03-27-2007, 09:39 PM
<b>Lucy Berrington </b> finds the Muslim Faith is winning Western admirers despite hostile media coverage
Unprecedented numbers of British people, nearly all of them women, are converting to Islam at a time of deep divisions within the Anglican and Catholic churches.
The rate of conversions has prompted predictions that Islam will rapidly become an important religious force in this country. “Within the next 20 years the number of British converts will equal or overtake the immigrant Muslim community that brought the faith here”, says Rose Kendrick, a religious education teacher at a Hull comprehensive and the author of a textbook guide to the Koran.
She says: “Islam is as much a world faith as is Roman Catholicism. No one nationality claims it as its own”. Islam is also spreading fast on the continent and in America.
The surge in conversions to Islam has taken place despite the negative image of the faith in the Western press. Indeed, the pace of conversions has accelerated since publicity over the Salman Rushdie affair, the Gulf War and the plight of the Muslims in Bosnia. It is even more ironic that most British converts should be women, given the widespread view in the west that Islam treats women poorly. In the United States, women converts outnumber men by four to one, and in Britain make up the bulk of the estimated 10, 000 to 20, 000 converts, forming part of a Muslim community of 1 to 1.5 million. Many of Britains “New Muslims” are from middle-class backgrounds. They include Matthew Wilkinson, a former head boy of Eton who went on to Cambridge, and a son and daughter of Lord Justice Scott, the judge heading the arms-to-Iraq enquiry.
A small scale survey by the Islamic Foundation in Leicester suggests that most converts are aged 30 to 50. Younger muslims point to many conversions among students and highlight the intellectual thrust of Islam…
Some say the conversions are prompted by the rise of comparative religious education. The British media, offering what Muslims describe as a relentless bad press on all things Islamic, is also said to have helped. Westerners despairing of their own society - rising in crime, family breakdown, drugs and alcoholism - have come to admire the discipline and security of Islam.
Many converts are former Christians disillusioned by the uncertainty of the church and unhappy with the concept of the Trinity and deification of Jesus. Others are self-confessed idealists wo did not go looking for religion but found an irresistible appeal in Sufi mysticism, which they describe as “the pearl within the shell of Islam”.