenbeigh, Bray, and Arklow benefited from Allanson-Winn's groyne and sea wall designs, while his papers in professional journals won prizes. He served as president of the Society of Engineers in 1921. 

Allanson-Winn felt sorely afflicted during the first decade of the new century. The third of his five sons died, at the age of one, in 1904; his only daughter did not survive even that long. During a severe illness, related to nervous strain, he found no comfort in religion. The low-church Anglicanism in which he was reared seemed rooted in the fear of hell. Centuries of corrupt sacerdotalism had rendered organized Christianity unfit for the age of reason; sectarian bigotry in Ireland disgusted him. Mankind needed a simple faith, free from dogma and superstition, that emphasized charity, tolerance, and brotherhood. 

On 13 January 1913 Allanson-Winn succeeded his first cousin as Lord Headley, fifth Baron Allanson and Winn of Aghadoe, co. Kerry, eleventh baronet of Nostell, and fifth baronet of Little Warley. With the titles came land in Yorkshire and Essex as well as in Kerry, but not a seat in the House of Lords, since he never sought election as an Irish representative peer. He was more often resident at Ivy Lodge, St Margaret's, Twickenham, than at Aghadoe House, near Killarney, or Glenbeigh Towers (burnt out by republicans in 1921). In autumn 1913 he came into contact with Khwaja Kamal ud-Din (1870-1932), an Indian from Lahore, who had recently reopened the Shah Jehan mosque at Woking (built in 1889 but little used since). They discovered that Muslim theology coincided in all essentials with Headley's own opinions. His conversion to Islam was announced at a dinner at Frascati's restaurant in Oxford Street, London, on 16 November 1913, when he assumed the additional name Shaikh Saifurrahman Rahmatullah El-Farooq. 

Lord Headley El-Farooq-as co-religionists called him-was not the first Muslim peer. However, whereas the late Lord Stanley of Alderley had seldom advertised his faith, Headley let himself be 'run' by Kamal ud-Din to publicize the Woking Muslim Mission. An inundation of angry letters from Christian compatriots convinced him of the comparative broad-mindedness of Muslims. His riposte, A Western Awakening to Islam (1914), noted that Muhammad was no more Asiatic than Jesus. Islam, he believed, could arrest the drift towards atheism in Britain and make the country easier to govern. It would put a stop to suffragettes, immodest women's clothing, and sentimentalism in penal policy. By turning Muslim, he had not ceased to be a Christian; on the contrary, he became a better Christian. Kamal ud-Din belonged to the heterodox Ahmadiyya movement, and Headley exploited its latitude. His articles in the Islamic Review were notable for eccentric digressions: on stewed tea as a cause of insanity, for example, or the mysterious significance of seven-leaved sprigs of ivy. 

Although the Woking mission made about a thousand converts over twenty-five years, most Muslims in Britain were visiting Indians and Egyptians. Headley, president of the British Muslim Society until 1935, enjoyed their acclaim and seemed unaware that few other people took him entirely seriously. Portly and bald, with a high colour and white moustache, he came across as a jovial old gentleman, endearingly innocent, perhaps rather silly, yet very sincere in his desire to correct Western misapprehensions about Islam. He also practised spiritualism with total conviction. 

Following the death of his first wife, Headley married on 11 February 1921 Barbara Janet Ainsleigh Baynton (d. 1929), seventh daughter of Robert Lawrence Kilpatrick, of co. Kerry, and widow of Thomas Baynton, of Darlington. Widowed a second time, he married on 28 July 1929 Catharine Bashford (d. 1947), founder and chairman of the Stonehenge Woollen Industry Ltd, daughter of Joseph William Lovibond, of Lake House, Wiltshire, and widow of Major Lindsay Bashford, of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. There were no children of his second and third marriages. 

In July-August 1923 Headley-who never pressed his family to change religion-made the pilgrimage to Mecca, the first Englishman to go there without subterfuge. Kamal ud-Din also took him to Egypt (1923), South Africa (1926), and India (1927 and 1928) to raise funds for a new London mosque. Three informal offers of the Albanian throne were prudently declined. Headley died in a nursing home at 2 Broadlands Road, Hornsey, Middlesex, on 22 June 1935, of nephritis and prostate obstruction, and was buried on 25 June 1935 in Brookwood cemetery, Woking. He was survived by his third wife and by four sons of his first marriage; the eldest, Rowland Patrick John George Allanson-Winn (1901-1969), succeeded him as sixth Baron Headley.

Jason Tomes 

Sources  'In memoriam', Islamic Review, 22 (1935), 322-5 + The Times (24 June 1935) + Lord Headley, A Western awakening to Islam (1914) + R. Bullard, Two kings in Arabia (1993) + 'Muslim peer', Muslim India and Islamic Review, 1 (1913), 401-15 + 'Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din and Lord Headley in Egypt', Islamic Review, 11 (1923), 301-15 + Al Hajj Lord Headley (El-Farooq), The affinity between the original church of Jesus Christ and Islam (1927) + Lord Headley, 'Good and bad impulses', Islamic Review and Muslim India, 6 (1918), 69-80 + Lord Headley, 'Second sight and superstition', Islamic Review and Muslim India, 6 (1918), 151-9 + A. W. [Lord Headley], Thoughts for the future (1913) + R. G. Allanson-Winn, Sea-coast erosion and remedial works (1904) + Burke, Peerage + WWW + d. cert. + m. cert. [Teresa St Josephine Johnson]
Likenesses  photograph, repro. in 'Muslim peer', frontispiece