Islamic conversions gain ground in Britain
RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL [ 2 Sep, 2006 0211hrs ISTTIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
LONDON: Shoe-bomber Richard Reid; 7/7 bomber Germaine Lindsay; August 10's Trans-Atlantic airline alleged conspirators Don Stewart-Whyte, Oliver Savant and Brian Young. All would fail the racial profiling test to screen potential terrorists; all are converts to Islam. So, is the new face of Islam in the UK increasingly white or at least non-Asian and non-typical?
"Yes and no," says Batool-al Toma, head of the New Muslim Project, set up 12 years ago in the English Midlands city of Leicester as Britain's first organised one-stop shop for new converts to Islam.
Al-Toma, formerly Mary Geraghty, is a white Irishwoman who converted to Islam 25 years ago. She admits to TOI that "the numbers of white converts have been steadily rising, my work has increased and the sheer volume of people coming to me every week has risen in the last 12 years".
But she disputes the easy media shorthand that sees British Islam as increasingly white and dangerously reflected in Reid, Lindsay, Stewart-Whyte, Savant and Young. "Reid and Lindsay were not of a white background," she points out, "and the others are not typical of the white people who convert to Islam." More crucially, says al-Toma, the New Muslim Project is now busy creating a separate programme of induction for Hindu and Sikh converts to Islam.
"Till now, Hindu and Sikh converts mostly turned to the British Pakistani community but I now realise they have specific issues to do with family and we need to support them."
Al-Toma estimates that Britain currently boasts 20,000 new converts. Though just a tiny fraction of Britain's officially endorsed 1.6 million strong Muslim population, it is still 6,000 more than the estimate offered by her colleague at the Lecister Islamic Foundation, Yahya Birt.
Whatever the figures, there is broad agreement that Islam's growth in Britain is possibly the fastest anywhere in the western world with all the attendant headaches for racial profiling and airline passenger stereotyping. American writer Robert Ferrigno, whose newest bestseller 'Prayers for the Assassin' imagines an Islamic United States in 2036, complete with Jihad Cola as the number one drink, says "mass conversions may involve relatively few 'true' spiritual conversions. Most believers go along to get along". But he insists that his novel makes "an imaginative, not statistical leap, positing a future where spiritually-bereft Westerners, their society rent by economic and social decay, were drawn to the spiritual certainty of a fundamentalist faith like Islam".
Though Ferrigno's novel may be a leap too far, many believe Islam's growth in the West is exemplified by British converts such as Birt, the 38-year-old son of the BBC's former director-general, who made headlines when he turned to Islam 16 years ago just four years after pop star Cat Stevens sensationally announced he had become Yusuf Islam. In recent years, former British cabinet minister Frank Dobson's son became Joe Ahmed Dobson and respected Cambridge academic Timothy Winter took the name of Abdul Hakim Murad.
Birt's estimates were based on an extrapolation of the number of people who said they were Islamic converts in the 2001 census in Scotland (the census in England and Wales did not ask about conversion).
But al-Toma, who shepherds new and potential white people into the Islamic faith, says her estimate is based on the volume of new converts who pass through her hands. "It now approximates at least 10 every month.'' And rising.
So much so that the New Muslim Project has finally established five affiliate groups dotted around England and Scotland to deal with the growing traffic of converts. And al-Toma and her Project find themselves in the firing line every time a Reid, Lindsay, Stewart-Whyte, Savant or Young joins the lengthening list of British extremist converts.
Birt believes "Middle England is in a moral panic at the news that a white middle-class boy from High Wycombe, the son of a Conservative party constituency worker (Stewart-Whyte) has been arrested in connection with what might have been our own 9/11''. And he laments the growing view that "people are converting not to one of the world's great religions but to Islamofascism, to an anti-Western political cause with its very own fringe of bloodstained anarchists who are prepared to kill people on a grand scale".
Al-Toma admits she gets her share of "emotionally-charged potential white converts''. Just days ago, she says, a young white man emailed her to express the desire to become a Muslim because "he didn't agree with the Bush-Blair politics". She says she gently cautioned him against "an empty conversion to Islam".
But the numbers of these as exemplified by the three alleged trans-Atlantic plane conspirators may be rising.