Why do so many middle class English women convert to Islam

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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100026233/why-do-middle-class-englishwomen-love-headscarves/ 



Ed West
Ed West is a journalist and social commentator and the author of The Diversity Illusion: What We Got Wrong About Immigration & How to Set It Right. He is @edwestonline on Twitter.
Why do middle-class Englishwomen love headscarves?

By Ed West Religion Last updated: February 16th, 2010

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Lauren Booth interviews Jenny Tonge on Iran’s Press TV (Image: Youtube)

Lauren Booth interviews Jenny Tonge on Iran’s Press TV (Image: Youtube)

What is it with middle-class Englishwomen and the headscarf? Why do so many ladies from the most sexually-liberated and educated society in history just crave the feel of fabric against their hair?

I was struck by this thought when watching Jihad Jenny Tonge being interviewed by Lauren Booth on Iran’s Press TV – the Liberal Democrat peer, you will remember, was fired after calling for an inquiry into allegations that Israeli soldiers supporting the relief effort in Haiti had been involved with organ-trafficking.

Lauren Booth and myself have something in common – we both used to work for the same lad’s mag years ago, although at different times and in different roles. She was their sex agony-aunt, I was the office dogsbody and gimp. Since then she’s migrated to the New Statesman and Left-wing journalism before embracing the Palestinian cause, Press TV and the Islam channel, where she’s regularly seen in the uniform of the modern British Left, the Arab headscarf.

One of Booth’s colleagues at Press TV, Yvonne Ridley, has gone even further, converting to Islam after she was kidnapped by the Taliban. Now a member of the Respect party, this one-time leftist feminist has since said that “Western feminism pales into insignificance” compared to the solidarity of Muslim women.

She’s not alone in thinking that. One hears of many educated, intelligent, emancipated western women embracing the Islamic life. Boris Johnson’s first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, revealed last month that she had married a Muslim man and now attends a mosque in east London.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote at the time that “her actions are as inexplicable to Muslims like myself… My mother's generation fought for equality and monogamous marriages, a struggle that carries on. To see the daughters of Britannia carelessly surrendering these rights is almost unbearable.”

It is a paradox, certainly. England has a long Arabist tradition, and for certain types of public school-educated Englishman the mystical East has obvious attractions, especially if one does not like the company of women and finds Americans vulgar and Jews uppity. But for women the benefits are less obvious, especially for former feminists who embrace a religion far, far more male-centred and conservative than their ancestral faith (usually Anglicanism or Catholicism).

I know I’ve written in the past about psychoanalysing political views, but I suspect that for many female radicals and feminists (not necessarily these examples) their rage is not so much against oppression as such but their own upbringing and some sort of father figure. That may be why so many Left-wing human rights activists are willing to overlook evils committed by non-westerners.

Alternatively there simply may be a yearning for certainty in some people, which Islam fills better than anything else. As Miss Mostyn-Owen herself wrote:

    "I've never regularly attended church, yet I have been to this mosque, my mosque, more times than I can remember. It's a place where I sometimes feel spiritually transported. As I busy myself on the carpet sorting colours and papers after what is always an exhausting class, I am soothed by the azan of evening prayers, the haunting and sometimes pained invocations to the Almighty. I feel my humility, and then realize this is my act of worship, my submission, my Islam. Forget the fact that only men take part in communal prayers, I am a token Christian discreetly trafficking through the men's space with my bags of materials, pretending I'm not really there. I am there, I am accepted, and this is all that   


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