Safiyya converted to Islam ten years ago.<1> She is married to a Muslim, works part time and has three children.  She wears hijab sometimes and modest dress.  She has been fascinated by the stories of the Arabian nights since she was a child.  She remembers vividly how, when she stayed in a Muslim house, on holiday with her parents, she was struck by the peacefulness of the household and the gardens. The man went to the mosque while his wife kept the home.  When she could, Safiyya visited some mosques and began to learn Arabic.  

She told me the story of how when she went to university she studied religions and, in order to make friends with young Muslim women, she wore a hijab and was accepted as a ‘sister’.  There was some outrage, especially among the more radical Muslims, when they discovered she was not a Muslim but was praying with them.  She went to the Central Mosque in Regents Park to find out why she couldn’t pray with Muslims and the man she spoke to asked her why she didn’t convert since, according to him, it was as if she was already a Muslim.  He introduced her to his wife, who was a convert, and Safiyya began to learn from her how to pray properly and how she should live as a Muslim.  She made her formal conversion in the Mosque in front of two witnesses.

Margaret is about the same age as Safiyya and used to be a primary school teacher.  Now she is a full time mum.  She too converted about ten years ago, but this time to Roman Catholic Christianity.  She had been a very committed Protestant but when she went to a Catholic college to train to teach she began to be attracted to the Catholic liturgy, and to the sense of fellowship she found.  A small community within the college formed, Margaret met her future husband, a Catholic, there and gradually felt that God was calling her to become a full member of this committed community and wider church.

The Roman Catholic Church has a programme for people who are becoming Catholics called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) and Margaret did a very rushed course in a parish.  The priest didn’t go through how to do confession so to this day she says, ‘I sort of do my own prayers and everything’. The community continued and grew with some members living together and others like Margaret living the values of the community in the world.  The community is charismatic, seeking the power of the Holy Spirit to invigorate worshipping life and to heal.  There is an hour’s prayer time every day, regular, sometimes daily attendance a Mass, and an ‘act of mercy’ at least once a month.  Margaret visits a hostel for young mothers every week.

There are many studies of conversion from different academic perspectives and involving different religious traditions.  I am not here focusing on reasons for conversion, the reliability of converts’ testimony, nor on what it is about a particular religion that makes it attractive to converts.  Instead I am interested in the process, the ‘what happens when someone converts’ and my sources for this are narratives – the stories converts tell about their lives. Probably the most interesting analysis of the stages of conversion comes from Lewis Rambo.  He argues that conversion is always a process and not an event and proposes a stage model that can be used to understand the very complex nature of conversion.  The seven stages are context, crisis, quest, encounter, interaction, commitment and consequences <2> and Rambo sums up the meaning and significance of conversion very well when he writes:

“Through conversion an individual may gain some sense of ultimate worth, and may participate in a community of faith that connects him or her to both a rich past and an ordered and exciting present which generates a vision of the future that mobilizes energy and inspires confidence.  Affiliating with a group and subscribing to a philosophy may offer nurture, guidance, a focus for loyalty, and a framework for action.  Involvement in mythic, ritual and symbolic systems with like-minded people makes it possible to connect with other human beings on deeper intellectual and emotional levels”. <3>

In this paper I argue that when converts tell the stories of their conversion the memories that they share and the ways in which these memories are understood point to both continuities and discontinuities in their lives.  In other words, although converts have deliberately changed their religious identity as they become members of a new tradition, I want to argue that the changes may not be as great or as complete as might be thought and that the idea of ‘translation’ is a useful one to explore the memories and the stories that converts tell.  In the different context of ethnography James Clifford had this to say about travel and translation:

“Cross-cultural translation is never entirely neutral; it is enmeshed in relations of power….One enters the translation process from a specific location, from which one only partly escapes.  In successful translation, the access to something alien – another language, culture or code – is substantial.  Something different is brought over, made available for understanding, appreciation, consumption.  At the same time…the moment of failure is inevitable”. <4>

The Polish Jewish writer Eva Hoffman wrote about her life story in the book Lost in Translation.  Having settled in Canada, she went to Harvard University and towards the end of the book is reflecting about the differences between herself and her American friends.  She could just as well be speaking about the challenge for a convert when she writes:

