Islam's makeover Sep 21st 2006 , From The Economist print edition
Why some Britons are embracing Islam CONVERTS to Islam have an image problem. Women who don Islamic garb are often pitied for their submissive lives behind the veil. And a handful of converts, mostly men, have been implicated in terrorist plots. Even the pope has waded in: on September 12th he appeared to link Islam to violent conversion in a speech. He apologised five days later, after riots in many countries with Muslim populations. Some commentators in London , too, have taken to worrying that the British establishment is enthralled by Islam. They point to Joe Ahmed-Dobson, the son of a former government minister, and Yahya Birt, the son of a former BBC boss. These worries grew when it emerged last month that three of the 25 Muslims arrested on suspicion of involvement in a plot to blow up planes over London were new believers. And this, in turn, appeared to bear out a government report, leaked in July, which said that converts were being wooed by radical Muslims. Yet statistics to substantiate the fear that reds under the bed have been replaced by hordes of traitorous new Muslims are sparse. The 2001 census in Scotland , unlike the exercises in England and Wales , included a question on current and former religious beliefs. Yahya Birt, a research fellow at the Islamic Foundation, a think-tank in Leicester , established that 3% of Scottish Muslims were converts. He used those figures to estimate that in Britain as a whole around 14,200 believers are convertsonly 1% of the country's 1.6m Muslims. Converting Britons to Islam is hardly a boom industry, he says. Islam is one of the items in the supermarket of faiths, but the rate of conversion is not spectacular. Unlike some Christian sects, Islam eschews heavy proselytising. One group, the Islamic Propagation Society, is typically low-key in seeking converts. Its members set up trestle tables at weekends in several big cities and hand out leaflets. Umar Tate, its chief, says that media interest brings them good business. The pope's speech has attracted many to their stalls, he says. Academic insight into why Britons convert is also sparse. A researcher from Leeds University , Myfanwy Franks, questioned converts before and after the attack on America in September 2001. She suggests that the appeal of Islam is changing. Before that date many were drawn to Sufism, a mystical and relatively tolerant strand of Islam. Her work since then suggests that new converts prefer a more austere form of the religion. Rebecca Masterson, once Catholic, became a Muslim six years ago and has interviewed women converts for a research project at London University . Some embrace Islam, she said, because in an increasingly raunchy Britain they dislike being seen as sexual objectsthe veil frees them from the male gaze. Many male converts, who include men of Afro-Caribbean stock, prize the Muslim family model in which men are idealised as dignified providers and protectors, she says. Other studies suggest that Islam has helped people escape from drugs and alcohol. Men are more likely than women, it seems, to react against British policy in the Middle East by embracing a violent form of Islam. Many converts praise the recent mini-industry that has sprung up to help them adapt. There are now New-Muslim projects in most British cities. Miss Masterson says that her life has changed completely since her conversionshe wears a headscarf and gown, and would rather socialise with Muslim sisters than spend time unchaperoned with men. Luckily for single converts, a number of matrimonial agencies offer help to those seeking love. The New-Muslim project in Leicester offers advice on coming out as a believer to non-Muslim relations, who are often appalled by the news. It offers guidance on dress and practices such as ritual washing and hair removaland on including non-Muslims in weddings and funerals. On September 20th the home secretary, John Reid, was heckled at a meeting with Muslim parents by an angry convert, Abu Izzadeenhardly the peaceful image of Islam that most Muslims are after. Converts of any sort tend towards an excess of zeal. But not all doand they might be the very people to bridge the increasingly dangerous gap between Britain 's Muslim minority and its nervous mainstream. ======================================== The pope and Islam When the heavens open Sep 21st 2006 | ROME >From The Economist print edition An ill-judged quotation about Islam has obscured a more serious message HE HAD to wait six centuries, but Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus has his revenge. Manuel, who ruled the Byzantine empire in 1391-1425, ended his days after signing a humiliating peace with the Ottoman Turks, the rising Muslim power of his day, who within three decades of his death would destroy the empire entirely. In a university lecture at Regensburg on September 12th, Pope Benedict XVI conjured up the memory of the emperor by recalling his views on Islam. Citing a hitherto obscure 14th-century text, the pope quoted Manuel as saying: Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached. The theme of the pope's lecture was a favourite one: the link between faith and reason which, he said, implied a rejection of any link between religion and violence. The pope later insisted the whole point of his address was to appeal for a dialogue with Islam. But many Muslims concluded that this was a pretty odd way to go about it, and demands for an apology soon poured in. For a few tense days, it looked as if the affair could spiral out of control, rather as happened earlier this year after a Danish newspaper had published cartoons lampooning Muhammad, when more than 100 people died in violent protests round the world. he breadth of the front against the pope was remarkable. Fundamentalist fanatics were there, raving about conquering Rome and putting Christians to the sword. But so too were representatives of some of the more moderate governments in the Muslim world, including those of Morocco , Turkey and Malaysia . By mid-week, however, a swift response from the Vatican seemed to have contained, if not neutralised, the controversy. In a statement issued first on his behalf and then twice in person, the pontiff expressed deep regret for the offence that had been taken. He vigorously denied sharing Manuel's view of Islam. In Somalia an Italian nun was shot dead. But it was unclear if her murder was a reprisal for the pope's remarks. The pontiff's critics grumbled that he had not really apologised. But his protestations nevertheless represented an unusual degree of expiation by a pope, whose views on some issues can be proclaimed infallible. The European Commission's spokesman made the obvious point: that Pope Benedict should be free to say what he wants. But freedom is one thing, advisability quite another. The dust may be settling on this dispute more quickly than it might have