Why they found Islam irresistible?

[Muslims Are Good Folks]

Why they found Islam irresistible?

There is compelling anecdotal evidence of a surge in reversions to
Islam since September 11, not just in Britain, but across Europe and
America. One Dutch Islamic center claims a tenfold increase, while the
New Muslims Project, based in Leicester and run by a former Irish
Roman Catholic housewife, reports a "steady stream" of new reverts.

This fits a pattern set by recent history. Similar surges followed the
outbreak of the Gulf War, the Bosnian conflict and the declaration of
a fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Some of the newcomers doubtless do not
share David Blunkett's enthusiasm for overt espousals of Britishness.
Some of them - by all accounts a rapidly expanding minority - are
white, more educated and more middle-class than the Home Secretary
himself.

These are some of Islam's more surprising reverts. They have chosen
their new creed over the world's other great religions having had the
privilege of choice, often confounding their own and their families'
prejudices in the process. They are highly articulate and tolerant to
a degree. They're People Like Us, only they're not. They're Muslims.
They pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan and hope to go to
Makkah before they die. They answer their mobiles with "as-salaamu
‘alaykum".

They are people like Elizabeth L. (who asked for her name to be
changed because she has not told her parents yet). Six months ago she
- a graduate in political science, the daughter of affluent white
British parents, an opponent of terrorism in all its forms - climbed
Mount Sinai at night to watch the desert sunrise from its summit.

"It was the stillest, most peaceful place I've ever been," she says.
"I could hear my feelings come up from within me, and in one surreal
moment it all seemed to come together."

On Friday 4 January 2002, at 4.45pm, she went to Regent's Park Mosque
in Central London and reverted to Islam. It wasn't hard. She witnessed
by two Muslim men and nine other friends squeezed into the Imam's
office, she pronounced, in Arabic learnt from a tape the night before,
the words she will repeat like a mantra five times a day for the rest
of her life: "There is no god but Allaah and Muhammad is His
Messenger." Afterwards there was a modest celebration at Al-Dar on the
Edgware Road. Elizabeth and her well-wishers sipped mint tea.

Why has she done this? "I know it sounds clichéd, but Allaah came
knocking at my heart. That's really how it feels. In many ways it is
beyond articulating, rather like falling in love."

It was, in other words, intensely personal. As she read the Quran and
prepared for her reversion, the September attacks came and went and
failed to derail her spiritual journey, despite their proven link to
an Islamist terror network. In as far as they featured in her
thinking, they even elicited some sympathy. All terrorism is cowardly,
she says. "But I can see why people get fed up with the West.
Capitalism is enormously oppressive."

Elizabeth is not a freak, and she is certainly not alone. There are
many others, like Lucy Bushill-Matthews, a 30-year-old graduate of
Newnham College, Cambridge, who flirted with Islam as a student in
order to dismiss it, but found it "so simple and logical I couldn't
push it away".

"When I went to Cambridge I joined the Christian and Islamic societies
and all three political parties," she says. "I wanted to explore all
the possibilities in order to dismiss them."

She thinks of herself as pragmatic and not all that spiritual, and as
such she found Islam irresistible. "It made sense of all the world's
faiths. It was a clear, simple way to believe in God."

She claims that it has even helped her to land good jobs by marking
her out as a free thinker. Her husband is a Muslim of English and
Iranian descent whom she married after reverting.

Yahya, whose father is a pillar of the Anglo Establishment, feels that
Islam "fits right into British tradition"; Yahya, too, chose Islam
from the broadest possible religious gamut. He was raised in a high-
profile London family that, because of his father's position, could
not be seen to favour one faith over another. He then took a degree in
comparative religion - the theological equivalent of a blind wine
tasting - and Islam, quite simply, won.

"It's pure monotheism," he says. "It has a clear moral system and an
intact tradition of religious scholarship. No scripture expresses its
message of the oneness of God as clearly as the Quran. It also has a
remarkably rich "mysticism", which may be what appeals to middle-class
white Brits like me."

Yahya converted five years ago. Now 33, he is at Oxford writing a PhD
on British Islam and is dismayed not just by last September's attacks,
but also by the mauling he says his religion has suffered since in the
media, even - or especially - at the hands of would-be sympathisers.

"It's very painful for all of us to be associated with such sickening
barbarism (of the attacks)," he says. "That's not what we signed up
for. And now we can't portray our religion in undiluted form. It's
always mediated by someone else. It's incredibly frustrating to have
Polly Toynbee trying to save you from yourself."

Joe Ahmed-Dobson, a son of the former Labour Health Minister Frank
Dobson, believes that Islam transformed his spiritual life - and
helped him to get a first at university. Now, he works on inner city
regeneration, finds spiritual satisfaction in Islam's "constant
impetus to do the right thing", and credits his first-class degree to
the structure his faith has brought to his life.

Matthew Wilkinson made headlines when he converted and changed his
name to Tariq in 1993; he was a former Eton head boy. He and Nicholas
Brandt, another Etonian and the son of an investment banker, swapped
their destinies as scions of the Establishment for a Slough semi
shared with four other Muslims.

Lord Birt's son, Jonathan, forsook a fast track into the ranks of the
great and the good by converting in 1997 and starting a PhD on British
Islam. So did a son and a daughter of Lord Justice Scott, the scourge
of Tory sleaze and the chairman of the Arms to Iraq inquiry.

All those reverts rejected Christianity on intellectual grounds. They
had Why grapple with mental puzzles such as the Holy Trinity and
Original Sin, they asked, when the alternative, asserting neither,
proved to them so much more satisfying? It was this clarity that won
over them.


http://www.islamweb.net/emainpage/index.php?page=articles&id=138404