‘If I don’t want to remain in arid internal exile for the rest of my life, I have to find a way to lose my alienation without losing my self.  But how does one bend towards another culture without falling over, how does one strike an elastic balance between rigidity and self-effacement?  How does one stop reading the exterior signs of a foreign tribe and step into their inwardness, the viscera of their meanings? … if I am not to risk mild cultural schizophrenia, I have to make a shift in the innermost ways. I have to translate myself (my italics).  But if I am to achieve this without becoming assimilated – that is absorbed – by my new world, the transition has to be careful … A true translation proceeds by the motions of understanding and sympathy; it happens in slow increments, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase. <5>

It would be interesting to explore the ways in which these processes connect the convert with group memories, remembrances and representations, but that is not the focus here.  Rather I want to explore some of the insights we might get by taking the idea of ‘translation’ as a key to understand the stories and memories of converts.  I am limiting this discussion to something written by Franz Rosenzweig, a German Jew, about the translation of the Bible, originally published in 1926 and discussed in a rather different context by Oona Eisenstadt in an article in the journal of the American Academy of Religion. <6> My focus here is not explicitly on issues of biblical translation but because I find the ideas about translation productive of potential insights into conversion.  I will discuss four claims made by Rosenzweig and Eisenstadt.  The first, and for me the most relevant claim to understanding the process of conversion is about how biblical translation tries to move the text’s language in the direction of its readers’ language while at the same time being true to the original.  A good translation also moves the language of the reader towards the text.  The other three claims I will give less attention to although I will indicate how they might be relevant to conversion.  These are the claims that a great translation is a unique event, how translation strives towards universality or unity and how translation differs from replacement.

Rosenzweig was writing about Luther’s translation from the Bible into German at a time when to be Jewish in Germany was to be becoming increasingly ‘in danger’. <7> Luther wrote about the need, sometimes, to ‘give the Hebrew some room’ but Eisenstadt argues that for Rosenzweig ‘Luther’s translation does not adequately “make room for the Hebrew” and implicitly questions the willingness of the modern German culture founded on Luther’s translation to make room for the Hebrews, that is, for the Jews’. <8>  In the preface to the Book of Job in editions in 1524 and 1525 Luther wrote about his desire to make his translation German (my emphasis), to ‘produce clear language, comprehensible to everyone, with an undistorted sense and meaning’. <9>  This is obviously one of the key elements of a good translation and the success of Luther’s translation owes much to this quality.  However, if something is to be a translation and not a new work it must also draw the reader in the direction of the original, that is, the Hebrew.  Rosenzweig noted that Luther only felt compelled to do this, to ‘give the Hebrew some room’ for those parts of the Old Testament that Luther believed ‘practised Christ’ and therefore were the living word of God.  Elsewhere, and this is the majority of the Old Testament text, Luther, the translator, sends the ‘Hebrew words packing’. <10>   In this way he failed to do justice to the original, he missed the power of the Hebrew and its significance.  By contrast, in a real translation, says Rosenzweig, the words are ‘a shell beneath which one day something holy, something holy for me, may be revealed’. <11>

A second issue which Rosenzweig discussed was that a great work in one language can, perhaps, be translated into another language only once.  Initially many different attempts to translate are made but no particular one catches on. ‘Then, one day, there occurs a miracle, and the genii of the two languages are wedded.  The time for this hieros gamos, this sacred marriage, is strictly determined; it is the time when the receiving people comes forth of its own desire and in its own utterance to meet the wing beat of the foreign work – the time, that is, when the act of reception is motivated not by curiosity, by interest, by edification, not even by aesthetic pleasure, but by the whole range of a historical movement’. <12>  

Part of the characteristics of a unique translation is that it ‘stride(s) toward the union of the Babel of peoples’. <13> This is a very interesting claim that there is a universalising tendency in a great translation which transcends national and linguistic differences and helps to overcome the confusions between people referred to in the story of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9.  Universalisation can be understood in two different ways.  For Rosensweig, according to Eisenstadt, Luther’s German ‘eats up otherness or others’ and is therefore the language of universal power and control. <14> This is one aspect of a universalising tendency’.  Rosenzweig believed that a new translation would, on the contrary, allow the true universality of the Bible to be heard which would have something to say to everyone.