done. But there are reasons to fear that the damage it has done could turn out to be enduring. Until now the Vatican has been remarkably successful in ensuring that, even if some sort of clash of civilisations is in progress, it need not turn into a clash of religions. Benedict's predecessor, John Paul II, understood that what radical Muslims most resent about the West is not its Christianity, but its rampant secularism. Osama bin Laden may have blustered that the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were a new crusade. But, although George Bush at one point played into his hands by carelessly using that very word, the view that Muslims were victims of a new holy war was impossible to sustain so long as the most influential Christian leader was openly critical of the fighting. By opposing both the bombing of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq , Pope John Paul made sure that the world's biggest Christian faith was not linked in Muslim minds with its only superpower. Pope Benedict's ill-judged quotation now risks blurring, if not erasing, that carefully-constructed distinction. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran 's supreme leader, whose opinions carry some weight among the world's 230m Shia Muslims, pounced on the pope's remarks. He claimed they were just the latest development in the crusade against Islam launched by Mr Bush. Such an allegation will, unfortunately, seem all too credible to many Muslims, because of the pope's record. On the one hand he is a keen proponent of the view that Europe 's identity is essentially Christian. In 2004, while he was still a cardinal, he declared that Turkey should not be admitted to the European Union. On the other, since becoming pope, he has repeatedly signalled a rejection of the unconditional dialogue favoured by his predecessor. In particular, he has packed the previous pontiff's top expert on Islam off to Cairo and merged the Vatican 's department for inter-religious dialogue into its ministry of culture. Yet it has also become clear that Islam is near the top of Pope Benedict's agenda. He is planning a visit to Turkey in November. On the very day that the latest crisis erupted, he confirmed as his new foreign minister a Moroccan-born archbishop, Dominique Mamberti, who has spent most of his diplomatic career in Muslim-ruled countries. When compared with John Paul II, the difference is not that Benedict, who was once a professor at a German university, rejects any discussions with Muslims. It is rather that he seeks to fill them with meaty, challenging substance. This is what he meant when, after lamenting the reaction to his words on September 17th, he added that he wanted a dialogue that was frank and sincere. There are two points he is especially keen to make. One is that Christians in many Muslim countries do not have the same religious freedom that is enjoyed by most Muslims in the West. The other is that too many Islamic clerics seem to sanction or at least tolerate violence in the name of religion. This was central to his Regensburg lecture in which, as he later said, I wished to explain that not religion and violence, but religion and reason go together. The value of that point in the present state of the world can hardly be overstated. It is sad that it should have been put in such an inept way that the only answers came in the form of burnt effigies, grisly threatsand a great deal of sincerely outraged protest. ============================================= Muslims in Minnesota Finding a voice Sep 21st 2006 | MINNEAPOLIS >From The Economist print edition Coming soon, the first minaret and the first congressman ON SEPTEMBER 8th ground was broken for the new Masjid An-Nur mosque in north Minneapolis , from which the first minaret seen in Minnesota will pierce the prairie sky. A few days later one of the mosque's more famous worshipers, Keith Ellison, won the state's Democratic primary in the deeply Democratic 5th District. In so doing, Mr Ellison will almost certainly become America 's first Muslim congressman, as well as the first black to represent anywhere in Minnesota . In this once lily-white Lutheran state, these two events point to deep changes. More immigrants arrived in Minnesota in 2005 than in any of the past 25 years. Immigrants from Muslim countries, especially Somalia and Ethiopia , have made up a sizeable part of this wave. Estimates of the number of Muslims in Minnesota range from 40,000 to more than 100,000 and perhaps as many as 150,000. These are big numbers for a state that had a tiny Muslim population just ten years ago. All the same, one might think that another state with a larger concentration of Muslims Michigan , perhapswould have produced a Muslim member of Congress sooner. Four Muslims ran for seats in 2004, two for the Senate and two for the House, but none made it out of the primaries. The difference in Minnesota seemed to be a sophisticated grassroots campaign, which turned out thousands of new immigrants who had never before voted, or done anything in politics, on a day normally dominated by hard-core party insiders. That machine is the political legacy of Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash in 2002. Within a month of his death his supporters established Wellstone Action, which has more than 100,000 members and has trained almost 11,000 people in grassroots campaigning methods and progressive political action. New immigrants, many of whom were Muslims, seem to have accounted for thousands of the voters who turned up on primary night to support Mr Ellison. Without those votes, he might well not have prevailed over his closest opponent, Mike Erlandson, the former chairman of the Democratic Farmer-Labour Party (DFL). Those Muslim connections, of course, are also fodder for his rivals. Mr Ellison is a former criminal defence lawyer and state representative who converted from Catholicism to Islam when he was 19. In 1995 he helped to organise the Million Man Marcha gathering of blacks in Washington to proclaim unity and responsibilityand thus found himself in the orbit of Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, who is notorious for his anti-Semitic rantings. Mr Ellison says he has never met Mr Farrakhan. Nonetheless, his Republican opponents and a cadre of conservative bloggers are making merry with his past associations. The Republican Party recently dubbed the DFL the party of Ellison. That may be close to the truth. Progressives welcome him as a refreshing change from the party stalwarts who, in recent years, have tended to lose races. Muslim Democrats see in Mr Ellison someone who can stick up for them as they face suspicion and intimidation. Many of them supported him quietly, for fear of a backlash. But his victory may bring them out into the opennot only in Minnesota , but across the country. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? 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