The Islamification of Britain: record numbers embrace Muslim faith

英國皈依穆斯林的入教故事

The number of Britons choosing to become Muslims has nearly doubled in the past decade, according to one of the most comprehensive attempts to estimate how many people have embraced Islam.

Following the global spread of violent Islamism, British Muslims have faced more scrutiny, criticism and analysis than any other religious community. Yet, despite the often negative portrayal of Islam, thousands of Britons are adopting the religion every year.

Estimating the number of converts living in Britain has always been difficult because census data does not differentiate between whether a religious person has adopted a new faith or was born into it. Previous estimates have placed the number of Muslim converts in the UK at between 14,000 and 25,000.

But a new study by the inter-faith think-tank Faith Matters suggests the real figure could be as high as 100,000, with as many as 5,000 new conversions nationwide each year.

The feminist case for the veil

西方穆斯林服飾議題

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a woman who prides herself on bridging worlds, denouncing racism at west London dinner parties while opposing religious bigotry down at the mosque. A committed anti-racism campaigner, she has been an almost-lone Muslim voice in the mainstream British media arguing against immigration scaremongering and retaliating against sweeping stereotypes of Muslims as anti-British terrorists. Her latest book, Refusing the Veil, part of a series entitled “provocations” for Biteback Publishing, is a passionate treatise against what she – as a Muslim, feminist and liberal – considers to be submission to a misogynistic symbol of women’s inferiority.

“The veil,” she argues, “in all its permutations, is indefensible and unacceptable”.

But this is no theological treatise aimed at challenging the textual validity of “veils”, though Alibhai-Brown does also question that. It is a fundamentally political treatise on the place of Islam and Muslims in Europe, in which Alibhai-Brown contends that Muslim women are exploiting “the weaknesses and vulnerabilities at the core of free societies”.