Intimate strangers: perspectives on female converts to Islam in Britain

Ramahi, Dorothea A.; Suleiman, Yasir

doi:10.1007/s11562-016-0376-0

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…The subject of conversion has long been one of academic interest, spawning a variety of theories and academic outputs in the fields of psychology (Starbuck, 1897;James, 2015), sociology (Lofland & Stark, 1965), theology (Rambo, 1993) and comparative religion (Underwood, 1925). However, with the growing number of Britons converting to Islam at a time in which the religion has entered the social imaginary through the negative frames of Islamophobia and Orientalism (Allen, 2010;Pędziwiatr, 2015), and with the mainstream media's construction of converts as cultural threats, closely associated with terrorism and prone to radicalism (Spoliar & Brandt, 2020;Ramahi & Suleiman, 2017;Moosavi, 2014;Brice, 2011, 13-16;Sealy, 2017, 198-200), the experiences of contemporary British Muslim converts has attracted some recent scholarly attention.…”

Section: Conversion In the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The nascent body of work in this area has tended, however, to focus upon conversion patterns and processes (Roald, 2004(Roald, , 2012, dynmics of change and continuity (Alyedreessy, 2016), socio-political context (Flower, 2013), identity (Brice, 2011Pędziwiatr, 2017;Sealy, 2021c), race (Moosavi, 2014(Moosavi, , 2015 and gender (Spoliar & Brandt, 2020;Ramahi & Suleiman, 2017). What emerges from over two decades of research into the convert experience following 9/11 is a sharp dissonance between the religious motivations and perspectives spoken about by converts themselves (Sealy, 2021c) and the ways in which they are constructed and theorised about in the discourse.…”

Section: Conversion In the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

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Reading an Islamic epistemology into research: Muslim converts and contemporary religion in Britain

Adebolajo

2022

j. relig. educ.

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This paper presents a tentative argument for the application of a unique methodological approach in researching convert Muslims in contemporary Britain. By throwing into relief some of the theoretical limitations of previous studies on the topic, a case is made for a dialectical model of thinking that foregrounds Islamic epistemology and places it into conversation with a critical posture. The article contributes to a wider discourse within academia about the ability of the contemporary study of religion to reflect the increasingly diverse world of religious and non-religious practice found in contemporary Britain. It is critical of the over enfranchisement of secular readings of Islamic conversion specifically, and orientalist framings of Islamic identity generally. I conclude by asserting insider positionality and the primacy of reflexivity as an approach to ensure intellectual rigour.

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Section: Conversion In the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conversion In the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Reading an Islamic epistemology into research: Muslim converts and contemporary religion in Britain

Adebolajo

2022

j. relig. educ.

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“…Admittedly, these examples might represent the exception rather than the rule: according to Ramahi and Suleiman, family members do not tend to be interested in the content of Islam or the converts’ reason for converting (Ramahi and Suleiman, 2017: 33). There is also some evidence of this in our two documentaries.…”

Section: Framings Of Women’s Conversion As Family Troublemakingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documenting conversion: Framings of female converts to Islam in British and Swiss documentaries

Spoliar

Brandt

2020

European Journal of Women's Studies

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In response to the phenomenon of women converting to Islam, a body of research has emerged, engaging with the question, ‘Why are Western women, raised in liberal contexts, converting to Islam?’ This line of enquiry is not limited to academic literature. In recent years, converts to Islam have faced intense scrutiny in mainstream media across Europe. This article contributes an analysis of documentaries to the study of representations of female converts to Islam, focusing particularly on the British documentary Make Me a Muslim (2014) and the Swiss documentary Les Converties d’Allah (2017). We suggest that comparing these two documentaries illuminates certain common narrative threads in media representations of female converts to Islam across different European contexts. In this article, we firstly situate this research within existing literature on gender and conversion to Islam and outline our approach to the study of documentaries on women’s conversion to Islam. Secondly, we analyse the two documentaries, focusing on their shared concerns, namely gender equality and women’s oppression, and the familial environment of the female convert. We argue that paying attention to how female converts are represented illuminates some of the ways in which European framings of the ‘in-betweenness’ of female converts to Islam create notions of female converts as ‘vulnerable-fanatics’ prone to ‘radicalisation’, and threatened by ‘oppressive’ Islam. We demonstrate how female converts participating in documentaries at times complicate and talk back to apprehensions regarding equality, oppression and radicalisation. Finally, we focus in a similar way on understandings of female converts as ‘troublemakers’ within their family environments. Throughout the analysis, we show how the figure of the female convert as vulnerable-fanatic and as family troublemaker is gendered and interlaced with concerns about essentialised cultural difference and radicalisation.

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“…On the one hand, Özyürek (2009: 102) draws on Viswanathan's (1998: xi) observation that "conversion is arguably one of the most unsettling political events in the life of a society" to show how German Muslims (who left Christianity) and Turkish Christians (who left Islam) are each depicted as threats to national security, and a "challenge to [the] socio-spatial ordering of self and other." Similarly, Ramahi and Suleiman (2017) coin the term "intimate strangers" to reflect the tension between estrangement and emotion experienced by female converts to Islam in the United Kingdom.…”

Section: Theoretical Perspectives and Turning Pointsmentioning

confidence: 99%