If Muslims have a poor reputation andndash; and they do andndash; converts to Islam have it even worse. Amongst their dreadful alumni are such characters as the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, the 7 July bomber Germaine Lindsay, and Nicky Reilly who experimented with to blow up a restaurant in Bristol with a nail bomb. And Lauren Booth. Nevertheless regardless of these poor recruiting sergeants and in spite of the overwhelmingly detrimental media depiction of Islam, the variety of folks converting to Islam looks to be rising.
A report this week recommended the amount of converts had doubled in the past 10 years from about 60,000 in 2001 to up to 100,000 with all around 5,200 people today converting to Islam in the UK final 12 months. These figures arrive with a well being warning andndash; they are estimates derived from extrapolations andndash; but if we accept that escalating numbers of British guys and ladies are turning to Islam, it does lead to concerns of why: why are people voluntarily signing up to a faith that is, if you believe that what you examine, a cesspit of misogyny, violence and detest?
The growth in conversions in the past decade is partly a reflection of social and geopolitical adjustments in Britain and the planet in the course of the previous ten years. Prior to eleven September 2001 there was fairly small press awareness provided to Islam. Subsequent the attacks there was an understandable rise in focus on the faith, which led non-Muslims to want to find out a lot more about the religion that was now so often in the information.
In addition to the worldwide resurgence in interest in Islam, combined-faith marriages are also now much more commonplace than in the previous. Frequently such marriages lead to "conversions of convenience" wherever the husband or wife will agree to convert to ease relations with the new Muslim in-laws. When I received married my household asked my fiancee to convert but she was rightly reluctant and I had always been uneasy about the cynicism of these kinds of conversions and felt it demeaned individuals individuals who had truly changed faith. In simple fact, I had usually been suspicious of Muslim converts. I located the preponderance of hijabs (and in the survey the huge proportion of white female converts wore the hijab) amongst converts unsettling. It was as if these women needed to promote their newfound faith in a way that my sister, mom and sister-in-law andndash; none of them hijab wearers andndash; did not need to have to.
The report suggests that it is white girls who are driving the rise in conversions and when asked for their causes the same themes recur: converts talked of feeling their lives had been lost and lacking in goal, they voiced apprehension at the normalisation of immoral behaviour amongst an increasingly irreligious British public. They identified alcohol and drunkenness, a "lack of morality and sexual permissiveness", and "unrestrained consumerism". There are many ironies right here andndash; at a time when British Muslims of Asian extraction are progressively consuming and engaging in sexualpermissiveness andndash; if theyre lucky- white converts are fleeing in the direction of piety. It also ought to be mentioned that it is far less complicated for a white woman to convert to Islam in Britain than, say, for a Muslim girl in Pakistan to convert to Christianity.
A typical thread in converts stories was that some thing was missing in their lives beforehand and Islam then supplied some stability in the midst of existential turbulence. This tends to make sense andndash; there has to be some dramatic require that is previously unfulfilled that would need somebody adjust faith. The challenge for mosques and other individuals is to assure that those who are expressing keenness in the direction of Islam get the appropriate guidance so their curiosity does not turn them into cannon fodder at the fingers of extremists joyful to exploit the susceptible.
If there are problems there are also some possibilities that arrive with the increasing number of converts. I admitted earlier that I was rather suspicious of converts; I also fairly envy them, for they know far more about Islam than most British Pakistanis. For us religion and culture had been so entangled that it was challenging to distinguish one from the other. The conservatism of our operating-class Pakistani culture blurred into the way our families practised religion. This meant, for illustration, that marrying outside of the faith, accepted by Islam, is routinely not accepted in the culture. They are not weighed down by the very same baggage and thus can be a beneficial bridge in between cultures and in nudging other Muslims in direction of a far more liberal and tolerant path on troubles these kinds of as mixing among men and women in mosques and mixed-faith marriages.
It applied to be explained that Asians andndash; with their emphasis on family members values, challenging function and schooling were "more British than the British". It is a last irony that nowadays it could be argued that converts to Islam, with their potential to disentangle faith from culture, are now additional Muslim than their brown brothers and sisters in faith
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