Disillusioned with Britain’s expanding imperialism, Stanley quit the diplomatic service in 1858 and decided to become a Muslim some months later while travelling in Arabia.<\/p>\n
“There’s little account of his religious conversion and beliefs,” Gilham said. “It’s just things that you can read in some of the family letters.”<\/p>\n
Press reports of Stanley’s conversion emerged in Sri Lanka on his visit there in 1859, before news travelled back home to Cheshire – where it was reported in the local Macclesfield Courier and then the national outlets in London.<\/p>\n
Some reported that he made a pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest site in Mecca and adopted the name Abdul Rahman – Arabic for “servant of the merciful Lord” – although evidence is unclear, Gilham added.<\/p>\n
“Letters show his parents were absolutely furious and equally embarrassed and humiliated that their son would convert to Islam from Christianity.<\/p>\n
“His father said to his mother, ‘Is he mad? What can he possibly mean by parading himself in our colonies and our possessions in the degrading position he occupies?’<\/p>\n
“His mother replied to his father that the newspaper report in the Macclesfield Courier ‘made me feel sick’.”<\/p>\n
They later issued a public denial that their son had converted to Islam however Stanley wrote to one of his brothers that “I have always been a Mussulman [Muslim] at heart”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Disillusioned with Britain’s expanding imperialism, Stanley quit the diplomatic service in 1858 and decided to become a Muslim…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":426913,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-426912","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}