A scientist from the University of Cambridge, Warren Dockter, says that Churchill was fascinated by Islamic culture.
Family members of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the early 20th century feared that he would convert to Islam, according to a letter published on December 29, Russia Today cites British media.
While working on his new book, Warren Dockter found a letter in which the family of British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill urged him not to become a Muslim and called on him to fight the urge to convert to Islam.
Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was apparently so moved by Eastern religions that his relatives wrote him a letter in which they tried to persuade him not to become a Muslim. "Please don’t become converted to Islam; I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalize. If you come into contact with Islam your conversion might be effected with greater ease than you might have supposed, call of the blood, don’t you know what I mean, do fight against it," Churchill's brother's wife Gwendolyn Bertie wrote to him in August 1907.
"Churchill never seriously considered converting. He was more or less an atheist by this time anyway. He did, however, have a fascination with Islamic culture, which was common among Victorians," Dockter said in an interview to the Independent.
Written to Lady Lytton in 1907 and referenced in the Independent report, Churchill wrote that he "wished he were" a Pasha, a rank of distinction in the Ottoman Empire. He even took to dressing in Arab clothes in private – an enthusiasm he shared with his good friend the poet Wilfrid S. Blunt. But Dr Dockter thinks Churchill's family need never have worried about his interest in Islam.
The historical record also shows that Churchill was critical of Islam: "The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men," he wrote in his 1899 account of Sudan, The River War.
