Around 5,000 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.'
I'm married to a Muslim and have two children.
We live in Lewes, where I'm probably the only hijabi in the village.
I
was born and raised in a middle-class, left-leaning, atheist family; my
father was a professor, my mother a teacher. When I finished my MPhil
at Cambridge in 2000, I worked in Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Israel.
Back then, I had a fairly stereotypical view of Islam,
but became impressed with the strength the people derived from their
faith.
Their lives sucked, yet nearly everyone I met seemed to approach
their existence with a tranquillity and stability that stood in contrast
to the world I'd left behind.
In 2001, I fell in love with and
married a Jordanian from a fairly non-practising background.
At first
we
lived a very western lifestyle, going out to bars and clubs, but around
this time I started an Arabic course and picked up an English copy of
the Qur'an.
I found myself reading a book that claimed that the proof of
God's existence was in the infinite beauty and balance of creation, not
one that asked me to believe
God walked the Earth in human form;
I didn't need a priest to bless me or a sacred place to pray.
Then
I started looking into other Islamic practices that I'd dismissed as
harsh: fasting, compulsory charity, the idea of modesty. I stopped
seeing them as restrictions on personal freedom and realised they were
ways of achieving self-control.
In my heart, I began to consider
myself a Muslim, but didn't feel a need to shout about it; part of me
was trying to avoid conflict with my family and friends. In the end it
was the hijab that "outed" me to wider society: I began to feel I wasn't
being true to myself if I didn't wear it.
It caused some friction, and
humour, too: people kept asking in hushed tones if I had cancer. But
I've been pleasantly surprised at how little it has mattered in any
meaningful relationship I have.
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