1. The first mosque in Britain
The Shah Jahan Mosque is famous for being Britain’s first purpose-built mosque, but one of the most incredible twists in the mosques story was that it was commissioned by a Jewish man, Dr Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner. He commissioned the mosque in 1889 to provide a place of worship for Muslim students at his Oriental Institute.
If a Jew commissioning a mosque seems a bit strange, a British Jew founding a University in Pakistan is probably just as strange. But these are just two of the contributions Dr. Leitner made to the Muslim world.
