Documenting conversion: Framings of female converts to Islam in British and Swiss documentaries

Abstract

In response to the phenomenon of women converting to Islam, a body of research has emerged, engaging with the question, ‘Why are Western women, raised in liberal contexts, converting to Islam?’ This line of enquiry is not limited to academic literature. In recent years, converts to Islam have faced intense scrutiny in mainstream media across Europe. This article contributes an analysis of documentaries to the study of representations of female converts to Islam, focusing particularly on the British documentary Make Me a Muslim (2014) and the Swiss documentary Les Converties d’Allah (2017). We suggest that comparing these two documentaries illuminates certain common narrative threads in media representations of female converts to Islam across different European contexts. In this article, we firstly situate this research within existing literature on gender and conversion to Islam and outline our approach to the study of documentaries on women’s conversion to Islam. Secondly, we analyse the two documentaries, focusing on their shared concerns, namely gender equality and women’s oppression, and the familial environment of the female convert. We argue that paying attention to how female converts are represented illuminates some of the ways in which European framings of the ‘in-betweenness’ of female converts to Islam create notions of female converts as ‘vulnerable-fanatics’ prone to ‘radicalisation’, and threatened by ‘oppressive’ Islam. We demonstrate how female converts participating in documentaries at times complicate and talk back to apprehensions regarding equality, oppression and radicalisation. Finally, we focus in a similar way on understandings of female converts as ‘troublemakers’ within their family environments. Throughout the analysis, we show how the figure of the female convert as vulnerable-fanatic and as family troublemaker is gendered and interlaced with concerns about essentialised cultural difference and radicalisation.

Let’s Talk about Gender

“…In later years, the topic of women's conversion continued to be of interest (i.a. : Galonnier and de los Rios 2016; King 2017;McGinty 2006;Roald 2012;Shanneik 2018;Spoliar and Van den Brandt 2020;Van Nieuwkerk 2006;Wohlrab-Sahr 2006). Vanessa Vroon most elaborately studied women's conversion to Islam in the Netherlands, incorporating the negotiations over ethnic, national and religious belonging (Vroon-Najem 2014).…”

Vulnerable—Not zealous: Muslim converts experience greater distress when experiencing religious struggle.

“…For MLUS converts, ideas about greater zealotry have often been bolstered by a finding that a greater proportion of MLUS converts commit acts of terrorism compared to lifelong believers (Crone & Harrow, 2011). Though the actual numbers are exceedingly small and therefore not representative of MLUS converts, news stories of terrorism have been frequently covered in Western news media (Sealy, 2017; Spoliar & van den Brandt, 2021) and contributes to an extremely negative public portrayals of MLUS converts, with journalists frequently using terms like “radical” and “extreme” (Sealy, 2017). In general, Muslims have been overrepresented in media stories about terrorism, but MLUS converts have been depicted in articles about terrorism at an even greater proportion than lifelong Muslims (Sealy, 2017).…”

Reading an Islamic epistemology into research: Muslim converts and contemporary religion in Britain

“…The subject of conversion has long been one of academic interest, spawning a variety of theories and academic outputs in the fields of psychology (Starbuck, 1897;James, 2015), sociology (Lofland & Stark, 1965), theology (Rambo, 1993) and comparative religion (Underwood, 1925). However, with the growing number of Britons converting to Islam at a time in which the religion has entered the social imaginary through the negative frames of Islamophobia and Orientalism (Allen, 2010;Pędziwiatr, 2015), and with the mainstream media's construction of converts as cultural threats, closely associated with terrorism and prone to radicalism (Spoliar & Brandt, 2020;Ramahi & Suleiman, 2017;Moosavi, 2014;Brice, 2011, 13-16;Sealy, 2017, 198-200), the experiences of contemporary British Muslim converts has attracted some recent scholarly attention.…”

“…The nascent body of work in this area has tended, however, to focus upon conversion patterns and processes (Roald, 2004(Roald, , 2012, dynmics of change and continuity (Alyedreessy, 2016), socio-political context (Flower, 2013), identity (Brice, 2011Pędziwiatr, 2017;Sealy, 2021c), race (Moosavi, 2014(Moosavi, , 2015 and gender (Spoliar & Brandt, 2020;Ramahi & Suleiman, 2017). What emerges from over two decades of research into the convert experience following 9/11 is a sharp dissonance between the religious motivations and perspectives spoken about by converts themselves (Sealy, 2021c) and the ways in which they are constructed and theorised about in the discourse.…”