I have so far discussed three of the ideas in Rosenzweig’s essay: that good translations will at some points pull the language of the text towards the  reader and at others move the language of the reader  towards the text; that a great translation is in some ways like a sacred marriage and thirdly that books and translations can be powerful in their impact on the relations between people.  The fourth idea is more from Eisenstadt than Rosenzweig and it is a reading, prompted by Derrida, of what Rosenzweig said about modern German based on Luther’s Bible as replacement rather than translation.  She argued that this replacement has four aspects.  First modern German is founded on Luther’s Bible which is a translation.  Second this translation is not so much a translation from the original Hebrew but from the Latin Vulgate so ‘the replacement of medieval German by the language of Luther’s translations is founded on the prior replacement of Hebrew by Latin’. <15> The third point is the nature of the replacement.  Hebrew emphatic doubles are replaced by dialectical doubles.  So ‘drew, yes drew’ (Exodus 2:19)  and ‘yet rescued, rescued’ (Exodus 5:23) are not translated to reflect the doubling but Psalm 68:18 where the Hebrew is ambiguous is translated with the dialectical double ‘led captivity captive’.  Eisenstadt argues that with this the human situation has been ‘eliminated and replaced with new conditions, better conditions, perhaps even perfect conditions’. <16> So, fourthly, then, ‘captivity’ is replaced by ‘freedom’, old conditions replaced by new.  This is her reading of Rosenzweig as ‘fleshing out Derrida’s claim that the German people went mad in a mad language and that their madness began in linguistic replacement.  And of course, replacement is a matter of shoving aside and taking over, replacement is the same thing as not making room’. <17>

But what has all of this to do with converts to Islam and Catholicism?  It is the idea of ‘replacement rather than translation’ which I want to pick up on, rather than the details of the replacement, to begin to make some links between translation and conversion.  Forced conversion seems to me to be very like replacement, where ideas and people are shoved aside and taken over.  The efforts of the Spanish Inquisition or of some of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Asia strike me as activities of people who have ‘gone mad in a mad language’  <18>  But of course this is not what we normally think of, in the modern world, as real examples of conversion.  The other ideas I have discussed about translation do shed light on aspects of modern converts’ stories and I will turn to that now.

Let’s begin with the ways in which both conversion and translation have a universalising tendency.  Bearing mind the double aspect of this which I have already discussed, it might seem at first glance that converting to a religion is a way of asserting its superiority over other religions, perhaps even its unique claims to truth.  Converts certainly have a reputation for being fanatical about their new religion and sometimes the stories of converts can make the process sound very easy <19> so I was struck by the title of a recent article ‘the Bumpy Path to Rome - scenes from the life of a struggling convert’. Here the author reflects that although she now calls herself a Catholic, her faith, was formed and informed outside the church.  She continues to have what she calls her ‘Protestant moments’ <20> and recalls a number of incidents when she struggled to understand her new identity as one of ‘Mother Church’s stepchildren‘.  She challenges the notion put forward by some cradle Catholics that converts are ‘more Catholic than the Pope’.  Religious conversion is not the same thing as religious commitment and converts are not necessarily more committed than those who have always been members of that particular faith.  But as Barker and Currie argue, the small number of converts in a particular community are sometimes more visible than the rest.  ‘As outsiders, they may be overtly zealous in conformity to the norms of the group, both to ensure acceptance by the group and because their lack of knowledge of acceptable deviance…behaviour associated with this greater visibility should not necessarily be equated with greater commitment’. <21> It is also possible that the zealousness predates the conversion and I will give an example of this later.

