It’s a controversial time for British women to be wearing the hijab, the basic Muslim headscarf. Last month, Belgium became the first European country to pass legislation to ban the burka (the most concealing of Islamic veils), calling it a “threat” to female dignity, while France looks poised to follow suit. In Italy earlier this month, a Muslim woman was fined €500 (£430) for wearing the Islamic veil outside a post office.
And yet, while less than 2 per cent of the population now attends a Church of England service every week, the number of female converts to Islam is on the rise. At the London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park, women account for roughly two thirds of the “New Muslims” who make their official declarations of faith there ”“ and most of them are under the age of 30.
Conversion statistics are frustratingly patchy, but at the time of the 2001 Census, there were at least 30,000 British Muslim converts in the UK. According to Kevin Brice, of the Centre for Migration Policy Research, Swansea University, this number may now be closer to 50,000 ”“ and the majority are women. “Basic analysis shows that increasing numbers of young, university-educated women in their twenties and thirties are converting to Islam,” confirms Brice.
“Our liberal, pluralistic 21st-century society means we can choose our careers, our politics ”“ and we can pick and choose who we want to be spiritually,” explains Dr Mohammad S. Seddon, lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Chester. We’re in an era of the “religious supermarket”, he says.
I read the article with a heavy heart. It seems to me that three factors can be discerned, some overlapping:
(1) Islam as giving identity.
Sometimes this is combined with a contrarian stance towards society which in turn links with the second strand,
(2) rejection of the sexualisation of our culture and its objectification of women.
There are deep ironies, here, of course, given the treatment of women within Islam. It reminds me of how many on the Left would use Marxism to criticise capitalist societies, regardless of the reality within communist states. However, clearly the liberal sexual mores of our Western culture is coming back to haunt us, for these women find meaning and identity in a more traditional femininity. Finally there is
(3) Conversion associated with marriage.
There is little sense of the classical conversion in these accounts. The God word is missing – no 1 speaks of God, the last one speaks of praying – but you wonder whether it is the identity thing that at first trumps everything, and which may lead into a fuller faith.
As a Catholic priest I have noticed through the years that the older generation (60 and over like myself!) in mixed marriages often had a spouse who had converted and become a Roman Catholic before marriage. How sad, how very sad, that we lack the confidence now to make a similar call to people who are unchurched (I would not of course seek to convert people who were already convinced Christians of another denomination.) How sad, too, that to preach a conventional Christian sexual ethic is to risk dismissal as a reactionary or fundamentalist, and all the while women are slipping out at the back searching for this very thing. As I say above – our failures have come back to haunt us.
At least this phenomenon should take some of the pressure off Rome, the Catholic Church, and the Orthodox Churches to bend the knee to feminism through ordaining priestesses and bishopesses. Is there such a thing as a female imam or sheik? Unfortunately, the message from women given in these statistics has come too late for the Episcopal Church.
The reasons for conversion sound very much like the reasons people convert to the LDS Church: falling in love with a member of the church, looking for a ‘clean’ lifestyle, traditional roles.
Notice how the people involved say little to nothing about the theological reasons for conversion. One wonders if they even know anything about the faith.