What We Muslims Can Learn From Converts

British Muslims Of Asian Extraction Are Often Weighed Down By Cultural Baggage – Converts Can Be A Breath Of Fresh Air

By Sarfraz Manzoor
Thursday 6 January 2011 14.10 GM
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

If Muslims have a bad reputation – and they do – converts to Islam have it even worse. Among their dreadful alumni are such characters as the "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, the 7 July bomber Germaine Lindsay, andNicky Reilly who tried to blow up a restaurant in Bristol with a nail bomb. And Lauren Booth. Yet despite these poor recruiting sergeants and in spite of the overwhelmingly negative media depiction of Islam, the number of people converting to Islam seems to be rising.

A report this week suggested the number of converts had doubled in the past 10 years from about 60,000 in 2001 to up to 100,000 with around 5,200 people converting to Islam in the UK last year. These figures come with a health warning – they are estimates derived from extrapolations – but if we accept that increasing numbers of British men and women are turning to Islam, it does lead to questions of why: why are people voluntarily signing up to a faith that is, if you believe what you read, a cesspit of misogyny, violence and hate?

The growth in conversions in the past decade is partly a reflection of social and geopolitical changes in Britain and the world during the past 10 years. Prior to 11 September 2001 there was relatively little press attention given to Islam. Following the attacks there was an understandable rise in focus on the faith, which led non-Muslims to want to find out more about the religion that was now so often in the news.

In addition to the global resurgence in interest in Islam, mixed-faith marriages are also now more commonplace than in the past. Often such marriages lead to "conversions of convenience" where the spouse will agree to convert to ease relations with the new Muslim in-laws. When I got married my family asked my fiancee to convert but she was rightly reluctant and I had always been uneasy about the cynicism of such conversions and felt it demeaned those people who had truly changed faith. In fact, I had always been suspicious of Muslim converts. I found the preponderance of hijabs (and in the survey the vast proportion of white female converts wore the hijab) among converts unsettling. It was as if these women needed to advertise their newfound faith in a way that my sister, mother and sister-in-law – none of them hijab wearers – did not need to.

The report suggests that it is white women who are driving the rise in conversions and when asked for their reasons the same themes recur: converts talked of feeling their lives had been lost and lacking in purpose, they voiced apprehension at the normalisation of immoral behaviour among an increasingly irreligious British public. They identified alcohol and drunkenness, a "lack of morality and sexual permissiveness", and "unrestrained consumerism". There are numerous ironies here – at a time when British Muslims of Asian extraction are increasingly drinking and engaging in sexual permissiveness – if they're lucky- white converts are fleeing towards piety. It also ought to be noted that it is far easier for a white woman to convert to Islam in Britain than, say, for a Muslim woman in Pakistan to convert to Christianity.

A common thread in converts' stories was that something was missing in their lives beforehand and Islam then provided some stability in the midst of existential turbulence. This makes sense – there has to be some dramatic need that is previously unfulfilled that would demand someone change faith. The challenge for mosques and others is to ensure that those who are expressing keenness towards Islam get the right guidance so their curiosity does not turn them into cannon fodder at the hands of extremists happy to exploit the vulnerable.

If there are challenges there are also some opportunities that come with the increasing number of converts. I admitted earlier that I was rather suspicious of converts; I also somewhat envy them, for they know far more about Islam than most British Pakistanis. For us religion and culture were so entangled that it was hard to distinguish one from the other. The conservatism of our working-class Pakistani culture blurred into the way our families practised religion. This meant, for example, that marrying outside of the faith, accepted by Islam, is routinely not accepted in the culture. They are not weighed down by the same baggage and thus can be a useful bridge between cultures and in nudging other Muslims towards a more liberal and tolerant direction on issues such as mixing between men and women in mosques and mixed-faith marriages.

It used to be said that Asians – with their emphasis on family values, hard work and education were "more British than the British". It is a final irony that today it could be argued that converts to Islam, with their ability to disentangle faith from culture, are now more Muslim than their brown brothers and sisters in faith.