Leaving your religion

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sarfraz_manzoor/2007/09/leaving_your_religion.html

Leaving your religion

Sarfraz Manzoor

September 17, 2007 2:30 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sarfraz_manzoor/2007/09/leaving_your_religion.html

My friend Saiqa is a successful, self-confident professional woman in her mid-thirties who was raised in a Muslim household but who would readily admit that religion did not play a hugely significant role in her everyday life. She enjoys a drink and would not dream of fasting for Ramadan but her religion still forms part of her identity: if you asked her to describe herself she would reply that she was a British Muslim.

For the past two years Saiqa has been dating a British Egyptian man and he is, she believes, the one: the person she wants to marry, have children with and with whom she wants to spend the rest of her life. The only stumbling block to this glorious and idyllic future is the fact that her boyfriend is Christian and she is Muslim and while her family are relaxed about him, his family are threatening to disown him unless she converts to Christianity. "If I was 25 or even 30 there is no way I would even think about doing that", Saiqa told me when I met her for lunch last week "but I'm 37 and if converting is what is needed to make this relationship work then I am willing to do it."

Now in purely practical terms, becoming a Christian would not greatly change my friend's life. She accepts she will have to be baptised but does not envisage any huge changes to her everyday life. But while on a practical level conversion may seem mundane, in other ways it represents an uprooting and reappraisal of one's personal identity. When such a conversion is done for the sake of convenience rather than conviction it seems to me to be pointless to the point of absurdity. Whenever I read of celebrities who have chosen to convert for the sake of their spouses - whether it was Isla Fisher for Sasha Baron Cohen or more recently Blake Fielder-Civil who has said he will convert to Judaism as a mark of love for his wife Amy Winehouse (some might suggest he could show his love in other ways which don't involve hard drugs) it does prompt me to wonder what the point of converting actually is.

Saiqa confessed she found the idea of telling anyone she had converted to be utterly embarrassing and she hoped to keep a secret. Although she was adamant that it was only the absurdity of the idea of being a British Asian Muslim turned Christian that prevented her from wanting to publicise the conversion it is fair to say that Islam does not tend to look too favourably on those who want to leave their religion.

It's always seemed rather ironic to me that those relationships which are outside of our control seem to exert the greatest influence in our lives: we do not choose our family, the religion we are raised with or the country we are born and yet it are those pushes and pulls - family, faith, nation - which often have the greatest force in shaping our lives. In the case of Islam converting to another religion is particularly controversial, with some Muslim scholars claiming that converts - also known as apostates - should be punished by death for deserting their faith.

This is not universally accepted and recently the grand mufti of Egypt suggested that in some circumstances Muslims were free to convert. Separating between the notion of choice and punishment, the mufti explained that while abandoning one's religion was a sin it was one that was only punishable by God; the only circumstances where converting demanded worldly punishment was when in addition to their apostasy they actively engaged in the subversion of society. That might be the official position but the experience of Egyptian Muslims who have converted is depressing. Last month a 24-year-old Egyptian man and his wife made history by becoming the first Muslims to file a lawsuit against the Egyptian government for refusing to legally recognise their conversion. The country's supreme court has also been hearing the final appeals for 45 others who were denied their attempt to legally reclaim their Christian identities after officially converting to Islam.

Egyptian Christians can easily change to become Muslims and should they decide to do so they can benefit from incentives covering everything from employment and marriage options to custody of their children in divorce cases. But while Christians are enticed to convert, Muslims and former Christians who wish to reclaim their faith are harassed, arrested, tortured or imprisoned.

According to this week's Dispatches on Channel 4, British former Muslims have also suffered examples of violence and intimidation. It is estimated there are as many as 3,000 Muslims who have converted to Christianity living in Britain and the programme features former Muslims who are now living under the threat of reprisals from their former communities. Among those featured in the programme is a brother driven out of his home and a convert whose brother was beaten close to death. The situation for converts from Islam in Britain is, according to Dispatches, a "tinderbox waiting to explode" but I hope and suspect this is over-sensationalism rather than the reality.

Living a reasonably middle-class London life, my friend did not look like a woman worried about the wrath of the "Muslim community". When I asked her why her boyfriend was so insistent she convert, part of the explanation was the treatment of Christians in his motherland was so poor that the only way his family could be reconciled with the notion of him marrying her was for her to abandon her religion. This seems not only a poor reason for changing faiths but also to insult those who are converting for more genuine reasons. A religion that is sure of itself and confident of its appeal to followers should be less frightened of those who might wish to leave.