Jomo Kenyatta while an Irish Muslim friend had unsuccessfully urged Kenyatta to convert to Islam. During his imprisonment, Kenyatta read up on Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism through books supplied to him by Stock. The Israeli diplomat Asher Naim visited him in this period, noting that although Kenyatta was "not a religious man, he was appreciative of the Bible". Despite portraying himself as a Christian, he found the attitudes of many European missionaries intolerable, in particular their readiness to see everything African as evil. In "Facing Mount Kenya", he challenged the missionaries' dismissive attitude toward ancestor veneration, which he instead preferred to
Jomo Kenyatta own wishes". Kenyatta expressed this in his statement that "I have stood always for the purposes of human dignity in freedom, and for the values of tolerance and peace." This approach was similar to the Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda's ideology of "African humanism". Murray-Brown noted that "Kenyatta had always kept himself free from ideological commitments", while the historian William R. Ochieng observed that "Kenyatta articulated no particular social philosophy". Similarly, Assensoh noted that Kenyatta was "not interested in social philosophies and slogans". Various commentators and biographers described him as being politically conservative, an ideological viewpoint likely bolstered by his training