The worst of non-Muslims convert to Islam, the best of Muslims leave Islam. Part 1

Special Series on Apostasy: There's no better time than Ramadan

Groucho Marx famously quipped, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” The wisecrack had no idea that Islam would claim him as a member even if he didn’t join. Read on…

On 19 October 2018, Shuhada‘ Sadaqat, at the time becoming Shuhada‘ Davitt from being Magda Davitt, having previously been Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor, the famous Irish singer, converted to Islam—sorry, "reverted"; everyone's born Muslim, you see—before Sheikh Umar Al-Qadri. She described her conversion as, “The natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey”. A broken middle-aged kafir European woman hits rock-bottom in her life and there she finds Islam. Muslims the world over were ecstatic. Finally! Proof that Islam is the true religion. A famous white Western woman had converted. They spread the news far and wide and repeated it at every turn.

Except that Shuhada‘ Sadaqat sang an adhan, a call to prayer, in a mosque right after her conversion, to the obvious discomfort of the select witnesses to the great event. It was a spectacle that embarrassed even ex-Muslims. Then came the details of her troubled life, then her racist tweets, followed by further name changes. By this point there was widespread mocking of Islam’s desperation for celebrity convert validation, regardless of the condition of the convert. It provided a few weeks of wholesome online entertainment. O'Connor passed away in July 2023 and is buried in the Christian Dean's Grange Cemetery, in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown, Ireland. It is not clear whether she died in kufr or out of kufr. Muslims prefer not to talk about it.

Henryk Broder, longstanding German critic of Islam, is reported to have said in 2010, “I have been saved from misguidance and have come to know the truth, returning to my natural state” (fitrah, being born innocent, i.e., Muslim, the reason converts to Islam, bizarrely, describe themselves as “reverts”), pressing all the right Muslim buttons. The conversion to Islam of such a prominent Western “Islamophobe” sent the Muslim world wild with jubilation. Triumphalist gloating spread across talk shows and intellectual websites like wildfire. Then came the bewildering news that Broder had merely written a sarcastic article. He had never converted to Islam! This proved too much for the Muslims’ “little brain,” as one Muslim, Ali Dawa, described it. According to another, Khaled Montaser,

We are a people incapable of comprehending sarcasm, since it requires a bit of thinking and intellectualising. And we read with great speed and a hopeful eye, not an eye for truth or reality. Some of us are struck with blindness when we read things that go against our hopes.

On 23 December 1977, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, at the time becoming Yusuf Islam from being Cat Stevens, converted to Islam. For Muslims the world over, the gates of Jannah had opened. Absolute irrefutable undeniable rock-solid watertight cast-iron iron-clad proof positive that Islam was the true religion: a top-top British musician, a big shot, had converted to Islam. Alhamdulillah! The new brother, previously known for his gentle ballads, threw himself into his new religion with the fervour of someone washed up on a desert island shore. Over a decade later, on live television, the following event, one of several similar thereafter, transpired:

Questioner: Yusuf Islam, would you go to a demonstration where you knew that an effigy [of Salman Rushdie] was going to be burned?
Yusuf Islam: I would have hoped that it'd be the real thing.

The backlash was fierce, including denial of entry to the United States, yet brother Yusuf’s faith remained strong, masha-Allah. But by 2006, Islam had become intellectually and morally indefensible in the West, and the cracks in the singer’s faith were beginning to show. Yusuf Islam semi-unreverted to simply Yusuf, and by 2014, had un-reverted some more, into Yusuf/Cat Stevens (The cat was back, as Bulgarkov might say, this time sans sexy boots). By then Muslims were seeing the writing on the wall. They weren't hanging around for “Yusuf/Cat Stevens” to complete his unreversion. They knew how this movie ends.

