Family of young Winston Churchill feared he might convert to Islam, long-lost letter says

[rug]

Winston Churchill in London on April 24, 1939. (AP Photo/Staff/Putnam)

By Terrence McCoy December 29, 2014

The indelible image of Winston Churchill is that of a cigar-chomping curmudgeon glowering behind spectacles, features gnarled by years of war, worry and wine. But even Churchill was not always thus. There was a time when he was young soldier with a face round and full who had journeyed to the outer reaches of the British empire. There, in northwest India and Sudan at the turn of the 20th century, he came into contact with a religion his family feared would consume him.

In 1907, Lady Gwendoline Bertie, who would go on to marry Churchill’s brother, Jack, wrote the future prime minister an impassioned note. She was concerned with Churchill’s dalliance with what she called the “Orient.” “Please don’t become converted to Islam,” she wrote him in a note recently uncovered by a Cambridge historian and reported by the British press on Sunday. “I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalize … If you come into contact with Islam, your conversion 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.”

The letter casts a fresh light on one of the 20th century’s most prominent characters — a man who defended Britain’s right to rule large swaths of the Muslim world and took a prominent role in demarcating the borders that define and bedevil the Middle East today. Due in large part to the work of historian Warren Dockter, a more nuanced picture of Churchill’s early years has emerged, depicting a time when the future leader’s religious predilections were fluid.

He regularly played polo with Muslims, reported Dockter, who’s working on forthcoming book called “Winston Churchill and the Islamic World.” And Churchill, who at times even wished he was Muslim, once claimed in 1897 he wanted to fight for the Ottoman Empire.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/29/family-of-young-winston-churchill-feared-he-might-convert-to-islam-according-to-long-lost-letter/

[Cartoonist]

1. Poor Lady Gwendoline

She must have gotten the vapors.

[Ron Obvious]

2. Churchill on Islam

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!
Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia
in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many
countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods
of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the
Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and
refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. 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.


Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion
paralyzes 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. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising
fearless warriors at every step, and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the
strong arms of science, the science against which it (Islam) has vainly struggled,
the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”

-- Winston Churchill, 1899