Journey into Europe by Akbar Ahmed

Author:Akbar Ahmed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

SIX

Muslim Converts: Seeking God in an Age of Secularism

“PROPHET MUHAMMAD, PEACE be upon him, is our role model,” murmured Kristiane Backer lovingly with a coy smile. Kristiane, a German convert to Islam and former star presenter on MTV Europe, did not fail to omit the blessings Muslims add when mentioning the Prophet. “He’s our beloved, you know. We love Muhammad,” she added with a shy spreading smile of someone who is allowing us to glimpse a secret. “All women would love to be married to Muhammad,” Kristiane admitted with affection.

We love him because the way he treated his wives. The way he … was so romantic with his wives, so caring, and gracious, and so full of love for everybody. He was a champion of women’s rights, an environmentalist, a formidable statesman, and most importantly a Prophet of God who guided people to salvation. I could talk to you for an hour about Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, means everything. He’s my favorite man, and I would love to see him and be near him one day, inshallah.

Then her face clouded and without pause she complained: “So when he gets attacked, of course it feels like, you are hurt, you feel personally hurt and personally under attack.”

Kristiane’s love for the Prophet is, as is ultimately all love, a mystery and a miracle in itself. It is a sociological curiosity how a European TV presenter and author, working in the full blaze of the media, hobnobbing with the likes of Mick Jagger, Robbie Williams, and Annie Lennox, so passionately and voluntarily converts to Islam, and then, in spite of the malicious distortions around the Prophet of Islam, ends up seeing him, as do Muslims all over the world, as the ultimate mahboob, or beloved of God. Her faith in our age of secularism and cynicism reflects the nature of religion and our very human aspiration to seek something beyond ourselves to inspire and create love in us.

Finding Refuge in Islam

Over the past few centuries, as Europe moved inexorably toward modernity and increasing secularism, its intellectuals and philosophers—Voltaire, Marx, George Bernard Shaw, and Nietzsche—used the battering ram of logic and reason to smash down the doors of the castle of faith. In addition to the more generalized attacks on religion, there is now the more recent Islamophobic assault that developed after 9/11 led by public figures like the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. With the toxic environment that has been created around Islam, even one conversion to the faith should be sufficient cause to send scholars of the sociology of religion scurrying to dust off their volumes of Émile Durkheim for explanation. But so far no satisfactory thesis has been fielded and defended that explains why, in the face of rampant Islamophobia, thousands of Europeans, especially women, are converting to Islam.

In this chapter, while I do not claim to have solved the puzzle, I will share the fascinating stories of why and how Europeans are converting to Islam.

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