Of course, after saying their shahada, famous "reverts" are called upon to make a statement, you know, for da'wah purposes, and they oblige by being as profound and earth-shattering as fits the gravity of the moment. A particularly well-fitting revert, one Andrew Tate of the Neanderthal persuasion, blessed the world with the following:

I was born in a Christian country. I was raised as a Christian and I’ve always been very respectful of Islam, and it’s become more and more obvious to me, and more and more pertinent that Islam is the last religion on the planet.

Masha-Allah Andrew, but nothing compares to Sinéad O'Connor's spectacular tweet:

What I'm about to say is something so racist I never thought my soul could ever feel it. But truly I never wanna spend time with white people again (if that's what non-muslims are called). Not for one moment, for any reason. They are disgusting.

The unedifying spectacle of desperate Muslims scraping for validation from the worst of the kufaar leads Raymond Ibrahim to conclude, “Muslims are ever and always looking for outside validation. Why? Because a growing number of them—those not indoctrinated in or even very familiar with the tenets of Islam—have a nagging suspicion that their religion is not just.” There is something about their own religion that someone is not telling them.

Two years before Sheikh Bilal Philips’ bombshell tsunami khutbah, Deeyah Khan managed to deliver a twenty-minute TED talk on the inner struggles of children of Muslim parents in Europe, without once mentioning Islam. Over the same period, stories began to emerge of Western converts to Islam who subsequently were so horrified by what they had learnt and experienced inside Islam, that they apostatised.

So-called “reverts” who later “un-revert” seem not to regret losing all the wonderful things they gained upon becoming Muslim: spiritual peace, universal truth and long-sought-after “belonging”—they go completely silent about all that. What they regret is that they so wantonly abandoned their own humanity; they regret the barbarism they had substituted for that humanity just to embrace Islam. Some are honest and feel genuine remorse for the wrongs and harm they have done in their zeal to prove their commitment to their new faith. They apologise to those they have wronged and try to make amends for their excesses.

We are quite correct to demand contrition, compensation, and apology from those who took it upon themselves to flirt with Islam, commit atrocious acts and utter appalling statements in its name, and later, seeing the error of their ways, return to civilisation and ethical behaviour. But let us not forget, such deeds and utterances are normal for Muslims, quotidian, yet we let them get away with such utterances and deeds every single day, even providing it with a protective shield called ‘diversity’. The volumes of Western laws, regulations, codes and mores that Muslims have been allowed to flout with impunity for years stand in stark contrast to the retribution we exact from the apostatising convert for such deeds while a Muslim. It is hard not to notice that, in the main, the converts deserving such retribution are white.

Not all apostatising converts are interested in coming clean, though. Flotsam-and-jetsam Cat Stevens (sorry, I’ve lost track of the names), now that he has sort-of-kind-of-in-a-way-depending-how-you-look-at-it given up Islam, will have the world believe that his appalling utterances regarding Khomeini’s death fatwa against Salman Rushdie were all just a media setup. He's sticking with the Muslim paranoia. That works for him. What a spineless, meagre coward. Or is it just that there’s still enough Muslim left in him that he considers evidence irrelevant?

Both Western converts to Islam and the children of Western “moderate” Muslim parents have been duped. “Moderate/reform/liberal/progressive” Muslims are simply people who lack the moral courage to say, “I am no longer a Muslim,” or, as Bilal Philips quotes, “I don’t believe in Allah.” Since being Muslim and practicing Islam are inseparable, they have to imagine for themselves a sanitised Islam that allows them to continue holding on to being Muslim. This candy-floss, fantasy Islam of everyone living together in harmony they teach to their children, who grow up knowing no better, until in their youth or early adulthood, they run into the real thing.

Western Muslims learn their cute cuddly Islam from their kind and goodly Muslim parents. The real thing, though, can come at them from any direction. Their first inner struggle is to reconcile their fantasy Islam with the actual religion that goes by that name, Islam, the perfect and final religion uniquely commanding its adherents to wage war against the entire world and subjugate all by terror until “religion (worship) will all be for Allah alone”. They discover to their confusion and consternation that "Islamism" is something inside their heads.

