CARACTERÍSTICAS TÉCNICAS MATERIALES DE CONSTRUCCIÓN

The speaker then turned to his personal position on the relations between converts and heritage Muslims, a point of view he could only articulate through reference to his own experience of life after conversion. Though British, he had embraced Islam as a young man living in Indonesia and married a Muslim Indonesian woman (to the perpetual question of why he had converted, his answer was ‘no, he had converted several years before marriage’). His understanding of Islam and of Islamic community was therefore heavily influenced by their Indonesian articulations. Though on the periphery of most people’s ideas of Islam (despite constituting the largest Muslim population in the world), Indonesian Muslims are accommodating and adaptive—‘Islam with a smiling face’. Within Indonesian society, converts were certainly prized as trophies, but they were not seen as tokens. He found it very easy to integrate as a convert and never had the sense of being part of a minority.

His experience upon returning to the UK was one of sharp and uncomfortable contrast. While he had come back once before and studied in a mosque, it had been ‘a very definite Arab mosque,’ and he was eventually to learn that the ethnic composition of British mosques could matter a great deal. His permanent move back led him and his wife to encounter South Asian Islam for the first time. Not only was he—a white convert—seen as an outsider, so was his wife, despite the fact that she was a born Muslim who could speak Arabic and held a degree from an Islamic university. Moreover, the defining attraction and trait of his own Islamic faith was rationality—he considered his choice to convert a rational decision, one he arrived at after careful, philosophical evaluation of other religions. He was particularly drawn to neo-Mu‘tazilite

thought, a re-emergent strand of Islamic philosophy that embraced rationality. But though this was a source of difficulty with heritage Muslims in Britain, the presenter was at pains to emphasise that it was only a difference of approach, stemming from understandable contrasts in cultural background, and not cause for serious division. In fact, he believed that he had been treated as an outsider by British Muslim communities not because he was a convert, but simply, because he, like his wide, was not part of the ‘in-group’. Such separations between ‘us and them’ were, after all, ‘a basic human trait’.

He therefore asked himself and other converts to be generous, careful, and self- critical in their relations with heritage Muslims. They should remember that they were in fact ‘interlopers asking for acceptance’ from an already ‘embattled minority’. In requesting a share in the community, they should not make demands but rather ask themselves why they felt they should have a larger say. ‘Are we trying to take control?’ he asked. Did ‘the preferred converts’ in particular—white, educated, and middle-class—feel entitled to an unearned dominance? It was important that converts pay respect to the achievement of heritage Muslims, to whom the whole infrastructure of Islam in Britain, from mosques to halal shops, was due.

The presenter closed his talk on the subject of the ummah, questioning the notion of solidarity among Muslims and of its actual relevance to their lives. Was holding one thing in common really enough to bind together a worldwide community? He felt he had more in common with white Britons and with Indonesians than he had with British South Asians. On the other hand, ‘who has not cried real tears at the plight of the Palestinians?’ Yet he would maintain that this was a human reaction rather than a specifically Muslim one. Islamic values, like British values, were in their essence only human values. His feeling was the ummah started at home and was, in the first instance, synonymous with family. Ummah then extended outwards through the concentric social circles of a Muslim’s existence—but by the time it reached all Muslims across the world, it became almost meaningless or at least indistinguishable from a general fellow feeling for humanity.

Thus, he declared that he would continue to be a Muslim at one remove from immersion in the Muslim community, practising Islam with a distinctly Indonesian flavour and ‘believing without truly belonging’.

2. D I S C U S S I O N 2.1 Themes

The presentation embraced a wide variety of views, expressing both convert and heritage perspectives, and it was unsurprising that the conversation that followed offered up a corresponding range of opinions. These related largely, though not exclusively, to the participants’ experiences of mosques and the communities that surrounded them. The perspectives that generated the most discussion were those of students and of one South Asian man. The concepts that provoked the most concerted challenges were the notion of a ‘monolithic’ heritage Muslim community and the metaphor of converts acting as a ‘bridge’ between Muslims and non-Muslims. Out of a debate on mosque architecture, finally, the heart of the discussion emerged: how could converts help create a British Islam in which the two terms did not contradict each other?