PORTLAND — Barack Obama has struggled throughout his presidency with misconceptions about his relationship with Islam. It turns out that Sir Winston Churchill, Great Britain’s leader during World War II, had the same problem early in his long, distinguished political career.
“Please don’t become converted to Islam; I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalise, Pasha-like tendencies, I really have,” Lady Gwendoline Bertie wrote to Churchill in 1907. Bertie would marry Churchill’s brother, Jack.
She added in the letter: “If you come into contact with Islam your conversion might be effected with greater ease than you might have supposed … do fight against it.”
Cambridge University history fellow Warren Dockter recently discovered the letter while researching a book about Churchill.
Churchill, who was 32 in 1907, had come into contact with Islamic culture while serving in the British Army in the Sudan. He wrote home that he “wished he were (a) Pasha.” He made his name at the turn of the century as a soldier and war correspondent during the Second Boer War, an adventure that included a daring escape from a POW camp in South Africa. In a new book about Churchill, London Mayor Boris Johnson writes that a “spirit of derring-do just pumped through his veins, like some higher-octane fuel than the one the rest of us run on.”
Dockter told The Independent newspaper that the letter provides telling insight into Churchill’s fascination with Islam, pointing out that for a while he was even partial to wearing Arab clothes in his daily life. Even so, Dockter says, “Churchill never seriously considered converting.”
Churchill is, of course, one of the great men of the last century, a soldier, author (he won the Nobel Prize in Literature), contrarian, statesman and larger-than-life personality. Offered a longtime friend of his: “The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults, and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”
There will be much celebration of the man over this month. Jan. 24 marks 50 years since Churchill’s death.
