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REVEALED: Churchill Wanted to Convert to Islam

21st Century Wire says…

How close was Churchill to converting?

During his service overseas as a young man, Winston Churchill was exposed to the religion of Islam during his foreign service in Sudan and India, circa 1910. His rapid movement towards the faith was such that his future sister-in-law was called by the family to intervene in this ‘fight against’ Winston’s desire to convert (see report below).

Other written passages tell another story – of his views towards Islam. In his book, The River War, published in 1899, and written during the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of the Sudan, Churchill writes off Islamic civilization as ‘backward’:

“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.

Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.

No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.”

Of course, it was Winston Churchill – who pioneered the use of deadly chemical weapons against Arabs in 1919 in countries like Iraq, keen to flex newly acquired British airpower and dropping poison gas against the “uncivilised tribes”, which he referred to as “a lively terror”. Churchill’s racist genocidal fervor was backed up by David Lloyd George, who famously said of the Arabs, “We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers…”, explaining the British government’s demands made at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference, further reserving the Crown’s right to use WMD’s and bomb for “police purposes in outlying places”.

More on Churchill’s adventures in Islam…

1-Churchill-Islam

Letters to Winston Churchill Reveal His Relatives Asking Him Not to Convert to Islam


Tina Nguyen

Mediate

Once upon a time, the friends and relatives of Sir Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister and defeater of fascism, were worried that he was seriously thinking about converting to Islam.

But from the letters The Telegraph dug up, his fascination seems rather harmless, though kind of antiquated and quasi-orientalist, by today’s standards. Churchill, who had fought in Sudan and India during his earlier years, had a habit of dressing up in Arab garb with his friend Wilfrid S. Blunt, “the poet and radical supporter of Muslim causes.”

Basically, he was just a big fan of a romanticized version of Islam, as this 1907 letter purports:

In the letter, discovered by Warren Dockter, a history research fellow at Cambridge University, [Churchill’s future sister-in-law Lady Gwendoline Bertie] pleads: “Please don’t become converted to Islam; I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalise [fascination with the Orient and Islam], Pasha-like tendencies, I really have.”

Lady Gwendoline, who married Churchill’s brother Jack, adds: “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.”

In a letter to Lady Lytton in the same year Churchill wrote: “You will think me a pasha [rank of distinction in the Ottoman Empire]. I wish I were.”

Okay, no one uses the term “pasha” anymore unless they’re in a 18th century Opera.

But in all seriousness, Dockter, who spoke to the Telegraph, said that Churchill held paradoxical views of Islam: in some ways, he was a staunch supporter of Muslims, holding the religion in a high esteem unusual for the period, and allocating money to build a mosque in London during World War II. In other ways, he inadvertently caused the Middle East to become a sectarian mess:

Ironically, many of the fault lines between Islam and the West have their roots in the world Churchill helped shape after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the redrawing of the Middle East at the end of the First World War.

The settlements between the region’s colonial powers, brokered by Churchill, with T E Lawrence – “Lawrence of Arabia” – as an adviser, gave birth, in Dr Dockter’s words, to “the Middle East we know, warts and all”.

[Source: The Telegraph]

READ MORE RELIGIOUS NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Religion Files

 

 

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