PETER FORD
Posted on 12/26/2005 6:41:01 PM PST by jailbird
Why European women are turning to Islam
By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
PARIS – Mary Fallot looks as unlike a terrorist suspect as one could possibly imagine: a petite and demure white Frenchwoman chatting with friends on a cell-phone, indistinguishable from any other young woman in the café where she sits sipping coffee.
And that is exactly why European antiterrorist authorities have their eyes on thousands like her across the continent.
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NO, LISTEN: When Mary Fallot converted, her surprised co-workers asked if she had a Muslim boyfriend. Actually, she explained, she was drawn to Islam by the answers it provided. PETER FORD |
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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, told the Paris-based newspaper Le Monde in a recent interview. "But we must absolutely avoid lumping everyone together."
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. Terrorists can use converts who "have added operational benefits in very tight security situations" where they might not attract attention, says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm.
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. Though non-Muslim men must convert in order to marry a Muslim woman, she points out, the opposite is not true.
Fallot laughs when she is asked whether her love life had anything to do with her decision. "When I told my colleagues at work that I had converted, their first reaction was to ask whether I had a Muslim boyfriend," she recalls. "They couldn't believe I had done it of my own free will."
In fact, she explains, 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."
At the same time, argues Sarah Joseph, an English convert who founded "Emel," a Muslim lifestyle magazine, "the idea that all women converts are looking for a nice cocooned lifestyle away from the excesses of Western feminism is not exactly accurate."
Some converts give their decision a political meaning, says Stefano Allievi, a professor at Padua University in Italy. "Islam offers a spiritualization of politics, the idea of a sacred order," he says. "But that is a very masculine way to understand the world" and rarely appeals to women, he adds.
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, though she is wearing longer and looser clothes than she used to.
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, and you could be prey to a lot of different people either acting individually or as members of an organization," 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.
"The saddest conclusion" al-Toma draws from Degauque's death in Iraq is that "a woman who set out on the road to inner peace became a victim of people who set out to use and abuse her."
Low self esteem and easily led.
In other words, a cult following.
The French culture is history ...
I agree. And I will tell you why French women like Islam. Because it is practiced passionately by men and women who care. In Europe, Christianity is spineless and leftist and limp. Women want someone who belives and stands for something...and so do men.
there is an old saw: If you don't teach your child to believe in something they will believe in anything.
Your post nailed it.
Reminds me of hearing Shaq explaining his conversion to Islam due to
(in so many words) Christianity being more about various forms of
dissipation and partying.
I was saying "heck, I must have fallen asleep at my conservative
Christian undergrad college when they covered 'Hedonism For Christians'".
Oh well, folks sometimes convert to religions or "-isms" for the
flimsiest of pretexts.
In so many words, there's your answer... low self esteem. It seems that the type of women attracted to radical Islam as converts have such low self worth that they're willing to be treated like trash in order to get a sense of belonging.
"Why European women are turning to Islam"
Females are atracted to strength and winners. It is not surprising that they are attracted to islam if it is perceived that the islamics are winning or that the Euromales are weaklings. It is the same reason that French women slept with German soldiers when their countrymen were proven to be cowardly and impotent at war.
Have none of these convert women ever seen "Not Without My Child"?
Just a little french humor. Heh.
It isn't a trend....that was my reference to thousands of burning cars. France is being engulfed by those who will destroy them; They abandoned God, and now 'Allah' is stepping up to teach the way to these morally bankrupt people.
No delusion here.....this is the future of America if the ACLU, atheists, and other affiliated groups have their way.
Historical footnote: On which side did the Muslims fight during World War II? You know the answer to that one.
No - there I disagree.
I would argue that they don't have a clue what Christianity is. Indeed, I would argue that almost no one I'm aware of has any idea either, BECAUSE ALMOST NO ONE HAS EVER SAT DOWN AND READ MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE, OR JOHN.
The degree of cultural [in this case biblical] illiteracy on the part of Westerners [Western Europe, Australia/New Zealand, North/South Americans, even church-going USA-ian "Christians"] is absolutely appalling.
And the sad thing is that a child could read M, M, L & J in little more than an afternoon - it's just about impossible to imagine that they [M, M, L & J] could have been more succinct than they were.
Well.....seeing as how European impotence is evident in the bedroom as well as in most other European endeavors, islamowench converts would breed like muzzirats, offering up their ovaries and eggs to better populate the madrassas's and al qaeda training camps with more homicide bombers, auto torchers and targets for American alpha soldiers to send to allah and their 72 Helen Thomas cloned "virgins".
Amen.
And right after the war, frenchmen boldly and courageously attacked the "collaborator" women in a way they'd never try with the Germans. Cowards.
Post 89 was meant for you.
and they will be screaming for US intervention - although I don't see how that plays out.
Terribly sad. And worse - having children with these men who now 'own' those kids (as well as the wife).
You must mean "72 virginians", from the conversation state.
This says more about the death of Christianity than it does about Islam. Those Euros are in deep doo-doo, I pray they WAKE UP!
They are doing it by abdicating their responsibilty to "the village", which placed its idiot in charge.
Any doubt what Hitlary has in mind? No; not Islam, but same principle.
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