It was partly funded by Nawab Shah Jahan Begum of Bhopal, as a place for students at the Oriental Institute in Woking to worship.

He had purchased the former Royal Dramatic College building in Woking and established the Institute in order to promote oriental literature.

[3] During his 1895 visit of England, Afghan prince Nasrullah Khan prayed Eid al-Adha prayers at the mosque and made a donation of £492 on the behalf of his father Emir Abdur Rahman.

During the First World War, the incumbent imam, Sadr-Ud-Din, petitioned the UK government to grant nearby land to the mosque as a burial ground for British Indian Muslim soldiers.

[1] Until the arrival of Pakistani immigrants in the UK in the 1960s, the Shah Jahan Mosque was the centre of Islam in Britain.

It was from the mosque that The Islamic Review was published, as well as Maulana Muhammad Ali's popular English translations of the Quran.

Chapter IX of HG Wells's The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, contains a description of the Mosque being damaged:[19]About six in the evening, as I sat at tea with my wife in the summerhouse talking vigorously about the battle that was lowering upon us, I heard a muffled detonation from the common, and immediately after a gust of firing.

The pinnacle of the mosque had vanished, and the roof line of the college itself looked as if a hundred-ton gun had been at work upon it.