The Shah Jahan Mosque of Woking

The Shah Jahan Mosque at Woking, in the gardened country of Surrey south-west of London, built in 1889, is honoured as the first purpose-built mosque in Britain and indeed in the whole of northern Europe. It was built in the age of the British Empire, when Britain ruled the largest Muslim population on earth in India and elsewhere, and when Muslims, students, scholars, visitors, diplomats and a growing number of British converts, were present in the imperial capital and its country. The mosque was the work of Dr Gottlieb Leitner, an orientalist scholar who founded at Woking an institute for the study of the languages and cultures of the East, and who wished to provide a place of worship for Muslims; and it was paid for chiefly by a Muslim queen of India, Shah Jahan Begum, the ruler of the princely state of Bhopal, one of the line of remarkable women who governed that state, after whom the mosque is named. It is a small but elegant building in the Indo-Saracenic style, with an onion dome, slender corner minarets and an arched facade, set incongruously and charmingly amid the lawns, cedars and brick villas of a Victorian English town. For a time after Leitner's death the mosque fell quiet, but in the early twentieth century it was revived and became a centre of Muslim life and missionary activity in Britain, the gathering-place of the small but growing British Muslim community and the site of some of the first public Islamic life in the country. It stands at the beginning of the long history of Islam in the modern West, which has since grown to great and settled Muslim communities across Britain and Europe. This scene depicts the Shah Jahan Mosque in its English setting. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.