Yahya Birt — son of John, the former BBC director-general — says that those who choose Islam are not the modern-day equivalent of Soviet moles such as Anthony Blunt
Converts to Islam are now under the microscope. Middle England is in a moral panic at the news that a white middle-class boy from High Wycombe, the son of a Conservative party constituency worker, has been arrested in connection with what might have been our own 9/11. The explanations reached for 7/7, about social unrest or cultural clashes between Muslim elders and youth, clearly don’t apply.
In the past, the temptation might have been to explain away conversion to Islam as a manifestation of social or personal discontent: an escape from personal problems, maybe, a decision to embrace the latest form of Third Worldism, a rebellion against liberal parents from the 1960s generation.
Now the thought is that people are converting not to one of the world’s great religions but to Islamofascism, to an anti-Western political cause with its very own fringe of bloodstained anarchists who are prepared to kill people on a grand scale. Converts have betrayed their country to join, like Bill Haydon in John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the other side. The Elizabethans confronting Ottoman naval power used to think the same: that converting to Islam was ‘turning Turk’. The Muslim convert becomes an odd amalgam of Anthony Blunt and Timothy McVeigh.
However, in my 16 years as a Muslim, most converts I’ve met were, like myself, only interested in searching for a spiritual path. Sufism, the Islamic mystical path, has been popular since the 1960s when it became part of the countercultural scene, and it still has a huge appeal to many Westerners. Today the mediaeval Sufi mystic Rumi is the bestselling poet in America.
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