New British Muslims are looking in Islam

for Deliverance from the Materialistic World

Though the typical image of Islam in the West has been distorted by Western media, which has striven to construct a rigid image of Islam and Muslims that is wrongly and slanderously associated with terrorism, violence and evil, Islam is the very religion which Westerners -as groups and individuals- have started to embrace in search of their peace of mind, serenity and of filling their spiritual vacuum. Islam has been the fastest growing religion in the West in terms of the numbers of new converts, especially during the last three decades.

Some Western psychologists and sociologists ascribe this phenomenon of Westerners embracing Islam in large numbers -beyond the spiritual causes- to a number of causes among which are pecuniary instability, job insecurity ; and the breaking up of families as a result of material pressures and of a feeling of lack of security and tranquillity. All these causes, along with others, made these Westerners aware of the fact that they should break away from the materialistic world and take refuge in the spiritual world, in quest of truth and peace of mind. They, thus, took refuge in Islam, which they deemed as the appropriate way out of this vicious circle, after they had carefully studied other religions and intellectual movements.

In this book about “New Muslims”, we are going to present a brief account of the life of each one of these Muslims who have embraced Allah’s religion. Some of them are famous while others are not.

Many Westerners wonder why these growing numbers of people embrace Islam in batches in spite of the systematic distortion of the image of Islam and Muslims in their media.

To answer this question Kathleen Rocher-Nagi (her family name is half Irish half Egyptian), who is one of the Western women who have embraced Islam, said about her faith journey that she met some Muslim women, at the headquarters of the “Islamic Institute” in Markfield, near the town of Leicester in Central England, who came there to take part in the special program for new Muslim women, and this was the beginning of her conversion to Islam.

Batul Altuma, an Irish woman, whose name was Mary before her conversion to Islam and who wears the Hijab today, said : “Most new Muslim women in the Markfield area are aged 35 to 55. Some have finished educating their children or lost their husbands as a result of death or divorce while others have noticed the deterioration of society’s conditions around them ; thus, they looked for a better way of escape.”

There are no official statistics as to the number of the British who have embraced Islam recently, but the “Islamic Institute” in Markfield, which was founded by Pakistanis from Al-Jamaa Al Islamiya Party in Pakistan, and which receives financial support from some Gulf countries, estimates that some eighty British people embrace Islam every year. Most of them converted to Islam after they had studied Islamic art, architecture or languages, or after visiting an Islamic country or even after meeting some Muslims, in addition to a small number of those who embraced Islam through marriage.

It is noticed that a large number of new British Muslim women share one common characteristic, that is they were catholic before embracing Islam.

Catheline Rocher-Nagi said : “I grew up in a traditionalistic catholic family and was taught that every other religion was alien” ; adding : “But today my practice of my Islamic religious rites does not greatly differ from what I used to do in Catholicism, for Islam shares many values with Catholicism.  Most of those new Muslims who had a catholic background chose Islam because they were not satisfied with the change introduced by the second Vatican Council in terms of replacing Latin by colloquial language, which was considered as a revolution in the Church’s Interaction with the modern world.”

Batul Altuma said : “The Church’s teachings have started to change while religions should not change according to their followers’ whims. When God reveals a religion we should not transform it to suit our purposes. Those who did not accept this tendency embraced Islam.”

Batul also said : “The family and relatives of the new Muslims sometimes feel that they are responsible for this change and start wondering : ‘Why is Catholicism not enough for you ?’”

She added : “As to my mother, she is able to see our way of life and of bringing up our children after my conversion to Islam ; she indeed approves of this, for it is similar to the way she and my father tried to bring us up.”

She went on to say : “The reaction from outside the family is the biggest problem for the new Muslims, especially Muslim women who wear the Hijab. Hostility comes from white male and female colleagues in the form of violent questions such as : ‘Why are you wearing this old rug on your head ?’ Similarly, some Asian Muslim women ask in astonishment : ‘Who do these white women wearing the Hijab think they are ?’”

Batul remarked that the Hijab may sometimes be advantageous in Britain and recalled an incident she underwent in the past. While she was at a security checkpoint in Ireland and though she was in the company of two Muslim men who were in the back seat of her car, the policeman allowed her to pass immediately as they took her for a local nun. But, the majority of her compatriots were unable to digest the idea of a white Muslim man or woman.

She added : “As soon as a white Muslim woman wears the Hijab on her head, British people start talking about her as if she were deaf or stupid and treating her as a foreigner.” 

Sara Parker said : “It is strange that the British treat some of their female compatriots as foreigners merely because they wear the Hijab.”

She went on to say : “The policeman asks for your passport, but if you were bareheaded and wearing a short dress, you would not have any problem.”

Sara thinks that the reason for all this is the West’s wrong understanding and misconception of Islam, which is supposed to represent political and religious fanaticism and savagery. But this misconception of Islam is not known to the new white Muslims who know Islam as a religion of tolerance, purity and salvation.

Kathleen also said : “The idea that Islam oppresses women is a mere fabrication of the imagination of Western media, yet this is not the way people think in the area where I live in Grimsby.” Kathleen thinks that her statement is also true for her two daughters, who are the only two Muslim girls in their school. Moreover, Kathleen does not see any contradiction in her insistence on the fact that her two daughters should marry Muslim men when they get married, while Islamic Sharia allows her son to marry a non-Muslim woman.

The continuous defence of Islam by new Muslims consists in the need for drawing a line of demarcation between Islamic Teachings and the Indian subcontinent’s traditions and cultures that constitute the behaviour of the majority of British Muslims.

