This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Something deranged seems to be happening on the Right. I mean that in the literal sense of the term: “completely unable to think clearly or behave in a controlled way” is the Cambridge Dictionary definition, followed by the words, “especially because of mental illness”.
Whilst I have no intention of diagnosing anyone with a psychotic disorder, to claim that King Charles III is a Muslim is almost the dictionary definition of deranged.
You might not have heard this theory yet, but it is increasingly being made across social media and, to my shock, has started appearing at polite dinner parties and on the fringes of academic conferences. “A lie will go round the world whilst the truth is putting its boots on,” as Edmund Burke almost certainly didn’t say. Ironically.
So let’s hear the claim. It is, in short, that King Charles III has secretly converted to Islam and is operating as a “stealth” Muslim monarch who intends to dismantle the traditional Anglican and Christian identity of the British state from within.
Core to this thesis are two events from the 1990s. First, a casual conversation with Paddy Ashdown on the way back from Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral when he mused on whether he should be known as “Defender of Faith” rather than of “the Faith”.
Second, a speech in 1993 called “Islam and the West”, given at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, where he praised classical Islam and noted some of its moral and cultural strengths.
This, apparently, was a public declaration of his true allegiance and his various state and official visits to the Middle East involved secret conversion rites — including (bizarrely) one at St Catherine’s monastery.
On top of this, he is a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, courtesy of the Kings of Seville and John of Gaunt, which is proof of his “rightful” place in the Islamic world. His public Christian worship is merely a necessary facade of taqiyya, or strategic dissimulation which is permitted by the Koran, in order to maintain his hold on the throne.
So there we have it: a secret Muslim sitting on the throne of Edward the Confessor. And so, since nobody else is doing it, please allow me to knock this nonsense on the head (although as Jonathan Swift said, “it is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into”, so this is probably a vain effort.)
First, even if you could imagine a secret Muslim undergoing the coronation ritual, publicly taking communion, and swearing that he was “a faithful Protestant”, just to keep the keys of the palace, why on earth would he bother being the Patron of the Prayer Book Society?
Note also his patronage of Aid to the Church in Need, and his convening of an annual service in Westminster Abbey for the churches of the Middle East, focused on the persecution they are currently enduring. Enduring at the hands of whom exactly? Quite.
To see what is good and wise in other faiths is not showing weakness in your own beliefs
Not that the King is supporting persecuted Christians simply in order to attack Islam. He certainly has a deep regard for that faith, as well as a deep knowledge of its philosophical riches. He shares this with the late philosopher Roger Scruton.
To see what is beautiful, strong and wise in other faiths is not showing weakness in your own beliefs; quite the opposite, in fact. It actually shows deep confidence in your own Christianity.
And he has built that confidence by being one of the most profoundly Christian monarchs we have ever had, something he shares with his late mother.
Whilst her Anglicanism was solidly 1930s Low Church, his is much more mystical and High Church. The beauty of the Prayer Book affects him, but so does the spiritual discipline of the Eastern churches — his grandmother was, after all, an Orthodox nun.
As Prince of Wales he regularly went on retreat to Mount Athos, and has a strong connection with the Romanian Orthodox Church, helping to rebuild dozens of churches after the fall of atheist communism.
The King is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, but he is also king of 15 realms with approximately eight million subjects who are Muslim; he is Head of the Commonwealth, which has somewhere in the region of 500 million Muslims.
That he sends greetings to his Muslim subjects on their feast days — and to his Hindu and Jewish subjects on their days too — does not make him any worse a Christian; it just makes him a good King.
But he is also a good Supreme Governor. He doesn’t need to talk about how moved he was to kneel down and touch the site of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem (Islamic tradition has Jesus born under a palm tree), nor does he need to talk of Christ as the “Saviour of the World”, both of which he has done in recent Christmas broadcasts.
He could have mouthed pointless platitudes about human rights and diversity and nobody would have raised much of an eyebrow.
