How family prevented Winston Churchill from converting to Islam

A newly discovered letter has revealed that Winston Churchill had wished to convert to Islam but his family had urged him to "fight against" the desire.

It turns out that the late Prime Minister, who saw to his country's victory in World War II, was so taken with the culture of the Orient and Islam that in a letter dated August 1907, his soon to be sister-in-law, Lady Gwendoline Bertie, wrote to him, begging not to become a Muslim, the Independent reported.

She wrote "Please don't become converted to Islam; I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalise, Pasha-like tendencies, I really have.

"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."

Warren Dockter, a history research fellow at Cambridge University who found the letter, said that Churchill had never seriously considered converting, and was more of an atheist by that time. He just had a fascination with Islamic culture.

Churchill had served as a British Army officer in Sudan opportunity, where he got to observe the Islamic society, and in a letter written to Lady Lytton in 1907 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, and in 1940 had given his support to plans of building the London Central Mosque in Regent's Park, putting aside 100,000 pounds for the purpose, hoping to gain Islamic countries' support in the war.

However, Churchill had also criticized a fact in his 1899 account of Sudan, The River War, 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.