Initially, parents are still able to make sure their children know that the machete-wielding mass-murderers screaming “Allahu-akbar” are not real Muslims. But their children are autonomous individuals, and their own curiosity can lead them, through researching their many questions, straight to the horror that their liberal parents have tried so hard to conceal from them. An honest Muslim in a mosque, under no illusions about his faith and proud of every bit of it, can extend a hand in brotherly or sisterly friendship, invite the young’un to a talk after the prayer, and induct them into the greatness of Islam, the power the kufaar have stolen from the Muslims and the grave injustice of it all.

Note that this luring-in will only comprise the “Orientalist and colonial injustice” stuff and the “Golden Age” stuff, a toxic mix of victimhood and pride. The real Islam, the barbaric Shari’a, comes when they enter the inner sanctum of “scholarship,” or take a short cut to ISIS. One way or another, their innocent child eventually comes to learn what Islam really is and either ends up apostatising, or withdrawing into piety and down a slippery slope into the murderous jihad that Islam expects of them, and one way or another, ending up dead with seventy-two virgins. Or there is the Deeyah Khan option: harness identity politics to double down on the fantasy by deflecting the Muslim youth’s inner struggles onto racism and culture, and appeal to sentimentality as the way forward. Bilal Philips, of course, has no answers and can offer nothing that such children have not already heard.

Those involved in da'wah confidently proclaim Islam the fastest-growing religion. Western converts to Islam, mostly non-Muslim women who have let themselves be sweet-talked by Muslim men, but also deluded Christians, ignorant liberals and troubled souls, such as drug addicts and prisoners, make for a sad conversion wave. Very few would have anything to do with Islam after a sober study of the faith and its history, let alone admire it. Adolf Hitler was a notable exception.

The women trapped by love may not have the slightest interest in Islam to begin with, but then, through a haze of seven conspiring hormones, behold Islam for the first time, and all is sweetness and light. They belong. The deluded Christians, ignorant liberals and troubled souls, some are all three in one, approach Islam with antennae fine-tuned to capture only what they want to see and what they want to hear, shutting out all else. When they have seen or heard something that appeals—a single, isolated phrase will suffice—they’re off to the nearest sheikh to say their shahada. They belong.

The convert by marriage to a “moderate” Muslim can probably live with the increasing weirdness and might even begin to feel rather exotic, what with the lovely two-colour hijabs à la Sarsour, the exhilarating weddings, the girlie henna-ins and all that, oh, and not to forget the captivating ’aoud—ah! The women who fall for the charms of real Muslims are the ones that dramas and documentaries are made of and books are written about. Theirs are the escape-with-your-life stories jam-packed with every heart-renting tragedy you couldn’t make up. As for the deluded Christians, ignorant liberals and troubled souls, it is deepening pathos all way till one day their YouTube videos lay their drip-drip epiphany and eventual apostasy bare, or, if they are Cat Stevens, their razzmatazz conversion to sneaky sort-of apostasy story ends up all over the news.

After a Muslim beheaded French schoolteacher Samuel Paty in the street in response to the latter showing a cartoon of Muhammad during a lesson on freedom of speech, someone in Malaysia had this to say:

i am a muslim from malaysia and i see most all the people here supported the terrorist actions… I am starting to think of leaving islam... I don’t know if islam is the problem, but I do see that the people following it is a big problem…therefore im thinking of quitting islam, (emphasis AP) LaTroy Oner.

LaTroy Oner might be wrong or right. The important point here is that in the same way as Yasir Qadhi was moved by Western academics who have not imbibed deference towards Islam, so this social media commenter too, was moved by a Western intellectual critic of Islam. These Western academics and other intellectual critics of Islam stand outside of Islam and so can be dealt with in the normal Muslim manner: dismissal, abuse, insult, vilification, threats and even killing.

