West Converting Fast

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_converts_to_Islam

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Muslims


Jerusalem Post, January 23 2007

Islam converts change face of Europe

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

As many as 100,000 French and British citizens have converted to Islam over the last decade, according to a new book by an Israeli historian.

The figures cited by Hebrew University Prof. Raphael Israeli in his upcoming book The Third Islamic Invasion of Europe are representative of the fast-changing face of Europe, which the Islamic history professor says is in danger of becoming "Eurabia" within half a century.

He noted that about 30 million Muslims currently live in Europe, out of a total population of 380 million., adding that with a high Muslim birthrate in Europe, the number of Muslims living in the continent is likely to double within 25 years.

Israeli also cited massive immigration and Turkey's future inclusion in the EU as the primary reasons why the face of Europe will be indelibly changed within a generation.

European concerns over a fast-growing Muslim population is at the center of opposition to Turkey's entry into the EU, he said, as the inclusion of Turkey into the EU will catapult the number of Muslims to 100 million out of a total population of 450 million.

"The sheer weight of demography will produce a situation where no Frenchman or Dutchman could be elected to parliament without the support of the Muslim minority," he said Monday in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.

"Muslims will have a more and more decisive voice in the makeup of European governments."

"With Turkey as a member of the EU, the process will be accelerated, without [Turkey] it will be slower but it will still happen," he added. Turkey has strong relations with Israel.

The historian, who has authored 19 previous books, said that Muslim political power in Europe would directly impact domestic politics, including Europe's immigration policy, with millions of additional Muslims waiting at the door to gain entry to the EU as part of "family reunification" programs.

"Every European with a right mind has every reason to be frightened," Israeli said.

The 50,000 French and 50,000 British who have converted to Islam over the last decade, including many from mixed marriages, did so for personal convictions, romanticized notions of Islam, as well as for business reasons, while others see Islam as the wave of the future at a time when Christianity is on the wane, Israeli said.

He said that Muslims converting to Christianity existed but their numbers were significantly smaller.

Israeli noted that conversions in mixed marriages worked only in one direction since a Muslim woman who marries a Christian is considered an apostate in her community, and faces physical danger.

"It is time one should wake up and realize what is happening in Europe," he concluded.

Israeli's book is due out in London in the coming months.

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YNETNEWS, Israel, January 18 2007

GERMANY: SHARP RISE IS MUSLIM CONVERTS

Report reveals more German university graduates, high-wage earners converting to Islam

By Eldad Beck

A report prepared at the request of the German Interior Ministry revealed that 5,000 Germans converted to Islam between July 2004 and June 2005, a figure that is four times higher than that of the previous year.

In previous years the average number of Germans who converted to Islam stood at only 300.

The researchers said that while in the past most of those who converted were women who married Muslims, today many university graduates and high-wage earners are joining Prophet Mohammad’s religion.

According to Berlin Imam Mohammed Herzog – a former protestant priest who converted to Islam – the Germans are choosing Islam ‘as they respect its clear values and decrees.’

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A matter of faith:

Islam is fastest-growing religion in U.S.

By Stephen Magagnini, July 1, 2001

Todd Wilson, a third-generation Italian American, swore off his beloved prosciutto. Thy Loun, a refugee from Cambodia now attending UC Davis, had to give up her twice-weekly staple of double-pepperoni pizza.

Wilson, 31, and Loun, 21, say they've sacrificed their favorite foods (both made from pork) for something more fulfilling: their belief in Islam. They are among an increasing number of converts who have made Islam the fastest-growing religion in America.

There are now as many as 7 million Muslims in the United States -- half of them American-born. In recent years, Americans of African, European, Southeast Asian, Latin American and American Indian descent have left their parents' spiritual paths to follow Islam, a religion that includes more than 1 billion believers from nearly every country.

At 10 p.m. on a recent Thursday, Wilson joined several dozen worshippers of different races and ethnic backgrounds at SALAM Mosque in North Sacramento for the last of the day's five prayers. Wilson, who teaches sixth grade in Elk Grove, observes his midday prayer between classes.

A one-time Marxist who still has posters of the late revolutionary Che Guevara, Wilson says Islam gives him a sense of peace and connectedness he never found in Catholicism, the religion of his parents. He and other made-in-America Muslims often combine the American values of democracy and gender equality with Islamic ideals, such as devotion to family, charity, modesty (women often cover their heads, arms and legs) and bans on alcohol, pork, smoking and premarital sex.

