The ‘King Charles is Muslim’ conspiracy theory

A London councillor resigned from Reform UK after footage emerged of him saying King Charles was a “traitorous” secret Muslim and should be beheaded.

Bromley councillor Dean Miller’s baseless remarks, recorded as part of ITV News’ undercover investigation into Reform, were only the latest airing of an increasingly widespread conspiracy theory that the British monarch, and head of the Church of England, is operating as a stealth Muslim who intends to dismantle the country’s Christian identity from within.

When did the rumours start?

Claims that King Charles had secretly converted to Islam have been circulating for decades. Their origin is hard to trace but many people point to a claim made in a book published in 1996, called “The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville”, In it, author Giles Milton quoted the Grand Mufti of Cyprus saying that the then Prince of Wales had become a Muslim on a recent visit to Turkey.

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This “revelation” caused a huge stir in the British press – at a time when Prince Charles was already deeply unpopular with the public after his divorce and admission of adultery. Buckingham Palace broke its normal convention of not commenting on press speculation to dismiss the book’s claims as “nonsense”.

Why have they gained traction?

The King has often “praised classical Islam and noted some of its moral and cultural strengths”, said vicar Marcus Walker in The Critic. To claim that this means he is a Muslim is almost the “dictionary definition of deranged”. But that has not stopped the theory “increasingly being made across social media”, and, to my shock, at “polite dinner parties and on the fringes of academic conferences”.

The rumours also feed into other conspiracy theories about the supposed Islamification of Britain, and especially London. Earlier this year, on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show, Rudi Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and personal lawyer to Donald Trump, said Britian is going to be “a Muslim country in 10 years” and “Charles III might be the Muslim monarch”.

What is the King’s history with Islam?

Charles is known to have studied the Qur’an and, in 2013, he had six months of private Arabic lessons. In the 1990s, said Walker in The Critic, he was reported to have “mused on whether”, once he became King, “he should be known as ‘Defender of Faith’, rather than of ‘the Faith’”.

He has long demonstrated a devout Anglicanism but, said Middle East Eye, he is also interested in theological scholarship that argues that “all the great religions share universal truths”. In speeches, he has praised Islam for its integrated view of the universe, nature and spirituality, and said that West is in debt to the scholars of Islam.

Last week, during a state banquet for Oman’s Sultan Haitham bin Tariq at Windsor Castle, the King quoted a hadith, a saying of the prophet Muhammad, in Arabic. A clip of his recitation has since gone viral on social media, adding more fuel to the far-right conspiracy that he is a Muslim hiding in plain sight.