People are converting to Islamofascism

[KashifAsrar]

Here is the first part of a report as published in Times Of India, today 3rd Sep, 2006. I found it useful to post it here. It shows that now the buzzword 'Islamo-Fascism' is being projected to be more deadlier than the word 'Terrorist/Terrorism' !!
Kashif


Mass conversions: ‘Most go along to get along’


London: Whatever the figures, there is broad agreement that Islam’s growth in Britain is possibly the fastest anywhere in the western world with all the attendant headaches for racial profiling and airline passenger stereotyping.
American writer Robert Ferrigno, whose newest bestseller ‘Prayers for the Assassin’ imagines an Islamic United States in 2036, complete with Jihad Cola as the number one drink , says “mass conversions may involve relatively few ‘true’ spiritual conversions. Most believers go along to get along’’.
But he insists that his novel makes “an imaginative, not statistical leap, positing a future where spiritually-bereft Westerners, their society rent by economic and social decay, were drawn to the spiritual certainty of a fundamentalist faith like Islam’’.
Though Ferrigno’s novel may be a leap too far, many believe Islam’s growth in the West is exemplified by British converts such as Birt, the 38-yearold son of the BBC’s former director-general, who made headlines when he turned to Islam 16 years ago just four years after pop star Cat Stevens sensationally announced he had become Yusuf Islam.
In recent years, former British cabinet minister Frank Dobson’s son became Joe Ahmed Dobson and respected Cambridge academic Timothy Winter took the name of Abdul Hakim Murad.
Birt’s estimates were based on an extrapolation of the number of people who said they were Islamic converts in the 2001 census in Scotland (the census in England and Wales did not ask about conversion).
But al-Toma, who shepherds new and potential white people into the Islamic faith, says her estimate is based on the volume of new converts who pass through her hands. “It now approximates at least 10 every month.’’ And rising.
So much so that the New Muslim Project has finally established five affiliate groups dotted around England and Scotland to deal with the growing traffic of converts. And al-Toma and her Project find themselves in the firing line every time a Reid, Lindsay, Stewart-Whyte, Savant or Young joins the lengthening list of British extremist converts.
Birt believes “Middle England is in a moral panic at the news that a white middle-class boy from High Wycombe, the son of a Conservative party constituency worker (Stewart-Whyte) has been arrested in connection with what might have been our own 9/11’’. And he laments the growing view that “people are converting not to one of the world’s great religions but to Islamofascism, to an anti-Western political cause with its very own fringe of bloodstained anarchists who are prepared to kill people on a grand scale’’.
Al-Toma admits she gets her share of “emotionally-charged potential white converts’’. Just days ago, she says, a young white man emailed her to express the desire to become a Muslim because “he didn’t agree with the Bush-Blair politics’’. She says she gently cautioned him against “an empty conversion to Islam’’.
But the numbers of these as exemplified by the three alleged trans-Atlantic plane conspirators may be rising.
TOMORROW: The new face of British Islam: Why are white people signing up?

 

[Averroes]

Islam is the future religion of Europe.

I can't tell you how many white Swedish convert brothers I've met. The nicest sight in town is when you see a blue eyed swede wearing hijab, whilst the people from "islamic" countries have no affiliation with the religon they were born into.

 

[KashifAsrar]

I agree Averröes !! ISLAM is the only solution which is stable and fulfilling in this life and here-after.
Thanks Dear
Kashif

 

[KashifAsrar]

Faith accompli: Why are white people signing up?

Rashmee Roshan Lall | TNN



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 mixedrace 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.