The growth of Islam in America has led to a growing acceptance of the hijab (the head cover worn by many Muslim women) and daily Muslim prayers during breaks at schools and workplaces.

Sacramento, home to the oldest mosque west of the Mississippi, at 411 V St., now has nine mosques, several Islamic schools and a Muslim cemetery. Community leaders estimate 35,000 Muslims live in the Sacramento area.

Wilson, Loun and dozens of others interviewed say they were drawn to Islam because it places emphasis on prayer rather than on place of worship -- no idols or icons are found in mosques, which tend to be relatively spare -- and because it attracts a diverse group of followers across the economic and ethnic spectrum.

While many people associate Muslims with Arabs, most Muslims aren't Arabs, and millions of Arabs aren't Muslim. At a Muslim picnic in Sacramento's Haggin Oaks Park last summer, believers from 20 nations prayed and ate barbecue together.

Islam, like other religions, is interpreted differently in different cultures. In Afghanistan, for example, the ruling Taliban Muslims recently destroyed ancient Buddhist statues, citing Allah's ban on idol worship. They forbid television, listening to music or playing cards, and women often are prohibited from working outside the home or traveling.

But many American Muslims, including immigrants from Afghanistan, denounce the Taliban's hard-line approach. They say they honor their wives as equals and insist that Islam was the first major belief system to advocate women's rights.

From the time of the prophet Muhammad, who Muslims believe received the word of God (the Koran) in the seventh century, Muslim women were allowed to choose their husbands, divorce, own property and do battle -- rights afforded few Western women at the time, said Kathleen O'Connor, who teaches Islam and the Koran at the University of California, Davis.

"This Western notion that Muslim women are all tied up in a closet somewhere, bound and gagged, is utterly ridiculous," O'Connor said.

Islamic militants have targeted Israel and its allies -- including the U.S. -- for acts of terrorism. But only a small minority of Muslims advocate violence in the name of religion, O'Connor said. "They're just like (U.S.) paramilitary groups -- you wouldn't judge Americans by Oklahoma City."

African Americans account for 30 percent of America's Muslims, according to O'Connor. She said the figure isn't surprising given that as many as 20 percent of the Africans brought to the United States as slaves were Muslim.

"African Americans who have converted to Islam believe it represents a return to cultural roots pre-slavery, a culture of self-respect and independence," she said. "And Islam is a religion of social justice. This speaks to blacks, whose experience has (often) been marked by injustice. They don't want to turn the other cheek -- they've been turning it for 200 years."

Like many African American Muslims, Askia Muhammad Abdulmajeed came to Islam after experimenting with the Nation of Islam, an African American group led by Louis Farrakhan that is not part of orthodox Islam.

Abdulmajeed, 56, joined the Nation of Islam under the late Elijah Muhammad in the early 1970s. He said he admired the Nation's self-help approach to inner-city problems but said he was repulsed by its anti-Semitic, anti-white doctrine.

He says Allah saved him from himself: "I was into drugs, I ran with a fast crowd, didn't hold down a job very long. My perception of women was decidedly chauvinistic."

He ultimately became an imam, or prayer leader, and now serves as a sort of Muslim circuit preacher who travels from mosque to mosque, explaining the Koran in modern American terms.

Abdulmajeed, like many American Muslims, is trying to strike a balance between American notions of equality and democracy and much-older Islamic laws that preach absolute adherence to the Koran.

His wife "can be a CEO as long as she doesn't walk away from her responsibility as a wife and mother," he said. "If my wife is uneducated, unsophisticated, what kind of children is she going to raise?"

Wilson, Abdulmajeed and other American converts appreciate Islam's rigorous, direct relationship with God. Muslims are expected to pray, in a kneeling position with their foreheads touching the floor, five times a day. Where they pray is immaterial as long as they're facing Mecca. They also are required to fast during Ramadan -- one month out of each year during which Muslims are to abstain from food, water, sex and arguing from sun-up to sundown.

In April, California State University, Sacramento, hosted a forum on the "Islamic Presence in Latin America" before and after Columbus.

One of the speakers, Salvadoran-born AbdulHadi Bazurto, said the more he examined his roots, the more he questioned the validity of Catholicism in his life.

"Since the day the Spanish arrived, we as people have suffered a lot," he said. "Christianity's 'white God' concept was harmful to our people, who were definitely not white."

Another speaker, Daniel Denton, a Stockton elementary school teacher who was born in Mexico, said he was a hard-drinking veteran of the Gulf War when he began to explore Islam in 1994. At the invitation of Muslims at Delta College, he went to a mosque.

