Posted on 09/01/2006 4:43:03 PM PDT by aculeus
LONDON: Shoe-bomber Richard Reid; 7/7 bomber Germaine Lindsay; August 10’s Trans-Atlantic airline alleged conspirators Don Stewart-Whyte, Oliver Savant and Brian Young. All would fail the racial profiling test to screen potential terrorists; all are converts to Islam. So, is the new face of Islam in the UK increasingly white or at least non-Asian and non-typical?
"Yes and no," says Batool-al Toma, head of the New Muslim Project, set up 12 years ago in the English Midlands city of Leicester as Britain’s first organised one-stop shop for new converts to Islam.
Al-Toma, formerly Mary Geraghty, is a white Irishwoman who converted to Islam 25 years ago. She admits to TOI that "the numbers of white converts have been steadily rising, my work has increased and the sheer volume of people coming to me every week has risen in the last 12 years".
But she disputes the easy media shorthand that sees British Islam as increasingly white and dangerously reflected in Reid, Lindsay, Stewart-Whyte, Savant and Young. "Reid and Lindsay were not of a white background," she points out, "and the others are not typical of the white people who convert to Islam." More crucially, says al-Toma, the New Muslim Project is now busy creating a separate programme of induction for Hindu and Sikh converts to Islam.
"Till now, Hindu and Sikh converts mostly turned to the British Pakistani community but I now realise they have specific issues to do with family and we need to support them."
Al-Toma estimates that Britain currently boasts 20,000 new converts. Though just a tiny fraction of Britain’s officially endorsed 1.6 million strong Muslim population, it is still 6,000 more than the estimate offered by her colleague at the Lecister Islamic Foundation, Yahya Birt.
Whatever the figures, there is broad agreement that Islam’s growth in Britain is possibly the fastest anywhere in the western world with all the attendant headaches for racial profiling and airline passenger stereotyping. American writer Robert Ferrigno, whose newest bestseller ‘Prayers for the Assassin’ imagines an Islamic United States in 2036, complete with Jihad Cola as the number one drink, says "mass conversions may involve relatively few ‘true’ spiritual conversions. Most believers go along to get along". But he insists that his novel makes “an imaginative, not statistical leap, positing a future where spiritually-bereft Westerners, their society rent by economic and social decay, were drawn to the spiritual certainty of a fundamentalist faith like Islam".
Though Ferrigno’s novel may be a leap too far, many believe Islam’s growth in the West is exemplified by British converts such as Birt, the 38-year-old son of the BBC’s former director-general, who made headlines when he turned to Islam 16 years ago just four years after pop star Cat Stevens sensationally announced he had become Yusuf Islam.
In recent years, former British cabinet minister Frank Dobson’s son became Joe Ahmed Dobson and respected Cambridge academic Timothy Winter took the name of Abdul Hakim Murad.
Birt’s estimates were based on an extrapolation of the number of people who said they were Islamic converts in the 2001 census in Scotland (the census in England and Wales did not ask about conversion).
But al-Toma, who shepherds new and potential white people into the Islamic faith, says her estimate is based on the volume of new converts who pass through her hands. “It now approximates at least 10 every month.’’ And rising.
So much so that the New Muslim Project has finally established five affiliate groups dotted around England and Scotland to deal with the growing traffic of converts. And al-Toma and her Project find themselves in the firing line every time a Reid, Lindsay, Stewart-Whyte, Savant or Young joins the lengthening list of British extremist converts.
[still more at link]
Actually, all converts to Islam, especially malcontent westerners white & black -- should be near the top of any 'profile' list.
"were drawn to the spiritual certainty of a fundamentalist faith like Islam"
certainly going to hell... yeah!
"It now approximates at least 10 every month"
Mulim = Lie
And the number of muslims who have converted to Christianity? I don't know what it is in England, but it's tens of thousands here in the US.
Islam : the Hitler ideology of our time.
Nauseating.
Once again, another "Islam is Growing" story including inflated numbers, with no scientific proof, like the earlier claim this week in the Washington Post that there are 6 million muslims in this country. The other day I heard that muslims make up 1.5 billion of the world population (which would mean a %50 increase in 5 years people). This is another one of thier weapons. Don't buy it.
Sooo....
120 Muslim converts a year is big news....
(yawn)
And the people in charge of these new converts are women.
Ummmmm???????
Second class Converts?
Just a thought.
translation: "Islam used to be, as we stated before, Africa's primary religion...there was around 30 countries that write in arabic , currently the muslim population in Africa dropped to 316 million. Half of that number is of the North African Maghrib arab countries who are muslims anyway. So Africa that we are talking about, the non arabic, now has a muslim population of only 150 million , and if we knew that africa's population is around 1 billion people, then this is for sure a far less ratio/percentage than what it used to be in the beginings of the 20's century....as opposed to this ; The catholic population has risen from around a million of people in 1902 To 329882000 now, lets make it nearer and say 330 million . As for how this happened, Africa has now a million and half a million churches. The number of the members of these churches 46 million people. Because of the christian missionaries every hour islam loses 667 muslims convert to Christianity, every Day 16000 , every year 6 MILLION."
Algerian berbers are turning towards Christianity:
http://www.meforum.org/article/104
"Christianity Is Life" The Islamist campaign of violence in Algeria has turned some Muslims, especially Berbers, away from Islam and toward Christianity, reports the Algiers daily Al-Yawm in late December 2000, as reprinted in Courrier International, January 4-10, 2001, p. 29. The following extracts are translated from the French.
In Kabylie, people of all ages are converting to Christianity. ....
The deterioration of the image of Islam during the crisis has played its part in this rise of conversions to Christianity and the adoption of its principles. What is happening and what has happened in Algeria, such as the massacres and killings in the name of Islam,1 has [sic] led many, when asked what the difference, in their view, was between Islam and Christianity, to declare: "Christianity is life, Islam is death."
Major props to your son in Iraq(again).
Raise my best bourbon to him, for I am 1 year too old to rejoin my Brothers...
Sigh....
The Muslims in the West
Charles Gai Eaton (Hassan Abdul Hakeem)
http://www.tanzeem.org/resources/articles/articles/musinwest.htm
I am speaking, however, of a generation which, in the nature of things, will soon die out. It is the young who matter; the second and the third generations. I have been told (I do not know whether this is true or not) that, in the United States, some forty percent of the young are leaving Islam altogether. That is disturbing, and one hopes that some will come back when they grow older, but there seems little that can be done at present about this situation.
Yeah... And conversions to the KKK were popular here at one time. Just ask Democrat Senator Robert Byrd.
http://muslim-quotes.netfirms.com/islamgrows.html
The Christain Missionary Menace
http://www.angelfire.com/ny/dawahpage/tm.html
(islamic site)
(Quote: )
"... in these countries the number who has embraced Christianity amounts to legion. The old myth that the Muslims are staunch believers and cannot be converted to any other religion holds no water. Modern missionaries with their vast resources and foreign aid have exploded this myth. They are scoring great successes in this field."
(much more interesting quotes in the article)
http://muslim-quotes.netfirms.com/islamgrows.html
image at link of document in arabic.
don't know why it disappeared like that, but here is is.
I wonder what muzzie name Prince Charles had taken??
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