When the French government reacted to Samuel Paty’s murder, everything French came under attack around the Muslim world to avenge the “injustice” against Muslims. The more shocked the kufaar are at such barbarism, the more affirmed Muslims are in their supremacy. The extremely rare Muslim statement not explicitly in favour of the murder was trivialising, equivocating and conciliatory. The uncouth masses on the Muslim street rage that this one or that one must die, while the “integrated” Muslims in Western television studios explain in measured tones and multi-syllable words that this one or that one must die.

Barbarism brings the ummah together, while civilisation drives it asunder. But this same barbarism sometimes drives the “revert” out of Islam and back to civilisation. Only the most stupid, the most troubled or the most unethical stick around. What happens when the Western academic or intellectual accepts Islam? To be comfortable as Muslims, they have to abandon their critical thought and their humanity, as many do. That they will go through with their own brainwash, though, is by no means certain. They have not been brought up Muslim, and are autonomous individuals steeped in a robust culture of freedom, especially the freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. It is only a matter of time before the expectations of Islam on such Muslims come hard up against their still-intact humanity, reason and values. That will be when they either apostatise, or try very hard to reconcile their adopted unfree, unethical values with their inherited free, ethical values. This is where they run into problems with Islam’s thought police.

At the same time, more importantly, Islam’s thought police will run into problems with Western intellectual converts when it becomes undeniable to such converts that Islam is not merely a set of ideas hiding in the pages of a book waiting to see who will adopt it. When real people expect you to care less about the latest person they beheaded in the street, than that the victim had upheld the freedom of speech, a value dear to you, it is suddenly no longer a “battle of ideas”. As much as mocking Muhammad presents Muslims with a deep crisis, so dismantling the freedom of speech in the wake of Muslims killing someone for protecting it, presents free people, at least those with integrity, with a deep crisis.

Does the Western intellectual convert to Islam want his entire society to pay the price for his personal choice of religion? Every Western kafir enjoys freedom of religion, but no one else dies for it, at least not at the moment he or she converts (the last Western religious wars ended 300 years ago). The Western kafir apologist for Islam does not face this problem because he is only in disagreement with a society that guarantees his right to disagree. The Western intellectual convert to Islam, additionally, now also finds himself part of a society that deals very harshly with disagreement as “corruption in the land”, for which the punishments are rather gruesome, including death by crucifixion. He will have to come down on one side or the other, or construct a dishonest fudge that will hold both Islam’s attack dogs, and his own humanity, at bay. The longer these "reverts" keep up the pretence, the deeper their unhappiness becomes.

The problem he will then have created for himself is that born Muslims will mark him out as someone whose commitment to the faith will always be in question. In so many ways he will be reminded that he is not quite Muslim enough. He doesn’t have what it takes. This is the kind of Muslim that Western security services have to monitor very closely indeed. They have something to prove and there is only one way to prove it. Such converts may not have the stomach for proving their Muslim credentials in the monstrous ways that less refined converts have a penchant for, but they can do far greater damage through their access to information and sensitive situations, their understanding the workings of the society they now want to destroy, and their ability to conceal their activities.

With the wholesale mayhem and murders in the wake of the showing of Muhammad cartoons, Muslims will tolerate no equivocation in this matter. Converts who grew up valuing their freedom of speech will find it ever harder to come down unequivocally on the side of free speech. As educated and refined as they may be, unless they go so far as to become a “scholar” by studying somewhere like Medina, Cairo or Qom, they will have no choice but to answer to complete cretins and thugs such as those who have savaged and continue to savage Yasir Qadhi for equivocating on the preservation of the Qur’an.

Every now and again, we are treated to the spectacle of Muslims’ desperation for Western validation of their faith, particularly when a prominent Western kafir, no matter who, no matter for what reason, converts to Islam. Muslims trumpet each such conversion to the Heavens. The Cat Stevenses, the Andrew Tates and the Sinéad O’Connors of this world are messed-up people, pathetic specimens, who will seek solace in a reality altered in one way or another, and for Muslims, these are the authorities that validate Allah. What an ummah!

