Across the West, people seeking meaning and belonging are finding it in Islam. In America, a significant proportion of converts are African-American men; in Europe, many are white women. In the British cases I’ve encountered, what begins as a quest for purpose often leads these seekers into systems of control from which it is difficult or impossible to escape.
When Max first became Mohammed in 2019, he was in prison, sentenced to seven years in prison for crack and heroin possession and for assaulting a rival drug dealer. Some of his close friends inside were born into the Muslim faith, while others had recently converted. Converting three years into his sentence was the best thing about prison. Much better to become a good Muslim than to try to move up the pecking order and become top dog in a pack of rapists, drug dealers, and murderers.
I have never met Mohammed, who was released last year, but I did meet his ex-wife, who agreed to speak with me about the experience of becoming Muslim. “I was with Max from age sixteen, before he went to prison,” Aisha, a white, formerly secular Brit tells me. “He was eighteen and was hanging out with a really rough crowd. When he committed the offense, we had a two-year-old, and, age twenty-two, he went to prison and was there until our little one was six years old. He went in as Max, came out as Mohammad, and everything changed from that day on.”