"There was a carpet on the floor, and the walls were bare. I wondered, 'Where is everything?' and then I realized that was everything. If you go to a Catholic church, every few feet they have an image or a statue, but in Islam, there is no association between God and any image."

Denton also was impressed by the Islamic belief that each individual will be judged by their deeds on Judgment Day. That night, he took the shahada, the Muslim vow that says "There is only one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger."

When he started fasting for Ramadan, "I heard my relatives in Stockton were calling my mom in San Diego and telling her I had become a terrorist and was doing drugs," Denton said. "When I went down to San Diego toward the end of Ramadan, I had lost 15 pounds and was starting to grow my beard. My mom was just in tears for days."

But, Denton said, his mother soon realized that instead of partying, he was staying home and talking to her as he had never done before.

"As she began to see the change, she came to accept it, and now she's happy. There's a saying in Islam that goes, 'Heaven lies at the feet of the mother. You have to treat her well at all times, take care of her.' "

Denton, 29, sees similarities between Islamic and Latino culture. "I've noticed that if you take away the crosses, the alcohol and the pork, the smells in my house are similar to Muslim homes. So is the behavior -- the respect for family."

Those similarities also ring true for Italian Americans such as Wilson and Nicole Ianieri, who teaches Italian language classes in Davis and Woodland.

"After the birth of my children (Miles in 1996 and Darius in 1998), I began to feel a very spiritual need," said Wilson, who converted in 1998. "If I don't pray five times a day, I get a little antsy. It's as if my whole day is out of whack."

Wilson's wife and mother accept his change of faith. But Ianieri, 24, initially was viewed as a traitor.

Ianieri, whose father is an Italian immigrant, said she was raised "a very strong Catholic." Then, as a teenager, she befriended a Muslim youth from Egypt and became curious about Islam. A few years later, a college friend invited her to a mosque. "As soon as I walked in, I felt a sense of belonging, a sense of community that in all my years of going to church, I'd never felt. There were people from all over the world sharing the same goals, and it touched me."

Finally, during Ramadan, she broke the news to her parents. "They were really shocked initially, and who can blame them? They met me for lunch, which was kind of a bad choice, because I couldn't eat or drink anything, and I was wearing a scarf and, unfortunately, the cheapest material was black, and I'm all pale from not eating.

"My dad's words were, 'You're Italian. Italians are Catholic. You were born a Catholic, and you're going to die a Catholic.' ... My mom was crying."

Ianieri said she no longer was welcome to serve as vice president of her Italian cultural group. One association member, a relative, telephoned to say "I no longer represented the cultural values they wished to represent. Fifty years ago, in the village, what were women wearing? They were wearing long skirts and scarves, like me. They were moral."

Ianieri eventually married a Moroccan immigrant who has been embraced by her parents.

"Their biggest problem wasn't about the religion, but about the way I dress," she said.

The hijab -- worn by some Muslim women, but not others -- can make life for young Muslims difficult in America.

Asma Ghori, 20, a UC Davis student from India, says high school dances and college nights out have been exercises in misery.

"I can't eat the food. I can't dance, because I don't dance in front of men. I can't dress the way other women dress. I don't drink, and I don't go with a date -- what's the point?"

Ghori's friend Roohina Diwan, a pre-med student who emigrated from Afghanistan as young girl, said that in high school she was called a "scarf head," "turbanator" and other slurs. After the Oklahoma City bombing, she said, schoolmates asked her if she knew how to make bombs.

But it's not just bigoted attitudes toward Muslims that bother Diwan.

"Every time you turn on the TV, the word sex comes up about a million times," she said. "In high school, I felt a lot of pressure to date and have a boyfriend."

At Davis, she has struggled with the drinking and mating habits of her non-Muslim friends and roommates. Because Muslim values so often clash with mainstream American behavior, Diwan identifies as Muslim -- not American.

Diwan has served as a spiritual guide for her friend, Thy Loun, who was born in Cambodia a Buddhist, then became a Christian before converting to Islam last April. Loun said she's traded nights of clubbing in mini-skirts for a hijab and the calmness that comes with daily prayer.

"When I have on the hijab, it makes me aware of what I do, and that I'm accountable for all my actions," she said. "I have an identity."

Loun and her husband, a Mexican American Catholic, are among many American Muslims struggling with the Koran's ban against usury, which holds that Muslims can't make a profit lending money. "Maybe we'll get an interest-free checking account," she said.

Jameela Houda Salem said her Egyptian husband refuses to buy life insurance because the Koran says it's sinful to profit off someone's death.