In the western world, many people are moving from one religious tradition to another and this suggests that the boundaries between religions can be fairly easily crossed, that one person can, at different times in their life be sincerely and wholeheartedly both this religion, and then that religion.  I am reminded of the frequently quoted words from John Henry Newman, himself a convert to Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century, that to live is to change, and to have lived well is to have changed often. The reality of conversion suggests that perhaps there is a universal religious or spiritual impulse which we all share, and although we understand the details of what is true and holy in different ways, we will have to be careful about any claims to exclusivity.

I find the idea of a translation occurring at a unique moment particularly apt for understanding my own conversion to become a Roman Catholic in the early 1990s. <22>  Although Rosenzweig was writing in terms of nations I identify with what he wrote about the time when ‘receiving people come forth of its own desire and in its own utterance to meet the wing beat of the foreign work…motivated not by curiosity, by interest, by edification, not even by aesthetic pleasure’. <23>  As a teacher of religious studies I have always been interested in religions and I remember clearly that there were times when I might have been drawn to become a Jew or a Buddhist or even a seriously practising Anglican which is the tradition in which I was brought up.  My interest in them certainly involved the attractions Rosenzweig listed.  But in fact it was only when I went to St Mary’s University College to lecture there that the situation, the historical moment, was right for me to convert.  I was particularly attracted by the quality of the people I was meeting, and by the strength and creativity of the Catholic feminist theology I encountered and by the spiritual traditions of the Church.  To put it in the language of the first idea about translation, I was ready to begin to translate the Catholic ‘text’ into my language.  <24>

It is the usefulness of this first idea of translation for understanding conversion which is the topic of the rest of the article.  If we think of the new religion as the original text, then the convert comes with a ‘language’ with which the translation has to be made. There are inverted commas around the word ‘language’ because of course it includes memories, culture, education, identities and all the other things which make up the experiential distinctiveness of the actual person who converts.  The convert is engaged in writing a version of the new religion, a translation, with and in his or her own life. 

And if a good translation moves the language of the text towards the reader and the language of the reader towards the text, the religion and the convert are both changed but not out of recognition.  British converts to Islam, for example remain British while in some ways Islam in Britain becomes distinctively British. Kate Zebiri makes this point in her recent book when she argues that ‘converts are making a disproportionate contribution to the indigenization of Islamic practice, thought and discourse in the West’. <25>

 Michael Young, for example, writes:

“When I, as a westerner and former practising Christian became a Muslim, I became just that – a Muslim, a believer in the religion of Islam….I am the same person with the same name, wearing the same western style of clothing (although now respecting the modest dress code of Islam) and eating the same style of food (although now making sure that my meat is halal)”. <26> Interestingly, Abdal-Hakim Murad, another convert, has argued that Islam is in fact particularly well suited to the British. <27> In the language of translation, Murad says that Islam translates very easily and well into the lives of British men and women. 

This may not be how conversion to Islam is always perceived though.  Karin van Nieuwkerk interviewed twenty four female Dutch converts to Islam, and some of their friends and family, to try to understand how this process is understood in a context where Islam is perceived as ‘the ultimate cultural other‘.  <28>   Some of these women made a radical break with their former lifestyles, taking a Muslim name, wearing a veil and limiting their social contacts with non-Muslims.  Others were not outwardly recognisable as Muslims and treated their religion as a largely private matter.  Van Nieuwkerk argued that ‘as long as they do not wear a headscarf, the new Muslimas seem still to be considered Dutch…although among friends and relatives their conversion will be cause for problems or concerns.  However, as far as relations between men and women are concerned, ’Whereas most converts see their relationship with their husbands as balanced and equal, their Dutch surrounding insistently interprets their marital relationship as an unequal one’ and ‘regardless of the converts’ behaviour, the Dutch environment will interpret their behaviour as submissive because they are Muslim now’. <29> In the Netherlands, then, according to these claims, Muslim identity can never be translated into Dutch, as the two reified cultures have no overlap.

In contrast, Safiyya commented that she, and many of the converts she knows are ‘middle class Europeans’ and can think for themselves.  Their ideas mature as they learn more about Islam and as they make the religion, in some sense, their own.  When I asked if she had been on hajj or umrah she dismissed the idea immediately, ‘No! Too many people’. For her, this is not an essential part of being a Muslim.  She does not buy halal meat either.  She wouldn’t eat pork but believes that the Islamic principles are to do with humane treatment of animals and reverence for God as creator.  She believes that these principles are put into practice much more seriously by organic meat producers than by Asian butchers.

