CONVERTS TO ISLAM IN THE WEST: YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET

The news that the number of converts to Islam in the UK has hit 100,000 must be met with the following the reaction: you ain’t seen nothing yet.

All the cultural ingredients are there for an upsurge in conversion to Islam in the decadent, post-Christian West in the second decade of the 21st century.

It is not surprising that Islam is proving attractive to white women in their twenties. What woman in her right mind wants to bring children into the self-destructive values vacuum of the permissive society, particularly if she has had first-hand experience of it?

What sort of Islam are these women going to instil in the boys they bring along to the local mosque? The nice, liberal variety happy to take part in an urbane inter-faith dialogue in a Cathedral conference room?

Memo to the Very Revd Wooley-Convenor: In your dreams.

A very significant passage in former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey (Hutchinson 2010), sheds light on the likely ethos of a growing indigenous Islam in the West, especially when the testosterone kicks in.

Commenting on President Obama’s speech in Cairo in June 2009, which Mr Blair described as a ‘brilliant exposition of the case for peaceful coexistence’, he wrote this:

The speech was carefully calibrated. The hand of friendship would be offered, even to Syria and Iran. The implicit message was: We have been disrespectful and arrogant; we will now be, if not humble, deeply respectful. But join us, if you will.

The trouble is: respectful of what, exactly? Respectful of the religion of Islam, President Obama would say, and that is absolutely right; but that should not mean respectful of much of the underlying narrative which many within Islam articulate in politics today.

Here is where the root of the problem lies. The extremists are small in number, but their narrative – which sees Islam as the victim of a scornful West externally, and an insufficiently religious leadership internally – has a far bigger hold (p673).

Western converts to Islam have already grown up in a post-modern culture in which the clamour for victim status is as common as canned music in a supermarket. Of course, they are going to buy into what Mr Blair identifies - and remarkably so for a self-styled progressive whose Faith Foundation is assiduously promoting the inter-faith agenda - as the victim narrative of contemporary Islam.

And that is why they are not going to moderate.

Orthodox Christian churches in the West that faithfully proclaim the supremacy and uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the world's only Saviour and Lord should not be bracing themselves for ‘peaceful coexistence’ as indigenous conversions to Islam escalate.

And the enemies, whom as followers of the crucified Lord we are called to love, are likely to have white faces.