"That's one of my issues, because I'm a licensed insurance agent," said Salem, who was raised Jewish and Catholic by divorced parents in Brooklyn. "I have faith that God will provide for me, but I also want the $250,000 (in the event of her husband's sudden death) to pay off the house.

"I'm working on the faith issue."

Salem, who said she studied 11 religions before converting to Islam last year, said it's been a little tough getting used to her husband's belief that "the man is the head of the household and he does have the last say."

"As an American woman who's been on her own for a number of years, I'm used to having my own say."

http://www.islamawareness.net/Fastest/sacbeelocal01_20010701.html

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Fast-growing Islam winning converts in Western world

Gayle Young, CNN, April 14, 1997

In the port city of Suez -- and across the Islamic world -- they are celebrating the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.

"This is a joyous day and the best day in the life of a man," said pilgrim Hussein Suleiman Hussein. "It is as if I am being born anew."

Millions of Muslims across the world will trek to Mecca this week for the annual religious event. They circle the Kaaba, a shrine that contains a black stone sacred to the Prophet Mohammed.

Mohammed decreed that every Muslim who can afford it make the Hajj at least once. It is one of five holy duties required in Islam.

A Muslim's first duty is to proclaim that there is only one God and that Mohammed is his prophet. Muslims also must pray five times a day, give charity to the poor and fast during the daylight hours of the holy month of Ramadan.

When a cannon signals that the sun has set during Ramadan, Muslims in Cairo break their fast with friends and family, often inviting the poor to share their meals.

Fastest-growing religion

The second-largest religion in the world after Christianity, Islam is also the fastest-growing religion. In the United States, for example, nearly 80 percent of the more than 1,200 mosques have been built in the past 12 years.

Some scholars see an emerging Muslim renaissance as Islam takes root in many traditionally Christian communities.

Islam has drawn converts from all walks of life, most notably African-Americans. Former NAACP President Benjamin Chavis, who joined the Nation of Islam recently, personifies the trend.

"In societies where you have minorities that are discriminated against, I think they may find an appeal in Islam," said Waleed Kazziha of American University in Cairo.

Many moderate Islamic countries such as Turkey and Egypt are becoming more conservative.

Two decades ago, few middle-class Egyptian women wore scarves or veils on their heads. Now they crowd into special emporiums that advertise Islamic clothing.

The shift toward Islamic fundamentalism worries many in the secular world, a fear underscored when splinter groups target Westerners with violent attacks.

Islam vs. the West

But most scholars argue that the extremists are a very small minority and that most Muslims adhere to principles in the Koran that teach peace and tolerance.

"The Islamic world is like any other society we have known in history," said Kazziha. "You might say it has the good, the bad and the ugly."

Founded in 622 A.D., Islam is among the newer major religions. But to the non-Muslim world, it sometimes appears inflexible. Clashes between Islamic tradition and Western influence are sweeping the globe.

In Islam, contrary to Western beliefs, the rights of the community are considered more important than the rights of the individual. Women are seen primarily as caretakers of the home, and religion strongly influences schools, government and courts.

Many Muslims today are trying to find a balance between being members of a global society and maintaining ties to a religion that calls for strict adherence to the Koran.

A case in point is 35-year-old Hisham Hussein, a wealthy playboy who turned to religion and swore off alcohol after an automobile accident.

He is going to Mecca this spring. "The most important thing is to maintain the purity of the Hajj, to lead a pure life," he said.

http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/9704/14/egypt.islam/

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BENEATH THE VEIL

By Lisa Wangsness, Globe reporter - BOSTON GLOBE - June 20, 2010

G. Willow Wilson traveled from B.U. to Cairo, and created a new Muslim life

A year after graduation, she was living in Cairo, a convert to Islam, preparing to marry an Egyptian man and adapting to a culture with drastically different values from the one she was raised in.

What took Wilson from a Comm. Ave. dorm to a flat in a working-class neighborhood in Cairo? And what was it like, as an American raised in a liberal secular family, to start seeing the world from within traditional Islam’s rules and norms?

She documents her unusual experience in all its complexity and joy in a new memoir, “The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam.”

The transition wasn’t easy. When she first arrived in Cairo, already privately committed to Islam, but isolated in one of the world’s most crowded cities, she and her American roommate were subsisting on cheese and olives, baffled as to how to buy food without American-style supermarkets. She got to know her future husband, Omar, a Cairo native and fellow teacher, when he offered to show them around. He soon became their cultural translator and close friend.

