New Muslims
by Marina Jiménez, National Post, January 19 2002 CE
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Like all Americans, Debra Portmann felt overcome with grief after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and mourned for the slaughter of her countrymen.
But she also felt something else: a lingering sadness for Islam itself, a faith she felt had been grossly abused by the terrorists to justify their actions.
Ms. Portmann, a Boston native whose Christian ancestors arrived here in 1649, wrote a note of sympathy and slipped it under the door of the Islamic students’ group at the University of Massachusetts, where she studies classical music.
Less than a month later, the 46-year-old liberal converted to Islam, in the basement of the Islamic Society of Boston’s Sunni mosque. It was a simple ceremony that took only moments. She said the shahadah (There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger) in Arabic, a simple testimony of faith she will repeat five times a day for the rest of her life.
Tiffany Motschenbacher, an extroverted theatre major from Michigan with curly brown hair, converted a few days later, sitting on the floor of the society’s cultural centre with a group of sisters, celebrating the occasion later over pizza and soda.
“I said the testimony and, poof, I was a Muslim. I was shaking and weeping,” recalls Ms. Motschenbacher, 30, with a laugh. “I really felt that this religion was the truth and what I’d been looking for my whole life. I used to feel something was wrong with me because I couldn’t grasp the concept of God. Now I finally had peace of heart.”
The terrorist attacks perpetrated by fundamentalist Islamists served as a kind of a catalyst for both of these women and at least four others in their class of New Muslims, propelling them forward on a long and sometimes hesitant spiritual journey toward conversion.
“Instead of running away, I felt myself running toward Islam. My heart had already opened to the religion and I knew that what had happened [in New York and Washington] was not Islam at all,” Ms. Motschenbacher said.
Adds Ms. Portmann, who wears a shalwar kameez – baggy trousers and a loose tunic – and covers her red hair with a pink hijab, or head covering: “When 9/11 happened, it gave Islam a black eye. But I knew the terrorist act was nothing Islam would ever sanction. I knew the terrorists’ idea of jihad was wrong.”
These women are part of a curious trend: a surge in conversions since Sept. 11 both in the United States and in Europe. It is a pattern that has replicated itself throughout recent history; there were many converts during the Bosnian conflict. During the Gulf War, the Saudis claimed to have welcomed 5,000 new Muslims into the fold.
“Americans have bought more flags since 9/11, but they’ve also bought more Korans,” says Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who runs the al-Taqwah mosque in Brooklyn, N.Y. “I’ve had more converts since 9/11 and I’ve spoken in so many different forums and inter-faith meetings.”
At Harvard’s Islamic Society, attendance at the annual Ramadan dinner nearly doubled this year, while several open houses at the Islamic Society of Boston attracted so many people they spilled over into the parking lot.
In New York, Sheik Ishaq Abdul Malik-ul-Mulk, a convert who also goes by his Puerto Rican name Luis Alejandro, says that every week, someone takes shahadah at the Long Island mosque where he worships. “The more controversial something is, the more people it attracts,” he says. “But attraction is just the first step. After that, you have to believe, and the message of Islam is so simple, without any of the Holy Trinity mysteries. You can practise it on your own.”
One Dutch Islamic centre claims a tenfold increase while the New Muslims Project, based in Leicester, England, reports a steady stream of new converts.
In a videotape released by the Pentagon last month, Osama bin Laden himself remarked on the phenomenon to his al-Qaeda lieutenants. “In Holland, the number of people who accepted Islam during the days that followed the operations were more than the people who accepted Islam in the last 11 years. I heard someone on Islamic radio who owns a school in America say: ‘We don’t have time to keep up with the demands of those who are asking about Islamic books to learn about Islam.’ This event made people think [about true Islam], which benefitted Islam greatly.”
Some of the high-profile Western converts who have captured the public limelight have been those drawn to the terrorist cause espoused by radical Islamists. According to the FBI, John Walker, a 20-year-old California man, took up arms with the Taliban and even met bin Laden and knew he had ordered the attacks.
Richard Reid is alleged to have packed plastic explosives into the heels of his black suede high-tops in an attempt to bomb American Airlines Flight 63 last month. In the mid-1990s, he came out of prison and joined a Brixton mosque in London, where he met Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20th” terrorist who engineered the hijacking of the planes that crashed into New York’s World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in Washington.
However, many American and European converts are similar to those in the New Muslim class for converts run by the Islamic Society of Boston. They do not support terrorism, nor share the al-Qaeda credo. They are well-educated, articulate, former Christians; some are even Jewish and Hindu.
These new Muslims, like the approximately 25,000 Hispanic converts in New York and California, are surprise converts to a religion that is the fastest growing in the United States. There are now six million adherents across the country, and more than 30% of mosque attendees are converts, according to a recent survey by four Muslim-American groups.
Some had studied Buddhism, flirted with Roman Catholicism or spent time with Quakers, but ultimately found them lacking.
Conversion is an intensely personal journey. But the influx of new Muslims prompts a number of questions. Why would people choose to embrace the faith at this time in history, when it suffers from such a public relations problem that Muslims can be spit on for wearing a hijab, called rag-heads and taunted in the street? And, a more fundamental question: What can a religion that segregates genders, bans dancing and drinking and requires women to cover up not just their hair, but their elbows and knees, offer to liberated American women?
