In need of strong values?

In Great Britain there are 5 thousand more Muslims each year. According to a recent report issued by the organization Faith Matters, each year some 5,200 British citizens convert to Islam, with women making 62% of respondents. The average age of conversion is 27 years old, and marriage is not the reason for conversion. Most respondents said their source of conversion were books, followed by Muslim friends and the Internet. SIR Europe asked Sara Silvestri, expert in Islam, Professor of religion and politics at London City University and at Cambridge University to broach the subject. What do you think of the scientific validity of the survey? “It’s an important survey since it’s one of the few on converts in Great Britain. However, its purpose is to obtain a ‘guess estimate’ of converts to Islam. The only concrete data available regards Scotland, drawn from the Scottish Census of 2011. I have my reservations on the online respondents, only 122, an irrelevant number in statistical terms. At least 500 are necessary”.Is it meaningful to know whether converts are increasing? “It’s hard to ascertain whether they are increasing since a benchmark for comparison is lacking. Mosque representatives obviously are keen in claiming that Islam is expanding, but these claims are groundless”.Are the survey’s findings substantiated by other surveys? “Yes. In fact, the report shows that those who have drawn close to Islam from other religions, as well as Muslim faithful who have returned to Islam after having drawn distant, are motivated by the need to find a point of reference in a globalized world that has lost its traditional values, an individualist society where the family doesn’t count much. Islam proposes very strong, conservative values, which give meaning to individuals and introduce them effectively within their community and families. Those who are disoriented by the dynamics of post-modern society find Islam attractive. Its core beliefs are very simple, and don’t add on to the complexities of everyday life. Make a profession of faith, pray five times a day, adopt a certain habit, fast. Going to the Mosque is not a requisite. We are therefore faced with a quest for conservative values against a modern background. Even the Pope said, right here in Great Britain, that Europe can’t become too relativistic. Indeed, a way to address the concerns over the expansion of Islam is not by stepping up liberalistic aspects or becoming more relativistic, since the more the relativist and liberal front expands the more Islam is understood as the banner of ethical rules, of eternal and universal values”.Do you think that Great Britain constitutes a fertile ground for the expansion of Islam? “Those who have a sense of spirituality and transcendence feel isolated here, since religion doesn’t have a public domain, it is ridiculed, and secularism is marked by aggressiveness”.How do the Muslim citizens raised in the UK, whom you meet during your university lessons, live these traditional values? “For my students being a good Muslim is very important, namely, to follow Ramadan and at the same time be modern. It’s a way of reaffirming their identity while displaying their intimate choice to the external world”.How can Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism be explained? “Those terrorists who have drawn inspiration from Islamist theories are marked by isolationist behaviour and unilateral, narrow-minded perception of reality. Their followers are thus brainwashed into believing in an exclusivist view of the world lacking critical judgement. It’s not very different from the approach adopted by Marxist movements that turned into terrorism”.