We can make sense of this in the terms proposed by Daniele Hervieu-Leger who discusses the way in which religious identity is no longer ‘given’ but has to be constructed.  She suggests that this construction uses the symbolic resources to which we have access and that identity ‘is analysed, in this perspective, as the result (always precarious and likely to be called into question again) of a trajectory of identification which realizes itself over the long haul’. <30> She wasn’t writing about converts but the relevance of what she says is striking since they are (re)constructing their religious identity in a heightened and more self-conscious way, perhaps, than other religious people. <31> Safiyya is using the symbolic resources to which she already has access.  This is the ‘language’ converts bring and with which they translate the new religion.

Conversion to Catholicism in the west doesn’t usually have the same national and ethnic aspects to it that conversion to Islam may have; the majority of Catholic converts in Britain were at least nominal Protestants before their journey ‘Romeward’.  As Ben told his story he talked a lot about how becoming a Catholic actually enabled him to be less zealous and visible than he had been.  Now in his mid forties, Ben had been a Salvation Army officer, following in the footsteps of his parents.  Gradually he became aware that he didn’t really believe what he was proclaiming from the platform.  Reading the Catholic Catechism clarified and crystalised his previously blurred thinking and living as a Catholic didn’t require superhuman efforts at living a perfect life.  Ben recalled how he had been sitting in church beside the station of the cross where Jesus falls for the third time. “I was moved by that visual image”, Ben said, “moved by the fact that I could come in to the church, no one would come up and ask anything, it was just private, peaceful… no need to pretend to be anything other than what you are.  No need to show off, speak in tongues, be someone who has done great deeds during the week. You don’t have to prove yourself”.  Ben is translating the new faith in his own terms.  He says, “I feel I’m a Catholic all the time and the religious side doesn’t demand more than I am.  I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not.”

Some of the real complexities of translating one’s life appear in the memories of another Muslim convert, Suzanne.  In her early forties, and now an events manager for a charity, she has always been searching for spiritual nourishment and for most of her adult life she has explored Sufism, Muslim spirituality, in different forms and places.  What she describes as her moment of conversion took place in India, at the shrine of a saint.   It was the first time she heard the Qur’an recited and she was nearly in tears as she told me,

“I’d never been so moved by anything in my life … the words felt familiar, it felt like I knew the language …my heart was in heaven…such a feeling of coming home, such a powerful feeling of knowing what it was all about.”

Some Muslim converts prefer the term ‘revert’ and say that they are not becoming something new and different but realise they had really always been Muslims. Conversion to Islam, unlike the RCIA process is very simple; one becomes a Muslim by ’taking the shahadah’. The convert declares in front of witnesses that ’I bear witness that there is no god but God and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God’.  There is no word in Arabic for ’conversion’ as such; becoming a Muslim involves ’submitting’ to God and to God’s will. <32> Suzanne took her shahadah in Turkey so that she could continue to study with Sufis there and she says she sort of knew at the time that it wasn’t the right thing. ‘The Sheikh said, ‘Do you believe in the oneness of Allah’.  I said, ‘Yes’.  ‘Do you believe that Muhammad was his Prophet?’  ‘Yes’. ‘Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?’  I looked at him and thought, ‘Have you seen the cellulite on my thighs? ‘Resurrection of the body’ - you’ve got to be joking’ - like a split second.  I said, ‘Yes’’.

On coming back to London she found a non-Muslim Sufi Sheikh whom she continues to follow. <33> Many Muslims will not accept her practice of Sufism as authentic and although for many years she practised as a Muslim she now says that being a Muslim is ’such a heavy identity, especially as a convert.  It rattles me somewhere to say, ’I’m a Muslim’ because of my commitment to a non-Muslim teacher’.  And so Suzanne is gradually letting her Muslim identity go, but is wholeheartedly committed to the Sufi path.   After the interview she said that this was the first time she’d told the story of her journey and she had realized that she would no longer call herself a Muslim.

