Hello, Brother: Why Kiwis are converting to Islam

Following the Christchurch mosque attacks, Kiwis are more interested than ever in the Muslim world. But what about those who had already converted? Greer Berry talks to a man who says he's the only Māori Muslim in Manawatū about why he converted to the religion.

Colin was in the car with his daughter when he knew he had to tell her.

She had come to pick him up to go somewhere, but instead, he asked if they could swing by the mosque on Cook St in Palmerston North.

It was March 15, a day etched in all Kiwis' memories, especially those in Christchurch.

Overcome with emotion, Colin decided now was the time he had to come clean.

"On the way there I said: 'I've got to tell you something,'" the 59-year-old remembers, becoming upset at his recollections.

For the first time, Colin revealed to those closest to him that he had converted to Islam the year before.

"She was good, but she was upset because I hadn't told her."

He's a private person and it was a private journey for him, so he had never felt the need to tell others about his decision.

Colin was also worried about what others would say or think, about being judged and misunderstood. It's something he still worries about.

On this day, the terrorist attack had changed that. He felt like he needed to share his newfound faith with his three children, "just in case".

"It was hard, but the Muslim community is strong. It was because of that that I thought: 'I've got to tell my kids'.

"I know the kids, no matter what I do, will support me," he says.

"Now they know, it's really good, they're really supportive."

Colin's road to conversion is one many others have found themselves on.

He was going through a hard time and was looking for a sense of belonging and contentment, and in Islam, he found that.

The religion is the fastest-growing faith in the world.

There aren't official figures on the number of people in New Zealand converting, but anecdotally, mosques around the country are reporting an increase in those attending prayers and interested in finding out more about the religion.

Following the Christchurch attacks, a Wellington mosque was reporting three to five people a day converting, and other mosques similarly reported running out of printed material aimed at educating others about Islam.

The Manawatū Muslims Association is trying to establish a group to arrange a database of new converts, something to keep track of the faith's latest followers.

Friday prayers at the mosque have swelled following the Christchurch attacks.

Association president Riyaz Rehman says there's a sense of people wanting to come together more, to bond over their shared faith, to feel safe and a strength in numbers.

Those numbers were replicated during the religious holiday known as Eid, where Muslims come together to break their fast following the holy month of Ramadan. 

"We need more space. We had 1500 people from around the region," he says.

Association member Zulfiqar Butt says the idea about grouping together potential new converts is so that they can band together to support each other in their newfound faith.

Butt has been buoyed by the upsurge in interest in Islam and says he hopes anyone who wants to know more will visit.

"There is certainly an increase," he says, from all backgrounds, with their own stories to tell.

"Even yesterday we were approached by a transgender person, wondering if they were welcome. And I said: 'Of course, you are very welcome'."

And he arranged one of the association's members to show them around and support them.  

Colin says he's noticed a few new converts over the past few months.

"They're trying to get a convert group together so we can all meet up now and then, talk about the hassles and troubles we've had and how we can get through them."

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His mosque was attacked. His answer was love. | Gamal Fouda | TEDxChristchurch

Khaled Abou El Fadl: "Islamophobia, Racism and the New Zealand Massacre

Islamophobia is practically enshrined as public policy in Australia

 
Second, the 9/11 attacks drew Australia into the War on Terror in support of its closest ally, and geopolitical sponsor, the United States.

Australian troops spent long periods in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting and killing Muslims in their own countries. The consequences of this endless war have included the targeting of Australians in Jihadi terror attacks and plots, both at home and abroad.

The wars began with a deluge of propaganda. Later, the terror threat was leveraged to massively enhance surveillance by Australia’s national security state. Muslim Australians have frequently been defined by arms of their own government as a source of danger.

Two years after the war in Iraq commenced, the campaign of Islamophobia culminated in the country’s most serious modern race riots, on Cronulla Beach in December 2005, when young white men spent a summer afternoon beating and throwing bottles at whichever brown people they could find.