Sara said  : “In the Gulf states women cover themselves from head to toe, yet this does not prevent them from going to university ; the Gulf women have a high level of education, but no one in the West is willing to accept this. Islam urges Muslim men and women alike to acquire Knowledge.”

Batul, whose first acquaintance with Islam was through Malaysian Muslim women, said : “I agree that the Islam I have embraced calls for knowledge and activity and is not an oppressive or dogmatic Islam. It calls for equality between man and woman. Those who have no knowledge of Islam need more persuasion, and there is a lot of convincing evidence in the Holy Qur’an and the Noble Prophetic Sayings.”

Kathleen said : “The fanatical minority does not represent Islam, and it should not be said that Muslims are fanatics. Anyone who says this is like the person who says that all Catholics are IRA bombers”. However, Sara goes to the extent of acknowledging the West’s fear of Islam saying : “Muslims are on the defensive today because they have lost self-confidence which is partly the result of colonialism, for the majority of them have no idea about the Muslims’ achievements in the fields of philosophy, mathematics and medicine during the Dark Ages of Europe.”

Nevertheless, there is still a distance between what Islam is and how the West understands it. Even Sara, who embraced Islam only some years ago, admits that she still has a way to go. In fact, Sara, who has changed the conception she had shared with her secular society to that of understanding Islam, suffers from some psychological disturbances. She states that the West considers the Islamic law (Sharia) to consist of beheadings and beatings, which needs revision so as to grasp the reality of Islamic Sharia. When we look back to the days Islamic culture was dominant, we find that Sharia was ahead of its time. The essence of Islamic law is to strengthen values and help individuals live in security and peace.

Sara said that Islam offered her freedom and delivered her from the psychological pressures she had suffered from before embracing Islam. Islam has, indeed, changed her vision of the world.

Kathleen said : “Islam gave me peace, for after I embraced Islam, I started living in peace with myself.” She stated that her conversion to Islam brought her peace and contentment, adding : “When I became a Muslim I felt as if I were driving a car in heavy rain, and Islam was like a windscreen wiper which removed rain.” She went on to say that she felt that her mother had the same feeling before her death. For before then, her mother used to ask her to remove the Hijab to the extent that Kathleen thought that her mother would never tolerate the Hijab. But at her deathbed, during which Kathleen and her sister, who was wearing a short dress, were present, the mother turned to the sister and told her : “Why don’t you wear a decent dress like Kathleen ?” This was some kind of reconciliation between Kathleen’s mother and the Hijab, and there was a long way to go for the British society to accept the Hijab, as Kathleen’s mother did.

Thousands of British women embrace Islam and become Muslims in a way that bewilders feminist movements in Britain and disturbs Christian circles. It is estimated that more than ten thousand British women embraced Islam in the last decade. The majority of them were single educated women, among whom we find medical doctors, university teachers and lawyers who have embraced Islam, the religion -falsely and slanderously- described by the West as oppressing women.

Moira Nicolmin, who grew up in a traditional Catholic Irish family, said : “I went on Sunday to Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner in London and started a religious discussion with a group of Muslims.” Then, she went back home and started reconsidering a lot of things after having some knowledge of Islam which she deemed as a means of spiritual salvation, peace and serenity. She believed in it and embraced it.

The decision of telling her family in Kirk was very difficult, indeed, but Nicolmin, who is like the new generation of Muslim women, does not regret her conversion to Islam, nor is she afraid of announcing it. She said : “I like the security and the moral values found in Islam. A person knows where he stands and what his rights are in Islam, while in Catholicism there are a lot of problems in dealing with the truth, such as not being allowed to have sexual intercourse before marriage. In Islam the matter is very simple : a woman should not have social intercourse with a man who is not her husband.” The clear definition of the relationship between man and woman in Islam means that there is no war between the sexes. For in Islam each sex knows its duties and rights.

Nicolmin, who got married to a Muslim man through an Islamic marriage agency, said : “The husband has the responsibility of providing for his wife and protecting her. Actually, I am very pleased with the definition of the duties of both husband and wife in Islam. It is a relationship which creates some kind of affinity within the couple.”

A spokesman of the British Muslims Union said : “Despite the non-existence of official statistics, the average number of British men and women who embrace Islam is growing steadily. Islam provides the majority of them with psychological refuge and peace.”

Roser Owen, who was educated in schools run by the Church of England and works in an investment company in London, said : “I do not cover my head at work ; I think that if I did the opposite, they would fire me. I do not mix with my male colleagues at work and I avoid going to pubs. I do not say that I am Muslim, so I suppose that people think that I am a conservative woman.”

Researchers in the Islamic Studies Centre at the University of Wales carried out studies on the turning of British men and women to Islam in order to understand this tendency in British society, particularly among women.

Mushaweq ben Ali, the Director of the Centre said : “The growing of secularism in British Churches seems to have contributed to people’s forsaking them, and to the recourse of some of them to embracing Islam. It is amazing that the new Muslim women in Britain come from among professionals and from the middle class ; especially if we look at this tendency in light of feminist movements which call for the liberation of women from the authority of men and for the establishment of equality between man and woman. Moreover, these active feminist movements have a negative image of Islam in the West.”

Furthermore, some new Muslims want European Islam to have its specific identity. Rabia Limahu-Evans said : “I meet some Muslims who frown at me because I do not wear a Hijab on my head though I consider that my act does not reduce my Islam.” Evans was born in Belgium ; she embraced Islam after her visit to India. She concluded, “I do not see any reason why I cannot be like any Western woman while being a Muslim woman at the same time. After all, I do not want to be cut off the Western world because I am part of it.”