It seems as a white convert, you can’t really do right. If your not very conservitive, your sabatoging the religion with your horrible debauched western ways. If your conservitive, your holding the entier Ummah back with your attension seeking mimicing. I’m so bloody tired of people making the following cousal connection for better or worse:

White convert=rejecting all that is western and therfore “haraam”(wheather negitive or positive depends on the speaker)–Muslim Ideal/Muslim Threat–Sign of Islam’s ascendency or regression.

What boggeles my mind is this….there are how many billion Muslims in this world? In how many countries? From how many cultures? Islam was spread becouse of radid conversition (with various motivations). God knows I have been to many many conferaces where the speaker had anouced that (prepare for cliche) “Islam is the worlds fastest growing religion”. As one can imagine, conversion contributes to this. So if this is such an aknologed and highly toted fact and conversion plays such a big role in Islamic history, why is this still sensationalised so much? Can’t this just be seen as a normitive religious growth? Why do we have to make it so polemic?

What do white converts want? The be seen as MUSLIMS before CONVERTS. To not have their deep and higly personal religious convictions made into a political tug of war.

DISCLAIMER: This only applies to white converts. If you are a convert of color, be perpared to be overlooked. By everyone.

Good post. As a white convert myself, I can testify to how hard it can be and the pressures put on us from all directions.

This lady moans a lot and seems to want to place blame everywhere and accept none of it herself. What has SHE done to help the plight of converts to Islam? If she can so readily point out what she thinks the issues are, why isnt she doing anything about it?

Many converts to “burn out” and drop the religion after a few years. This is for many reasons, but some of them are things the Muslim community itself could, and should address.

Can I just say I’m doing a lot of head nodding to these comments, and lol-ing at Lol Muslima’s.

Yakoub – Pfft. That can’t be true, that sounds far too heartfelt for a bunch of silly white girls playing dress up. /sarcasm.

Bingo.

The transition into a new community is always going to be a time of high anxiety.. but yeah the (over)zealous brothers/sisters are always the most aggressive in dawah and often make a big impression on new converts who are eager to learn and also very vulnerable to pressure from within a community they’re still trying to gain acceptance into. It’s not their own fault.

I have a feeling there is pretty large percentage of converts that end up burning out and leaving Islam after a year or two. Jeffrey Lang has made it a point to talk about this a lot.

What Muslims like Alibhai-Brown and non-Muslims need to understand, though, is that the stigmatizing treatment of Muslims in the media does 2 things: it puts the community into a more defensive – and always conservative – stance, and it causes many progressive Muslims to spend their time dealing with outside prejudice, leaving them exhausted when faced with the problems inside the community.

Well it’s not the white Muslimahs or the converts who are bringing polygamy back. Everyone looks at converts and says “oh, you’re such better muslims than us born muslims.” (not true) But the idea is that Western converts are of a different culture than born Muslims. Born Muslims are usually (not always because some are now the children of converts in the West) coming from other cultures to the Western culture while converts are coming from the Western culture and going to the Islamic culture. Sometimes they slip up and end up confusing culture with religion.

Anyway this is too long for a comment nehow, but the point is that those who will accept polygamy has probably something to do with conversion, but more to do with position in life, and economic status.

Good coverage MMW.