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Converts to Islam double in Britain, says study
Tuesday January 04, 2011 05:39:04 PM ,
IANS
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London: The number of
Britons choosing to become Muslims has nearly doubled in the past
decade, according to a study by an inter-faith think tank.
The study by think tank Faith Matters attempts to estimate how
many people have embraced Islam.
Despite the "often negative" portrayal of Islam, thousands of
Britons are adopting the religion every year, The Independent
reported.
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.
Previous estimates placed the number of Muslim converts at between
14,000 and 25,000.
But the new study by Faith Matters suggests the real figure could
be as high as 100,000, with as many as 5,000 new conversions
nationwide each year.
The researchers used data from the Scottish 2001 census - which is
the only survey to ask respondents what their religion was at
birth as well as at the time of the survey.
The experts broke down what proportion of Muslim converts there
were in Scotland and then extrapolated the figures for Britain as
a whole.
In all, they estimated there were 60,699 converts living in
Britain in 2001.
The 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 France
which found that there were around 4,000 conversions a year.
Fiyaz Mughal, director of Faith Matters, said that coming up with
a reliable estimate of the number of converts to Islam was
"notoriously difficult".
"This report is the best intellectual 'guestimate' using census
numbers, local authority data and polling from mosques. Either way
few people doubt that the number adopting Islam in the UK has
risen dramatically in the past 10 years," he said.
Batool al-Toma, an Irish-born convert who works at the Islamic
Foundation and runs the New Muslims Project, a group to help
converts, said she believed the new figures were "a little on the
high side".
Inayat Bunglawala, founder of Muslims4UK, which promotes active
Muslim 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.
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