page_title: Khalid Sheldrake
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Khalid Sheldrake / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Fazl Mosque inauguration, 1926
context_page_description: Khalid Sheldrake, born Bertram William Sheldrake, was an English pickle manufacturer who converted to Islam and in 1934 was briefly declared king of Islamistan in the Xinjiang region of China in the Warlord era.
context_section_description: Sheldrake was the son of Gosling Mullander Sheldrake (usually called "George"), a condiment manufacturer of southeast London. Sheldrake was raised a Roman Catholic but in 1903 he converted to Islam and changed his name to Khalid.
  In 1920 Sheldrake founded a journal called Britain and India. He also founded the Muslim News Journal and was editor of a monthly magazine called The Minaret. He was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Ecuador.
  Sheldrake helped to found the Fazl Mosque in Southfields, southwest London, which opened in 1926. Sheldrake then founded mosques in Peckham Rye and East Dulwich in southeast London. He founded the Western Islamic Association, which opened a branch in South Shields in 1930.
  Sheldrake married a woman called Sybil, who converted to Islam and changed her name to Ghazia. They had two sons. They made their family home in suburban Forest Hill, London, from which Sheldrake commuted to the family pickle factory in Denmark Hill.
  Sheldrake sought to convert fellow-Britons to Islam. In 1932 he conducted the conversion of Gladys Milton Palmer, wife of Bertram Willes Dayrell Brooke, aboard a chartered Imperial Airways 42-seat airliner over the English Channel. Gladys was the daughter of Huntley & Palmers biscuit magnate Walter Palmer, and Brooke was the son of Charles Vyner Brooke, the last Rajah of Sarawak. Sheldrake renamed her "Khair-ul-Nissa" ("Fairest of women").
caption: Opening of the Fazl Mosque, London in 1926
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