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chapter 4 Gender, Conversion, and Islam A Comparison of Online and Offline Conversion Narratives Karin van Nieuwkerk In this chapter, conversion narratives of female converts to Islam collected during anthropological fieldwork in the Netherlands will be compared with self-presentations of new Muslimas on the Internet. During my research among Dutch female converts to Islam in 1997 and 1998, I was often impressed and puzzled by the diversity of the women’s stories . I conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-four women, and of half of them I also interviewed relatives or friends.1 In addition, I joined twenty- five meetings of two organizations for converts and analyzed their monthly magazines.2 During these meetings I had many informal talks with converts. After most interviews I came home with the feeling that I could understand this particular woman’s choice for Islam, but that her motivation was rather specific and quite dissimilar from the motivations and the life stories of the women I had spoken to before. I thus often found it difficult to understand these women’s choice for Islam in a sociologically satisfactory way. It was hard to relate their conversion to (a lack of) religious affiliation, educational background, family milieu, and psychological crises, or even to their marriage with Muslim partners, because this was not the case for five new Muslimas. Although most were married to Muslim partners, were of a middle-class background, and were well educated, these factors did not give much insight into the reasons for and meaning of their conversion. It appeared that each conversion story made sense only within the framework of the complete life story. For one of them a psychological crisis and medicine addiction convinced her of the natural and healthy character of Islam; for another woman sexual harassment made her realize the importance of a certain distance between the sexes. Some women tried to rebel against dominant mothers; others tried to find a “place to belong .” Several converts were attracted to the spiritual and all-encompassing nature of Islam; many were attracted to the rational character of Islam. Some converted to establish a harmonious marriage relationship or to realize a uni- fied upbringing of the children; others converted without a Muslim partner. 96 d i s c o u r s e s a nd n a r r at i v e s Within the diversity of the converts’ stories, however, there are also commonalities . Despite their divers trajectories, the converts are all women who are living in the West and decided to become Muslim. They thus share important aspects of their identities related to ethnicity, religion, and gender. These important aspects of the converts’ identities are crystallized in a structured narrative or discourse. Most conversion stories contain a biographical narrative (why they as individuals took the path to Islam), a religious discourse (why Islam), a gender discourse (why they as women chose Islam), and finally an ethnic or national discourse (why they as Dutch/Western women chose Islam). Together these four discourses give insight into Islam’s appeal to women in the West. Whereas the biographical narratives are heterogeneous , the other discourses show recurrent patterns. The religious discourse in particular shows a high level of congruency. In the meantime, I was fascinated by the growing amount of conversion stories on the Internet. I was excited to find this extra source of information because it is well established in anthropology that the stories and narratives gathered in interviews are strongly influenced by the interactive context of the interview. The fieldwork setting and the converts’ perception of the researcher as a non-Muslim Dutch feminist professional could influence the content and style of these narratives (Rabinow 1977; Clifford and Marcus 1980). The Internet offers the convert the possibility of presenting her story in her own words without any interference and questions. Self-presentation on the Internet is potentially a free and unconstrained way of creating and expressing new identities (Schmitz 1997; Watson 1997; de Groot 1997). Narratives online, as bodiless expressions for an anonymous public, offer possibilities for autonomous identity constructions absent in an ordinary anthropological setting of fieldwork and interview. Ieventuallycollectedmorethanahundredstoriesoffemaleconvertsfrom the Internet. They came from personal homepages, special sites for converts, and e-mail discussion groups. Most of them are in the meantime put together on the site “The True Religion.”3 Of this sample, I selected fifty stories of female converts from the United States, Canada, and Europe from a...

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