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Unexpected and Surprising Facts About England’s Iconic Queens

england's iconic queens

In 2018, a Moroccan newspaper made an assertion that created quite a stir: that it had traced the lineage of Queen Elizabeth II all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad. In reality, the queen’s descent from the founder of Islam had been known – if not widely – since at least 1986. Below are thirty things about that, and other lesser-known British queen facts.

30. Queen Elizabeth II is Descended From the Prophet Muhammad

Queen Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II. Wikimedia

In 1986, Burke’s Peerage, an authority on British royal pedigree, traced the ancestry of Queen Elizabeth II back 43 generations and determined that she was descended from the founder of Islam. Burke’s research revealed that Her Majesty’s bloodline runs through a fourteenth-century Earl, to medieval Spain, and eventually to Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. Those findings were supported by records from Middle Ages Spain, which in turn have been verified by a grand mufti – the highest Islamic religious scholar – of Egypt.

Queen Elizabeth II's link to the Prophet Muhammad
Queen Elizabeth II’s link to the Prophet Muhammad. The Daily Mail

At the time, Burke wrote noted that: “It is little known by the British people that the blood of Mohammed flows in the veins of the queen. However, all Moslem religious leaders are proud of this fact“. In a letter to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Burke’s cautioned that the queen’s bloodline would not protect her from Islamic radicals. As they put it in a letter to the Prime Minister: “The royal family’s direct descent from the prophet Mohammed cannot be relied upon to protect the royal family forever from Moslem terrorists“. As seen below, the key link between the line of Islam’s founder and that of the British royal family is a medieval Muslim princess who fled to the Christian kingdom of Castile.

Written by

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.

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