Faith accompli: Why are white people signing up? RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL [ 3 Sep, 2006 2336hrs IST TIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
LONDON: TJ Winter is an Englishman living the quiet life of an Oxbridge don. He is also a Muslim, a white man who marked his self-confessed "boring and undramatic journey to Islam' years ago with a full conversion to the faith.
Winter became Abdul Hakim Murad. As a renowned Islamic scholar and translator of several Arabic works, including Imam Al Bayhagi's Seventy-Seven Branches of the Faith, Winter is as far away as anyone can be from shoe-bomber Richard Reid, 7/7 bomber Germaine Lindsay and trans-Atlantic airline conspirators Don Stewart-Whyte and Brian Young, the other white and mixed-race converts to Islam who have burst upon the dismayed consciousness of Britain and the wider world.
So why did Winter sign up to Islam? Why did Yahya Birt, son of the BBC's former chief convert? What led Matthew Wilkinson, former head boy of Eton to become Tariq in 1993?
Winter tells TOI the trio, all scions of the stiff-upper lip Establishment, are just one strand of a "complex" story slowly unfolding the rising tide of white conversion.
Winter estimates Britain to have "30-40,000 people who identify themselves as converts" but challenges the notion of a "decided spike in conversion".
But Batool Al Toma, the Irish Catholic housewife who converted to Islam 25 years ago and now runs the New Muslim Project, the lead organisation for convert-induction, insists "Britain's incredibly strong involvement in Middle Eastern politics, relationship with the US and the atrocities in the Middle East has inevitably led many whites to question 'what is this ism', this Islamism?
They start to read about Islam and many may decide to convert". Surprisingly, says Al Toma, more white women than men convert. Often, as in the case of former journalist Yvonne Ridley who memorably described the hijab as "liberating being judged on the size of your IQ rather than the size of your bust", Al Toma says women converts find a new freedom in their new moral and ethical choice of clothes.
For Winter, conversion was a "boring journey mostly conducted in libraries" but also the logical conclusion of his belief in monotheism. Both Winter and Birt say Islam's monotheism and simplicity were a powerful attraction.
"I regarded the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as nonsensical and I believed the ultimate reality ought to be ultimately simple," says Winter.
Adds Birt, who took a university degree in comparative religion, sometimes described as the theological equivalent of a blind wine-tasting, found Islam the hands-down winner, "It's pure monotheism.
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 rich mysticism, which may be what appeals to middle-class white Brits like me."
Sociologists agree that there are widely varying reasons that bring white converts to Islam, including an admiration of Islamic art, women's revolt against the perceived sexualisation of Western life, a rebellion against parents, a sense of political outrage at Western policies or a search for theological certainty.
But Birt, Winter and Al Tooma are just one societal strand of the trend towards conversion widely reported across Britain and Europe with one Dutch Islamic centre declaring a 10-fold increase in converts since 9/11.
Winter admits there is no classic profile to be had of Britain's new Muslims. "I have spent years trying to construct a profile of the New Muslim in England," he says, "and I have failed.
Britain's New Muslims, says Winter, include "fox-hunting Tories, whom I know; people from the New Left; former members of local government; members of the House of Lords and lorry drivers".
As also, he admits, people like Reid, who had a troubled adolescence and converted to Islam while in a young offenders' prison during the mid-1990s. And then there was Muriel Degauque, the white middle-class Belgian woman who converted to Islam and took part in a suicide attack against US forces in Iraq.
Adds Al Tooma: "Some people take to Islam because they are disillusioned. With people like Reid, one can only say that they convert because they were already carrying a chip on their shoulder about society and think that Islam will help them sort it out".
That the government is worried about this trend is clear from a recent report warning that significant numbers of whites may have been lured into terrorism.
Al Toma agrees this is one "tragic" part of the largely positive story of Islam's spread in the white Christian world but Winter says even offenders such as Reid cannot be "anathematised" by British Muslims.
"A religion, any religion, has to provide a refuge even for people like that," he insists. But in the meantime, says Winter, British Islam has to develop its own distinct personality. The jury is still out on what it will be.