Islamic Extremes, Christian Mediation

Why ARE so many modern British career women converting to Islam? asks the Daily Mail in their “femail” section. Though the Daily Mail is one of the respectable English tabloids (please note that “respectable” is to be defined in terms of “tabloid”), the answer is suggested by the list of stories, complete with photos, along the right hand side of the page.

As I write, the top story has the text “What was Denise thinking? Ex-wife went on date with Charlie Sheen and porn star before hotel rampage.” Other stories include “A little Moore leg! Demi’s ripped hemline raises plenty of interest on [sic] GQ ball,” with a picture of Moore’s thighs in a shortish skirt, a number of similarly smirking stories, and lots of celebrity news, such as a story announcing that Paris Hilton had dressed her dogs in Halloween costumes. The stories range from the salacious to the trivial. There is not one that you gain anything by knowing.

I thought this when I saw the headline (a friend sent the link) and the stories beside it and, as it turns out, the decadence expressed in the Mail’s choice of stories to feature seems to be part of the reason the women featured became Muslims. The writer of the story grew up Muslim and left because no “modern, liberated British woman” could live the life she had been forced to live as a child, and wonders why already modern, liberated British women would move the other way.

They lived it, in short, because they saw something else in it than restrictive rules. One woman, an MTV presenter named Kristiane Backer, began to think about Islam after being taken to Pakistan by a Pakistani boyfriend, “where she says she was immediately touched by spirituality and the warmth of the people.”

Kristiane says: ‘Though our relationship didn’t last, I began to study the Muslim faith and eventually converted. Because of the nature of my job, I’d been out interviewing rock stars, travelling all over the world and following every trend, yet I’d felt empty inside. Now, at last, I had contentment because Islam had given me a purpose in life.’

‘In the West, we are stressed for superficial reasons, like what clothes to wear. In Islam, everyone looks to a higher goal. Everything is done to please God. It was a completely different value system.

‘In the West, we are stressed for super ficial reasons, like what clothes to wear. In Islam, everyone looks to a higher goal. Everything is done to please God’

‘Despite my lifestyle, I felt empty inside and realised how liberating it was to be a Muslim. To follow only one god makes life purer. You are not chasing every fad.

‘I grew up in Germany in a not very religious Protestant family. I drank and I partied, but I realised that we need to behave well now so we have a good after-life. We are responsible for our own actions.’

It is a well done story (the Daily Mail is, as I said, a respectable tabloid) and well worth reading. These women found in Islam something — a vision of life and a discipline, including support for chastity and modesty — they should want to have. In many ways, their lives have changed for the better, by standards the Christian holds.

The question is why they found what they sought only in Islam, and why they did not see it in Christianity. The answer is not, I think, simply that we haven’t lived our faith in such a way as to make it compelling, though that must be a lot of the reason. That’s the answer to which Christians tend to jump in these cases, maybe because we tend to feel guilty.

We believe in modesty and chastity as much as the Muslims do. But I wonder if part of the problem for Christianity is that we try to be in the world but not of the world and emphasize the orientation of the heart, and this is much harder to do and much less attractive to those who are sick of a worldly lifestyle, than a set of clear rules and the specific dress that expresses and enacts them. Though generations of parents and teachers have tried, there is no way to derive from the Christian tradition an exact rule for the proper length of skirts.

The Christian life is in this sense a mediating position between the worldly and the legalistic extremes. It’s not surprising that some of those who lived at the first and were sensitive enough to find it wanting have gone all the way to the second.