When I asked her whether her values had changed through this life journey there was a stunned silence before she said, ‘Completely, everything has changed, nothing is the same…I feel almost unrecognisable to myself…All I care about is more consciousness of God’.  This suggests a complete discontinuity with her earlier self but I was very struck by the continuity with one of the significant memories she has.  When she was seven or eight she was given the book, ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ as a present and read it seventeen times.  She said, ‘This was the only thing I got in my childhood that had any spiritual nourishment in it at all.  It was all I had; it said something’.  Suzanne has translated both Islam and Sufism in her own way to meet her spiritual longing.

She is also helping to make Sufism more British. She says, ‘it’s my soul’s destiny to be a bridge … I understand in retrospect my conversion as the destiny of my soul - to belong to my teacher who is not a Muslim, but to bring diverse groups together…asking God - if you can use me to bring some of the beauty of Islam into other people’s hearts - I’d give my life to do that.’

We can also see the two way process of translation operating in the story Margaret told of her conversion to a very committed Catholicism from a very committed Protestant belief; this is the example of zeal I mentioned earlier. She describes the attraction of the new religion, the ‘original text’  ‘I liked the liturgy, the beauty of the services … coming from a tradition which is very sparse…You just sit around a plain table with bread and wine, to somewhere where they have icons and incense and the idea of beauty is important, the beauty of God’.

But for her the change was very gradual.  ‘I feel I deepened as a person through the change, and that’s for me the important thing…It’s given me a richness that perhaps I didn’t have before’.  A priest told her she would spend all her life becoming a Catholic and she said that a lot of who she is, is still quite Protestant.  ‘That’s just where I am.  I accept myself for who I am and I’m not going to try to become something I’m not.’ But the original text is also pulled in the direction of the convert.  Margaret is having an impact on the understanding of the Catholic charismatic community she is part of, helping it to be more ecumenical so that people relate positively with non-Catholic Christians. ‘We’ve learned lots from Protestants, she says, ‘lots’.

I have argued in this paper that ideas about translation can illuminate our understanding of the stories converts tell.  Let me end by returning to Rosenzweig.  Towards the end of his essay he wrote about ‘the religious compulsions that directs all real translation of Scripture in every detail.  Again: a different religious hope, to which all that is profane in scripture – and what is not profane! – is only a shell beneath which one day something holy, something holy for me may be revealed’. <34>  If converts really do have ‘translated lives’ then this is because they find in the new religion a shell beneath which something holy may be revealed.

 

References

<1> This paper draws partly on extended, face to face, interviews with four Muslim and Catholic converts that took place between 2001 and 2008.  Direct quotations are taken from the transcripts of the interviews.  Names and details of the interviewees have been altered to preserve their anonymity.  It also uses some examples from written sources.

 

<2> L Rambo Understanding Religious Conversion. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) p17

 

<3> L Rambo Understanding Religious Conversion p2

 

<4> J Clifford Routes: Travel and Translation in the late Twentieth Century. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997) pp182-183

 

<5> E Hoffman Lost in Translation. (London: Vintage, 1998) pp209;211.

 

<6> F Rosenzweig ‘Scripture and Luther’ in M. Buber and F Rosezweig  Scripture and Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana Press 1994 (first published in 1926) pp47-69 and  O Eisenstadt ‘Making Room for the Hebrew: Luther, Dialectics and the Shoah’ in Journal of the American Academy of Religion Vol 69 (3), pp551-575.  It was Eisenstadt’s article that first led me to consider the possibilities of ideas about translation for understanding conversion.

 

<7> F Rosenzweig ‘Scripture and Luther’ p56

 

<8> O Eisenstadt  ‘Making Room for the Hebrew’ pp551-552

 

<9> Quoted in Rosenzweig ‘Scripture and Luther’ p49

 

<10> Quoted in Rosenzweig ‘Scripture and Luther’ p50

 

<11> F Rosenzweig ‘Scripture and Luther’ p66

 

<12> F Rosenzweig ‘Scripture and Luther’ p53. Luther’s translation is, of course, just such a unique occurrence according to Rosenzweig and its impact on protestant Germany has been immense as the founding text of modern German and the great German translation of the bible. 

