LONDON,SATURDAY 04.10.08
The new face of Islam
By Nick Compton
At first she tried to resist. She did not want this to happen. She was not that sort of person. After all, there were no gaps in her life, no spiritual ache, she did not need support or direction. But she kept reading and it kept making sense.
‘I had absolutely no expectation or desire to end up where I am,’ she says. ‘It was almost with trepidation that I kept turning the pages and the trepidation just increased. I kept thinking: “OK, where’s the flaw? Where’s the bit that doesn’t make sense?” But it never came. And then it was like: “Oh no, I can see where this is leading. This is disastrous. I don’t want to be a Muslim!”
Caroline Bate is 30 years old, blonde, blue-eyed and pretty, with a soft Home Counties accent. She has a degree from Cambridge (she studied Russian and German before switching to management studies) and works for an investment bank in the City. She is Middle England’s dream daughter or daughter-in-law. And though she has yet to make her formal declaration of faith in Allah and the prophet Mohammed – a two-line pledge called the Shahada – she considers herself Muslim. She ticked the box on a form recently. It felt good, she says.
Caroline is not alone. Though data is hard to come by, several London mosques have been reporting an increase in the number of converts to Islam, especially since 11 September. Like Caroline, many of these converts are from solid middle-class backgrounds, have successful careers, enjoy active social lives and are fundamentally happy with their lot.
This is not a new trend, however. Matthew Wilkinson, a former head boy of Eton, became Tariq, when he converted to Islam in 1993. Jonathan Birt, son of Lord Birt, late of the BBC and now the government’s transport guru, converted in 1997. The son and daughter of Lord Justice Scott also converted and Joe Ahmed Dobson, the 26-year-old son of the former Health Secretary Frank Dobson, has recently and, somewhat reluctantly, emerged as the voice of new Muslim converts in Britain. But it is a trend that has been pushed along by recent events. So far it has gone largely unnoticed, as the press concentrates on some of the more colourful characters that 11 September has thrown up.
Since 11 September, the luridly painted poster boys of British Islam have been radical clerics such as Abu Hamza al-Masri, the steel-clawed, milky-eyed so-called ‘mad mullah’ of Finsbury Park mosque. Here are Victorian villains, fiendish emissaries of some ancient and foreign evil, straight out of an Indiana Jones movie.
Their followers are blank-eyed drones like Richard Reid, packing his high-tops with high explosives. Or James McLintock, the ‘Tartan Taliban’. There are lost boys, dislocated and dysfunctional, petty thieves preyed on in South London prisons and young offenders’ institutions by fakir Fagins who forge an untempered anger into a righteous ire and provide it with a target. (Three imams working in British prisons have been suspended since 11 September for making ‘inappropriate remarks’ about the terrorist attacks.)
But that is a sideshow, a compelling melodrama played out beyond the fringes of Islamic culture in this country. And while it might be stretching a point – and answering caricature with caricature – to insist that a demure English rose is the exemplar of the modern British convert to Islam, Caroline Bate is certainly more representative than Richard Reid. Read the rest of this entry »
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