Conversions

I must admit that, after having read Kose’s piece, I was rather frustrated by the fact that Gaudeul’s piece did not entail an analysis of the same nature. In retrospect, however, I think that the disparity between the two analyses highlighted the notable and significant difference between the nature of the conversions to and from each religion.

It is immediately evident that the two data sets were not equivalent: Kose’s analysis examined people in what is considered the “West” (with all of the social and cultural baggage that entails) who converted to Islam. The particular concerns, struggles, feelings, and needs that these Western people experienced (which were resolved by conversion to Islam) were the direct result of a distinct cultural milieu that had no parallel in the cultures of the Muslim-majority countries from which Gaudeul pulled his examples. Likewise, the cultural milieu in which the Muslim converts to Christianity were raised gave rise to few of the existential questions and issues that prompted the Westerners that Kose studied to look towards another faith.

Similarly, those who converted to Islam were more likely to have come from irreligious or nominally religious backgrounds; and even those who did claim to come from a solidly religious background (like Janet the former Catholic p. 88 and John the religion teacher p. 98-101) were terribly uninformed about the religion that they professed faith in, making elementary mistakes in their understanding of the Christian faith. Janet, for example, claimed that Catholicism allowed no way back to grace from the lifestyle she was leading and she was condemned to hell, apparently completely unaware of the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation. John, likewise, made serious methodological errors in his study of the Gospel of Luke, coming to absurd conclusions about the synoptic Gospels, the dating of biblical texts, and manuscript studies that would be glaringly obvious to anyone that is remotely well-versed in any of these fields. It seems, then, that few, if any, of those who converted to Islam were very religious (or well-versed in their religion of origin).

This is in marked contrast to those converts to Christianity, who were raised in an Muslim milieu in which Islamic identity, thought, teaching, and practice were predominant. The social networks that they were a part of were largely intact, and it did not seem that personal, emotional, or situational problems are what inspired these conversions. In that sense, the two analyses are difficult to compare, and that is if comparison is even possible at all.

Perhaps my desire was to see a quantitative analysis from Gaudeul like that of Kose. But then again, perhaps the sheer difference in the nature of these conversions would make a comparison between the two impossible altogether, even if such a quantitative analysis could be done on Muslim converts to Christianity. Perhaps the people who convert to Islam have a fundamentally different religious and cultural paradigm from those who are seeking to convert to Christianity.

I would have been particularly interested to see data on Eastern Christians in Muslim-majority countries who converted to Islam. Likewise, I would like to see statistics on people in the West converting to more ‘austere’ or ‘rigid’ forms of Christianity than the Church of England with which they had been raised and compare that data to Kose’s.