Islam and terrorism: beware, most of all, of the converts?

Why European women are turning to Islam

2 January 2006 · Christian Science Monitor

Ms. Fallot is a recent convert to Islam. In the eyes of the police, that makes her potentially dangerous.

The death of Muriel Degauque, a Belgian convert who blew herself up in a suicide attack on US troops in Iraq last month, has drawn fresh attention to the rising number of Islamic converts in Europe, most of them women.

"The phenomenon is booming, and it worries us," the head of the French domestic intelligence agency, Pascal Mailhos [..]. The difficulty, security experts explain, is that while the police may be alert to possible threats from young men of Middle Eastern origin, they are more relaxed about white European women. [..]

Ms. Fallot, who converted to Islam three years ago after asking herself spiritual questions to which she found no answers in her childhood Catholicism, says she finds the suspicion her new religion attracts "wounding." "For me," she adds, "Islam is a message of love, of tolerance and peace."

It is a message that appeals to more and more Europeans as curiosity about Islam has grown since 9/11, say both Muslim and non-Muslim researchers. Although there are no precise figures, observers who monitor Europe's Muslim population estimate that several thousand men and women convert each year.

Only a fraction of converts are attracted to radical strands of Islam, they point out, and even fewer are drawn into violence. A handful have been convicted of terrorist offenses, such as Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" and American John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan.

Admittedly patchy research suggests that more women than men convert, experts say, but that - contrary to popular perception - only a minority do so in order to marry Muslim men. "That used to be the most common way, but recently more [women] are coming out of conviction," says Haifa Jawad, who teaches at Birmingham University in Britain.

[Fallot explains that] she liked the way "Islam demands a closeness to God. Islam is simpler, more rigorous, and it's easier because it is explicit. I was looking for a framework; man needs rules and behavior to follow. Christianity did not give me the same reference points."

Those reasons reflect many female converts' thinking, say experts who have studied the phenomenon. "A lot of women are reacting to the moral uncertainties of Western society," says Dr. Jawad. "They like the sense of belonging and caring and sharing that Islam offers."

Others are attracted by "a certain idea of womanhood and manhood that Islam offers," suggests Karin van Nieuwkerk, who has studied Dutch women converts. "There is more space for family and motherhood in Islam, and women are not sex objects." [..]

After making their decision, some converts take things slowly, adopting Muslim customs bit by bit: Fallot, for example, does not yet feel ready to wear a head scarf [..]. Others jump right in, eager for the exoticism of a new religion, and become much more pious than fellow mosque-goers who were born into Islam. Such converts, taking an absolutist approach, appear to be the ones most easily led into extremism.

The early stages of a convert's discovery of Islam "can be quite a sensitive time," says Batool al-Toma, who runs the "New Muslims" program at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, England.

"You are not confident of your knowledge, you are a newcomer [..]," Ms. Al-Toma explains. A few converts feel "such a huge desire to fit in and be accepted that they are ready to do just about anything," she says.

"New converts feel they have to prove themselves," adds Dr. Ranstorp. "Those who seek more extreme ways of proving themselves can become extraordinarily easy prey to manipulation."

At the same time, says al-Toma, converts seeking respite in Islam from a troubled past - such as Degauque, who had reportedly drifted in and out of drugs and jobs before converting to Islam - might be persuaded that such an "ultimate action" as a suicide bomb attack offered an opportunity for salvation and forgiveness. [..]

Officials Concerned About Muslim Converts

Associated Press
ELAINE GANLEY
January 16, 2006

Mathieu Pawlak is one of about 50,000 French, and tens of thousands of others across Europe and North America, who have converted to the Muslim faith. Like most converts, he is a mainstream Muslim.

But intelligence services are tracking a disturbing new phenomenon: A growing number of Westerners are giving their hearts to radical Islam and some may try to prove themselves through holy war.

"This phenomenon is in full expansion," said Pascal Mailhos, head of the French intelligence service. Some 1,600 converted Muslims follow the rigorous Salafist brand of Islam that breeds today's radicals - out of about 5,000 Salafists in France, he said.

Converts are seen as potentially naive, malleable and zealous in their newfound faith, easy prey for radicals. The path to Islam often starts with a marriage or through friendship. But prisons inmates, and people at loggerheads with society, may also take refuge in Islam.

"Nowadays, Islam is a kind of ideal means to express discontent with society and the Western world in general," said a sociologist who wrote books on conversions in prison and suicide bombers.

The Dutch government has said that "various Dutch converts are experiencing a radicalization process." French intelligence is so concerned it conducted a detailed survey of 1,610 Muslim converts. It concluded that 3 percent of the converts "belong to or are in the circle of the movement of Islamist combatants." At least three Muslim converts in France have been convicted in recent years on terror-related charges.

In France, only several dozen converts are "potentially violent," said Jean-Luc Marret. But one Islamic Internet site where al-Qaida has posted claims recently carried a portrait of "the future al-Qaida soldier" - a secretly converted Muslim "born in Europe of European and Christian parents."