But we also have the phenomenon of Western academics, professors, people who hold the kind of jobs where you don’t get an interview without a PhD, converting to Islam. Being a Western apologist for Islam is one thing; you might very well know just how bad Islam is, but selling Islam is good business, and principles don’t pay the bills.

Part 2/...

Picture credits:

DubhEire - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9331335

Bernd Schwabe in Hannover - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28233736

Man Alive! - Sinéad O'Connor, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=135114655

Raph_PH - Glasto2023 (296 of 468), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=137172592

Ali Esfandiari at the Persian language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12047217

Comments:

On 11 March 2024 at 14:08, Ben Dor A. wrote:

Dear Anjuli Pandavar

Very interesting though I have some questions. I hope you can help me understand:

You write:

"Those involved in da'wah confidently proclaim Islam the fastest-growing religion. Western converts to Islam, mostly non-Muslim women who have let themselves be sweet-talked by Muslim men, but also deluded Christians, ignorant liberals and troubled souls, such as drug addicts and prisoners, make for a sad conversion wave. Very few would have anything to do with Islam after a sober study of the faith and its history, let alone admire it."

What are the main reasons that Westerners, white or black convert to Islam?

Why are so many Muslims slaughtered by other Muslims?

Best Regards

Ben Dor A.

On 30 March 2024 at 15:52, Anjuli Pandavar wrote:

I offer my opinions:

What are the main reasons that Westerners, white or black convert to Islam?

"...for they know not what they do." They think Islam is just another religion, only better, because they read or were told one thing that clinches it for them. We live in an incredibly superficial and fickle age. I can be one thing today and another tomorrow and switch right back again the next day. Who needs more than 120 characters to make a life-changing decision?

Such people tend to be adrift and find solace in the "community" they are now part of, at least until reality kicks in.

I also think it's one of the more extreme forms of "virtue signalling". You can't be more right-on than converting to Islam, except actually going out and killing people, which some do.

Why are so many Muslims slaughtered by other Muslims?

If you ask any of those doing the slaughtering, they'll tell you that they have never harmed a Muslim, and strictly-speaking, they would be right. It is part of Islam's built-in future-proof mechanism.

On 11 March 2024 at 16:13, Andy Martin wrote:

What do you think about the conversion of former child actress Emile Siobhan Geoghegan François who 'reverted' and at first became hijab- wearing Myriam François-Cerrah, and now as endless Instagram pictures show her pouting into a camera with, no hijab low cut tops etc. She has certainly toned down her reforming zeal of the new convert shouty What a wonderful religion Islam is rhetoric, but still identifies as a Muslim and I would say is currently a far left activist pro-Palestine peddling all the anti-white colonial oppressor tropes.

The reader reaction to the following Guardian article for a while caused her to keep a low profile. Read the article and scroll down for reader comments and you'll see why.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2012/sep/17/muhammad-aisha-truth

On 30 March 2024 at 15:37, Anjuli Pandavar wrote:

@Andy Martin

Thank you for this and sorry for the very late response. I am unfamiliar with her case and have read the article plus the first 25 of 479 comments. I'll stop there.

She demonstrates a phenomenon I mention somewhere in the series of "reverts" having to compensate for never being quite Muslim enough. Basically, they end up handing over their entire beings to Islam. I have no reason to doubt that she is or was a highly creative person, but then hijacked herself into becoming a propagandist for Islam. Some can keep that up for life, although they grow increasingly unhappy as it dawns on them that they had made a catastrophic mistake, and they find themselves unable to un-revert given the very public big deal they made of converting.

As Islam is incapable of fielding an Oriana Fallaci, we are likely to keep seeing the emergence of such tragi-comic figures.