Why christians converts to islam

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Share this link:. Besheer Mohamed is a senior researcher focusing on religion at Pew Research Center. Elizabeth Podrebarac Sciupac is a former senior researcher focusing on religion research at Pew Research Center. New estimates show U. Muslim population continues to grow. Muslims and Islam: Key findings in the U.

Follow Us. So, I didn't drop out of an old life to find a new one. But Islam has strengthened my ethics and morals, and given a good foundation for our family life. You sometimes feel like a "trophy" because you are white. If you go to a gathering, everyone wants to help and teach you and take you under their wing, up to the point where I found it suffocating.

But, mostly, a lot of conversion problems are human problems, women's problems. I was the talk of the student Islamic society when I became a Muslim: happy-go-lucky, trendy, outspoken me. After meeting Muslims at university, I'd become intrigued. I started studying Islam and taking heed of the Qur'an's teachings. Two years later, at 23, I took my shahadah Islamic profession of faith.

The fact that my family were Sikhs intrigued many Muslims. I was handed many sisters' phone numbers and people wanted to meet me. Then it all went quiet: the sisters were too busy. It hurt; I was alone. I am single, 26, and live at home with my family who are non-practising Punjabi Sikhs. My family and Sikh friends have yet to learn of my conversion, but I am not hiding my copies of the Qur'an.

I want my family to see that I'm studying Islam with a fine-tooth comb, so they'll know I've made a well-informed decision; Islam has given me a sense of independence and serenity, I've become more accepting of what life throws at me and less competitive. But I feel they will be disappointed, somewhat embarrassed and also scared that the world will treat me unfairly if I'm Muslim. Becoming a Muslim is not easy: people say hurtful things about your faith, and it's a struggle to fit in with pious-looking sisters who wear traditional Arabic dress.

It's also hard to kiss goodbye to nights out in bars with friends. I loved to party; I still do. I take pride in my appearance: I wear makeup, dresses and heels. Initially, I went in all guns blazing and covered every inch of my body. I used to go to work in the hijab and remove it as I drove back into my home city. It was as if I was leading a double life and that became tiresome and stressful, so I stopped.

I would like to marry sooner rather than later, but how will I ever find a suitable husband? Most Muslims find mingling with women haram [forbidden by Islamic law].

Because I am not fully out in the open, Muslim men won't know I exist. Around 5, British people convert to Islam every year — and most of them are women. Six of them talk about prejudice, peace and praying in car parks.

Ioni Sullivan: 'In my heart, I began to consider myself a Muslim. Ioni Sullivan, local authority worker, 37, East Sussex I'm married to a Muslim and have two children. We know about these martyrs thanks to a large but understudied corpus of hagiographical texts written in a variety of medieval languages, including Greek, Arabic, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian.

The martyrs were participants in this broader culture of conversion, but as their deaths make clear, they were also dissenters from this culture, individuals who protested Islamisation and attempted to reverse the tide of religious change.

The first and largest group consisted of Christians who converted to Islam but reneged and returned to Christianity. Because apostasy came to be considered a capital offence under Islamic law, they faced execution if found guilty. The second group was made up of Muslim converts to Christianity who had no prior experience of their new religion.

The third consisted of Christians who were executed for blasphemy; that is, publicly reviling the Prophet Muhammad, usually before a high-ranking Muslim official.

The martyrs were small in number — not more than around discrete individuals between Spain and Iraq — a testament to the relative absence of systematic persecution at the time. As a collection of texts, the lives of the martyrs represent one of the richest bodies of evidence for understanding conversion in the early medieval Middle East.

Please update your browser. A list of the most popular browsers can be found below. Diddy — but a transformation of heart, mind and soul. I used to be Lew Alcindor, the pale reflection of what white America expected of me. I should know. Although I had already achieved a certain degree of national fame as a basketball player, I tried hard to keep my personal life private.

Celebrity made me nervous and uncomfortable. Over the next few years, I started to understand it better. Not only did I have the usual teenage angst of becoming a man, but I was also playing for one of the best college basketball teams in the country and trying to maintain my studies. They wanted me to be the clean-cut example of racial equality. The poster boy for how anybody from any background — regardless of race, religion or economic standing — could achieve the American dream.

To them, I was the living proof that racism was a myth. I knew better. Being 7-foot-2 and athletic got me there, not a level playing field of equal opportunity. But I was also fighting a strict upbringing of trying to please those in authority. My father was a cop with a set of rules, I attended a Catholic school with priests and nuns with more rules, and I played basketball for coaches who had even more rules. Rebellion was not an option.

Still, I was discontented. I admired Martin Luther King Jr. I knew this reality was somehow wrong — that something had to change. The first thing he did was push aside the Baptist religion that his parents had brought him up in and study Islam.

To him, Christianity was a foundation of the white culture responsible for enslaving blacks and supporting the racism that permeated society.