Cronulla was a milestone in the development of a more forthright, ugly public nationalism in Australia. Now young men wear flags as capes on Australia Day, a date which is seen as a calculated insult by many Indigenous people. Anzac Day, which commemorates a failed invasion of Turkey, was once a far more ambivalent occasion. In recent years it has moved closer to becoming an open celebration of militarism and imperialism.

Every step of the way, this process has not been hindered by outlets owned by News Corp, which dominates Australia’s media market in a way which citizens of other Anglophone democracies can find difficult to comprehend.

News Corp has the biggest-selling newspapers in the majority of metropolitan media markets, monopolies in many regional markets, the only general-readership national daily, and the only cable news channel. Its influence on the national news agenda remains decisive. And too often it has used this influence to demonise Muslims.

On Anzac Day 2017, a prominent young Australian Muslim woman, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, posted on her personal Facebook page, “LEST.WE.FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine…)”, which appeared to draw an equivalence between the suffering of Muslims around the world today, and that of Australia’s diggers during the first world war.

News Corp outlets – especially the Australian – howled about her supposed disrespect for months. Opportunistic conservative politicians lined up to condemn her. Towards the end of the year, she decamped for London, and in a television appearance compared Australia to an “abusive boyfriend”.

On the other hand, News Corp has been far more solicitous to touring grifters from the “alt-right” movement. They gave softball interviews and free publicity to Milo Yiannopoulos, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux ahead of their national tours. They also gave Gavin McInnes the soft touch, but his plans were aborted when he was denied a visa on character grounds.

More significantly still, News Corp has itself recently run campaigns based on white nationalist talking points.

A year ago, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran reports on the alleged plight of white farmers in South Africa, in a way that echoed far-right myths about “white genocide”. This worked well enough to elicit a short-lived policy proposal from the immigration minister to give white farmers “special attention”.

News Corp also had a big hand in promoting the idea over the last few years that “African gangs” were holding the city of Melbourne to ransom. This campaign was also in lockstep with the rhetoric of local neo-Nazis such as Blair Cottrell.

And last August, News Corp’s most influential rightwing pundit, Andrew Bolt, wrote a column which explicitly raised the prospect of demographic replacement – a recurring obsession of the white nationalists.

Bolt depicted a possible future in which a “tidal wave of immigrants sweeps away our national identity”. For Bolt – who has previously been found to have breached Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act – the country was under demographic attack.

This normalisation of white nationalist concepts is also visible in politics. Senator Fraser Anning has had a hit of global social media fame this week after he appeared to blame the victims of the Christchurch massacre, and again when a young protester cracked an egg on Anning’s bald pate.

Anning is hardly alone – white nationalist anxieties have continually surfaced at the heart of Australia’s political process. In 2016 the Australian Senate held an inquiry into halal food, in which senators asked questions which appeared to owe a debt to rightwing conspiracy theories about certification funding terrorism.

Anning himself was elected as a result of the revival of Australian anti-immigrant populist party, One Nation, whose recent elected members have included an alleged sovereign citizen. Last year the Australian Senate almost passed a motion that “It’s OK to be white”, which would have seen a 4chan meme approved by the national parliament.

Just last week, publicity-hungry former Labor leader Mark Latham, now running for state office with One Nation, suggested that self-identified Indigenous people be DNA tested before they receive welfare.

And at least until Friday, it looked like a desperate conservative national government might run a race-based election, reaching once more for the same playbook the party has used for decades. (In 2011, the current prime minister Scott Morrison reportedly recommended an anti-Muslim election strategy to his Liberal party colleagues). Former race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane said the government was “campaigning on fear, seeking to incite hysteria about asylum seekers and border security”.

Australia now has a public collection of open white nationalists – from antisemitic podcasters to would-be infiltrators of mainstream conservative parties.

They need to be understood in their proper context: the decades-long drumbeat of xenophobia and Muslim-hate, which has issued from some of the most powerful institutions in the country.

This is the environment in which Muslims, refugees and immigrants have come to be understood as enemies of Australia. It may be an environment that has nurtured white supremacist terror.

Link

New Zealanders observe Muslim call to prayer: 'We are one'