The number of Britons choosing to become Muslims
has nearly doubled in the past decade, according to one of the most
comprehensive attempts to estimate how many people have embraced Islam.
Following the global spread of violent Islamism, British Muslims have faced
more scrutiny, criticism and analysis than any other religious community.
Yet, despite the often negative portrayal of Islam, thousands of Britons are
adopting the religion every year.
Estimating the number of converts living in Britain has always been difficult
because census data does not differentiate between whether a religious
person has adopted a new faith or was born into it.
Previous estimates have
placed the number of Muslim converts in the UK at between 14,000 and 25,000.
But a new study by the inter-faith think-tank Faith Matters suggests the real
figure could be as high as 100,000, with as many as 5,000 new conversions
nationwide each year.
By using data from the Scottish 2001 census – the only survey to ask
respondents what their religion was at birth as well as at the time of the
survey – researchers broke down what proportion of Muslim converts there
were by ethnicity and then extrapolated the figures for Britain as a whole.
In all they estimated that there were 60,699 converts living in Britain in
2001. With no new census planned until next year, researchers polled mosques
in London to try to calculate how many conversions take place a year.
The
results gave a figure of 1,400 conversions in the capital in the past 12
months which, when extrapolated nationwide, would mean approximately 5,200
people adopting Islam every year.
The figures are comparable with studies in
Germany and France which found that there were around 4,000 conversions a
year.
Fiyaz Mughal, director of Faith Matters, admitted that coming up with a
reliable estimate of the number of converts to Islam was notoriously
difficult.
"This report is the best intellectual 'guestimate' using
census numbers, local authority data and polling from mosques," he
said. "Either way few people doubt that the number adopting Islam in
the UK has risen dramatically in the past 10 years."
Asked why people were converting in such large numbers he replied: "I
think there is definitely a relationship between conversions being on the
increase and the prominence of Islam in the public domain. People are
interested in finding out what Islam is all about and when they do that they
go in different directions. Most shrug their shoulders and return to their
lives but some will inevitably end up liking what they discover and will
convert."
Batool al-Toma, an Irish born convert to Islam of 25 years who works at the
Islamic Foundation and runs the New Muslims Project, one of the earliest
groups set up specifically to help converts, said she believed the new
figures were "a little on the high side".
"My guess would be the real figure is somewhere in between previous
estimates, which were too low, and this latest one," she said. "I
definitely think there has been a noticeable increase in the number of
converts in recent years. The media often tries to pinpoint specifics but
the reasons are as varied as the converts themselves."
Inayat Bunglawala, founder of Muslims4UK, which promotes active Muslim
engagement in British society, said the figures were "not implausible".
"It would mean that around one in 600 Britons is a convert to the faith,"
he said. "Islam is a missionary religion and many Muslim organisations
and particularly university students' Islamic societies have active outreach
programmes designed to remove popular misconceptions about the faith."
The report by Faith Matters also studied the way converts were portrayed by
the media and found that while 32 per cent of articles on Islam published
since 2001 were linked to terrorism or extremism, the figure jumped to 62
per cent with converts.
Earlier this month, for example, it was reported that two converts to Islam
who used the noms de guerre Abu Bakr and Mansoor Ahmed were killed in a CIA
drone strike in an area of Pakistan with a strong al-Qa'ida presence.
"Converts who become extremists or terrorists are, of course, a
legitimate story," said Mr Mughal.
"But my worry is that the
saturation of such stories risks equating all Muslim converts with being
some sort of problem when the vast majority are not".
Catherine
Heseltine, a 31-year-old convert to Islam, made history earlier this year
when she became the first female convert to be elected the head of a British
Muslim organisation – the Muslim Public Affairs Committee.
"Among
certain sections of society, there is a deep mistrust of converts," she
said. "There's a feeling that the one thing worse than a Muslim is a
convert because they're perceived as going over the other side. Overall,
though, I think conversions arouse more curiosity than hostility."
How to become a Muslim
Islam is one of the easiest religions to convert to.
Technically, all a person
needs to do is recite the Shahada, the formal declaration of faith, which
states: "There is no God but Allah and Mohamed is his Prophet." A
single honest recitation is all that is needed to become a Muslim, but most
converts choose to do so in front of at least two witnesses, one being an
imam.
SIC: TI/UK