The book vividly recounts her struggle with the sexual harassment she experienced on the street, the suspicion of some of her neighbors, and the deep frustration many Egyptians feel toward the United States. But she also discovered generosity and warmth in unexpected places, and a new identity as a person bridging two worlds.

Ideas spoke with Wilson from her home in Seattle, where she now lives with her husband, Omar, who works for a nongovernmental organization that helps refugees.

IDEAS: Like a lot of people, you underwent almost a period of religion shopping in college. What drew you to Islam?

WILSON: I knew I was a monotheist-monotheist. Islam had a lot of the things I liked about Judaism, in terms of the indivisible God who is one and whole, and “does not beget and is not begotten”...but it was an evangelical religion....[W]hat also appealed to me is that to become a Muslim is sort of a deal between you and God. You don’t need to be witnessed [by] any particular priest; there’s no ceremony you have to go through; there is no test.

IDEAS: You told Omar you were in love with him when you had only known each other for a matter of weeks. At the same time, you revealed that you were a Muslim. Do you think he believed you when you said that?

WILSON: I never met anyone who didn’t. That’s not something you say lightly — you’d have to be crazy to joke about that at this time in history, as a Westerner.

IDEAS: You lived in Tura, a working-class district of Cairo. What did you discover about the so-called Arab street that you wouldn’t have known from books?

WILSON: One thing I learned [is] that there is no such thing as the “Arab street” — things are so different depending on class, location....There are extremists, religious extremists, who have very specific religious issues with us, and they try to prey upon the insecurities and fears of ordinary people and say, “You should be looking at this through a religious lens, in terms of Muslims vs. non-Muslims.” But the original frustration has nothing to do with religion, it’s a cultural and economic and political frustration that’s being exploited by religious extremists.

IDEAS: You came to appreciate the fundamentalist idea that beautiful things — women’s bodies, Mecca — ought to be hidden from view. But you were relentlessly harassed by men on the street. How do those attitudes square?

WILSON: There’s a misunderstanding in the West — people think that because harassment is bad and fundamentalism is bad, that fundamentalism and harassment must be somehow connected...but in fact they’re not. One of the big draws of the fundamentalists to me is they’re so polite, especially to women....In Cairo there is so much political oppression, and there are huge economic disparities between rich and poor, there’s so much social injustice. This creates a huge amount of frustration, and people act out — I think the harassment of women is an outgrowth of that. But it’s absolutely anti-Islamic to treat women that way.

IDEAS: Shortly after your engagement to Omar, you decided to begin wearing a head scarf. What did that mean to you?

WILSON: I wanted to do something to honor my marriage and make that relationship...different from all my other relationships. That’s something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture, it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you’ve never met.

IDEAS: What was his reaction?

WILSON: He was surprised. He never pressured me...it had never come up between us. But he was very happy and touched that this was something I would bring up on my own.

IDEAS: One of the first head scarves you bought was red.

WILSON: I wanted to be able to express myself within the parameters of this symbol I’d chosen....I didn’t limit myself to what we think of here as this stereotypical black, drab [color]. The great thing about Cairo is the vast majority of women wear some kind of head scarf, but they are also very fashion-conscious. They love bright colors.

IDEAS: You wrote an essay for The New York Times that drew some criticism for seeming to glorify the “women’s car” in the Cairo subway, where men are not allowed. What were you trying to say?

WILSON: These spaces that we don’t understand in the West, that we explicitly condemn, that we don’t want to have anything to do with, that we feel superior to , are not empty spaces...people have experiences there [and]...build relationships there. They laugh, they cry, they go about their daily lives. There is not nothing going on in these women-only spaces in the Middle East. There are conversations and personalities.

IDEAS: When you and Omar started living together, you were freelancing and spent a lot of time keeping house. Was there a tension there because it was a choice for you, and for a lot of women those menial jobs are not a choice?

WILSON: For most women these jobs are not a choice. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t at the end of the day, even if they are a high-powered CEO, come home and pick clothes off the floor and put them in the washing machine. I think we [in the West] like to pretend that these jobs are less vital than they are....In Egypt, they’re appreciated.

IDEAS: Did you ever argue about chores?

WILSON: Yeah, we did what every couple does — “I’m not going to take out the trash, I refuse! It’s your job.”...Relationships between married people have a lot more similarities across the world than they do differences.

IDEAS: You are also a comic book writer — are you possibly the only white American Muslim woman in comics?

WILSON: For sure.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/06/20/beneath_the_veil/

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