(KUNA) -- The number of Britons choosing to become Mohammedans has nearly doubled in the past decade, it was reported Tuesday.Following the global spread of "violent Islamism", British Mohammedans have faced more scrutiny, criticism and analysis than any other religious community, the Independent newspaper reported.
Yet, despite the often negative portrayal of Islam, thousands of Britons are adopting the religion every year, according to one of the most comprehensive attempts to estimate how many people have embraced Islam.
Estimating the number of converts living in Britain has always been difficult because census data does not differentiate between whether a religious person has adopted a new faith or was born into it, the paper noted.
Previous estimates have placed the number of Mohammedan converts in the UK at between 14,000 and 25,000.
But a new study by the inter-faith think-tank "Faith Matters" suggests the real figure could be as high as 100,000, with as many as 5,000 new conversions nationwide each year.
| Versus 200,000 Muslims reported by the Times to have converted to Christianity as of 2006. And the Muslim claim that sub-Saharan Africa alone sees 6 million conversions from Islam to Christianity each year. Raw numbers need a frame in which to be properly understood. |
In all they estimated that there were 60,699 converts living in Britain in 2001.
With no new census planned until next year, researchers polled mosques in London to try to calculate how many conversions take place a year.
The results gave a figure of 1,400 conversions in the capital in the past 12 months which, when extrapolated nationwide, would mean approximately 5,200 people adopting Islam every year. The figures are comparable with studies in Germany and La Belle France which found that there were around 4,000 conversions a year.
| Versus 15% of European Muslims leaving Islam, according to the same Times article linked above. For perspective, in 2009 the BBC said France had 5-6 million Muslims, and Germany 3 million. |
"This report is the best intellectual 'guestimate' using census numbers, local authority data and polling from mosques," he said.
"Either way few people doubt that the number adopting Islam in the UK has risen dramatically in the past 10 years." Asked why people were converting in such large numbers he replied "I think there is definitely a relationship between conversions being on the increase and the prominence of Islam in the public domain.
People are interested in finding out what Islam is all about and when they do that they go in different directions.
Most shrug their shoulders and return to their lives but some will inevitably end up liking what they discover and will convert." Batool al-Toma, an Irish born convert to Islam of 25 years who works at the Islamic Foundation and runs the New Mohammedans Project, one of the earliest groups set up specifically to help converts, said she believed the new figures were "a little on the high side".
"My guess would be the real figure is somewhere in between previous estimates, which were too low, and this latest one," she said.
"I definitely think there has been a noticeable increase in the number of converts in recent years. The media often tries to pinpoint specifics but the reasons are as varied as the converts themselves." Inayat Bunglawala, founder of Mohammedans4UK, which promotes active Mohammedan engagement in British society, said the figures were "not implausible".
"It would mean that around one in 600 Britons is a convert to the faith," he said.
"Islam is a missionary religion and many Mohammedan organisations and particularly university students' Islamic societies have active outreach programmes designed to remove popular misconceptions about the faith." The report by Faith Matters also studied the way converts were portrayed by the media and found that while 32 per cent of articles on Islam published since 2001 were linked to terrorism or extremism, the figure jumped to 62 per cent with converts.
There are around 1.6 million Mohammedans in the UK, the majority from India and Pakistain.