 

<13> F Rosenzweig ‘Scripture and Luther’ p54

 

<14> O Eisenstadt  ‘Making Room for the Hebrew’ pp554-555

 

<15> O Eisenstadt  ‘Making Room for the Hebrew’ pp561

 

<16> O Eisenstadt  ‘Making Room for the Hebrew’ pp558

 

<17> O Eisenstadt  ‘Making Room for the Hebrew’ pp561-562

 

<18>  It is worth making the point here that Islam was not ‘spread by the sword’, although obviously the Arab, and then the Muslim Empires were.  The religion spread much more slowly, and there were few forced conversions.  See for example C. Norton, ‘Lust, greed, torture and identity: narrations of conversion and the creation of the early modern renegade’ in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 29 (2), 2009, pp259-268.

 

<19> See for example P Wilson ed. Living Faith Stories ( London: Catholic Missionary Society, 2001).

 

<20> J.H. Raber ‘The Bumpy Path to Rome’ in Commonweal January 14,2005, pp15-17, p15.

 

<21> IR Barker and RF Currie ‘Do converts always make the most committed Christians?’ in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion Vol. 24 (3), 1985, pp305-313, p312.

 

<22> Of course my own interest in the academic study of converts comes partly from trying to understand my own religious journey.

 

<23> F Rosenzweig ‘Scripture and Luther’ p53

 

<24> It was a ‘unique moment’.  I don’t think that if I was encountering the Roman Catholic Church in the same fresh way today I would be drawn in the way I was then – but that is another story!

 

<25> K. Zebiri British Muslim Converts (Oxford: One World, 2008)

 

<26> M. Young, ‘frustrations of a convert’ in Q News June , 2001, pp30-31

 

<27> http://ds.dial.pipex.com/masud/ISLAM/ahm/british/htm An article by Abdal-Hakim Murad called ‘British and Muslim’, based on a lecture given to a conference of British converts, September 17^th 1997.  Accessed 3.7.01.

 

<28> K Van Nieuwerk, ‘Veils and wooden clogs don’t go together’ in Ethnos, Vol 69 (2), 2004, pp229-246, p229.

 

<29> Van Nieuwerk, ‘Veils and wooden clogs don’t go together’ pp236; 241

 

<30> D Hervieu-Leger, ‘The transmission and formation of socio-religious identities in modernity’ in International Sociology, Vol. 13 (2), 1998, pp213-228, p218.

 

<31> Alan Aldridge used her model to analyse disaffiliation from different types of religion . A Aldridge, ‘The sovereign consumer? Religious allegiance and disaffiliation in a detraditionalised world’ in LJ Francis and JK Yaacov eds. Joining and Leaving Religion. (Leominster: Gracewing, 2000) pp9-19.

 

<32> Y. Dutton ‘Conversion to Islam: the Qur’anic paradigm’ in C Lamb and MD Bryant eds.: Religious Conversion. (London: Cassell, 1999) pp151-165, pp151;153.  I recall at a conference in 1992, Bashir Ahmad Dultz, a German convert for many years and a Sufi sheikh, saying that the whole world is Muslim because no one cannot be subject to the will of God since God created the world.  He drew a distinction between this and those who are ‘believers’ and members of the umma, the world-wide community of Muslims.  This universalistic claim which was certainly meant inclusively also reflects the fact that while it is easy to convert to Islam, it is not so easy the other way.  Apostasy in certain circumstances traditionally carries the death penalty and there is a belief that Islam is the final and complete version of the truth so that nothing could be better Y Dutton ‘Conversion to Islam: the Qur’anic paradigm’ p161.

 

<33> For very helpful discussion of the many different forms of Sufism in Britain, including those who teach a form of what could be called ‘universal Sufism’ rather than Muslim Sufism’ see R. Geaves: The Sufis of Britain (Cardiff: Cardiff Academic Press, 1999).

 

<34> F Rosenzweig ‘Scripture and Luther’ p66