Winston Churchill's Family Was Worried He'd Convert To Islam

The woman would would one day be Winston Churchill’s sister-in-law was so worried he might convert to Islam, she wrote a letter urging he rein in his enthusiasm for the religion to which he had been exposed as a British officer serving in Sudan.

In a newly-discovered letter dated August 1907, Lady Gwendoline Bertie, who later married Churchill’s brother Jack, described what she saw as an alarming fascination with Islamic culture.

“Please don’t become converted to Islam; I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalize, Pasha-like tendencies, I really have,” she wrote in the letter that was discovered by Cambridge University history research fellow Warren Dockter.

“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,” she wrote in the letter that was widely reported in the British media Sunday.

But were Lady Gwendoline’s fears based in a reliable assessment of Churchill’s mindset?

“Churchill never seriously considered converting,” Dockter told The Independent. “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.”

That fascination was expressed in a letter to Lady Lytton in 1907 in which Churchill wrote he “wished he were” a Pasha (a high-rank in the Ottoman Empire).

He also occasionally privately dressed in Arab-style clothing along with his friend, poet Wilfrid S. Blunt.

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