Lord Headley

Rowland George Allanson Allanson-Winn, 5th Baron Headley (19 January 1855 – 22 June 1935) was an Irish peer and civil engineer, educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge, who built roads in India and wrote standard works on boxing and self-defence. He succeeded his cousin as Baron Headley in 1913.¹

On 16 November 1913 he announced his conversion to Islam at the hand of Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, taking the name Shaikh Rahmatullah al-Farooq. He became a leading member of the Woking Muslim Mission, founded the British Muslim Society in 1914 and presided over it, chaired the Woking Mosque Trust, wrote books and articles for the mission's Islamic Review, and performed the Hajj twice.¹² In 1925 he refused an offer of the throne of Albania. His leadership of the Lahore Ahmadiyya's mission has led some to file him among British Ahmadis, while no source records him professing Ahmadi doctrine or naming any school; the question is recorded here as unsettled.¹ He died in 1935 — at Codford in Wiltshire on the English article's account, in London on his Islamic Review obituary's — and was buried in the Muslim section of Brookwood Cemetery.¹²