Abstract
Since the turn of the millennium, an unexpected pattern has caught the interest of researchers and students across various disciplines. Contrary to forecasts of secularisation in the European context, and against the grain of the contemporary stigmatisation of Islam and Muslims in European public debates, a number of formerly non-Muslim men and women convert to Islam. In response to the phenomenon of women converting to Islam, a body of research has emerged, engaging with the question, ‘Why are Western women, raised in liberal contexts, converting to Islam?’ (McGinty, 2007; Van Nieuwkerk, 2006). This line of enquiry is not limited to academic literature, however. In recent years, converts to Islam have also faced intense scrutiny in mainstream media across Europe (Sealy, 2017), with newspaper headlines such as ‘Swapping Raving for Praying’ (La, Grazia Daily, 2015) and ‘Why ARE so many modern British career women converting to Islam?’ ( Daily Mail, 2010) abounding. At the same time, this discussion has begun to appear in documentaries across Europe. While framings of Muslims in print media and news reporting have begun to be scrutinised, little literature exists on portrayals of formerly non-Muslim converts to Islam generally and none on representations in documentaries specifically. 1
This article contributes an analysis of documentaries to the study of representations of converts to Islam, focusing particularly on the British documentary
The article is structured as follows. Firstly, we situate this research within existing literature on gender and conversion to Islam and outline our approach to the study of documentaries on women’s conversion to Islam. Secondly, we analyse MMM and LCA, focusing on two of their shared concerns, namely gender equality and women’s oppression, and the familial environment of the female convert. Based on our analysis, we argue that paying attention to how female converts are represented illuminates some of the ways in which European framings of the ‘in-betweenness’ of female converts to Islam create notions of female converts as ‘vulnerable-fanatics’ prone to ‘radicalisation’, and threatened by ‘oppressive’ Islam. We then demonstrate how female converts participating in documentaries at times complicate and talk back to apprehensions regarding equality, oppression and radicalisation. Finally, we focus in a similar way on understandings of female converts as ‘troublemakers’ within their family environments. Throughout the analysis, we show how the figure of the female convert as vulnerable-fanatic and as family troublemaker is gendered and interlaced with concerns about essentialised cultural difference and radicalisation.
Studying gender and conversion to Islam in documentaries
According to conversion studies scholars Lewis Rambo and Charles Farhadian, conversion is rarely, if ever, framed as a ‘neutral act’. Instead, it tends to be imagined as establishing new boundaries, and transgressing pre-existing religious, political, social and cultural boundaries (Rambo and Farhadian, 2014). While this is the case across a range of religious traditions (Davidman, 1991; Klaver, 2011), conversion seems to be of particular interest for journalists and scholars alike ‘when the religion is Islam and the convert is female’ (Soutar, 2010: 4). This fascination with women converting to Islam can be explained in terms of a broad tendency to imagine Islam as a religion that oppresses women and thus stands in tension with ‘Western culture’ as a driving force in the emancipation of women. This model of Western, secular society as ‘emancipatory’ and religion (particularly Islam) as ‘oppressive’ has been extensively contested (Cady and Fessenden, 2013). Additionally, women are often characterised as ‘symbolic repositories of national identity’ in public discourse (Vom Bruck, 2008: 53). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that European media as well as academic research should be concerned by their ‘national symbols’ converting to a religion seen as contradicting the Western norm of gender equality.
There are three prevailing strands of explanation for the phenomenon of women converting to Islam in both media narratives and academic discourse on women’s conversion to Islam. Firstly, women’s conversion to Islam is framed in terms of the danger of potential ‘radicalisation’ 2 (Bartoszewicz, 2013). Secondly, conversion to Islam is often explained in terms of individual biographies related to family ties (Hermansen, 2006). Thirdly, scholars seek to clarify how female converts might find, in Islam, a distinct form of gender equality (Van Nieuwkerk, 2006).
We approach the two documentaries by means of a critical discourse analysis. Discourse can be characterised as a system of representation that establishes tacit knowledge and delimits identity construction (Foucault, 1970), while subjectivity is best understood as formed through its interaction with ‘outside’ normativities shaped by culture and gender. Sociologist Sarah Bracke makes a compelling case for applying an Althusserian–Butlerian methodological approach to framings of Muslim women in contemporary public discourse. In this article, we are informed by the emphasis on
Researchers in critical discourse studies (CDS) have already begun to recognise the potential of documentaries as analytical sources. Bateman, for example, points out that documentaries always make certain ‘truth claims’, while featuring ‘potentially misleading or misdirecting…(audio)-visual representations’ (Bateman, 2017: 613). This potential tension between visual representations and narrated framing renders documentaries a particularly useful source when exploring tacit knowledge. An additional layer of insight is provided by individual participants in the documentaries, who sometimes explicitly contest both visual and narrative truth claims. Somewhere at the ‘border between information and entertainment’, documentaries walk a fine line between telling an interesting story and representing a set of truth claims that correspond with, and inform, the viewer’s accepted reality (Russell, 1999: 97). In this article, through a detailed transcription and close viewing of the two documentaries, we pay attention to presuppositions, indirect speech, and the distinctions between scripted and unscripted interactions (Flowerdew, 1999: 167). In what follows, our focus is twofold: we will explore both the discrepancies between language and visuals and the interplay between framings of converts and converts’ responses to these framings. As such, our analysis will illuminate implicit assumptions in discourse on female conversion to Islam, and draw out the ways in which converts ‘talk back’ (Van den Brandt, 2019).
Documentaries on women’s conversion to Islam in the European context
Before analysing
In the German context, several recent documentaries engage with – and problematise – a particular model of ‘Germanness’, which precludes the conversion of native German women to Islam. For example, in
From here we turn to the British documentary
While in LCA, the interviewer remains invisible, an ostensibly neutral arbitrator, in MMM (2014), British-born Muslim model and entertainment figure Shanna Bukhari travels around the UK, interviewing young women who have converted to Islam, and sharing her own story. The documentary was produced and broadcast on the BBC, which has, in recent years, produced a number of programmes representing British Muslims including a ‘reality TV show’ entitled
Following the above critique, it is important to recognise that the conversion of white women to Islam seems to be disproportionately discussed in the British and Swiss contexts (and across Europe), while conversion to Islam is, in fact, a highly diverse phenomenon (Vroon-Najem, 2014). This overemphasis on the plight of white women has long been a problem within feminist and gender studies (bell hooks, 2000). In our analysis in the sections that follow, we keep in mind that MMM and LCA are indeed mediated by, and (almost exclusively) limited to, the experiences of white middle-class women.
Framings of vulnerable-fanatic in-betweenness
In the opening minutes of both documentaries, conversion to Islam and a young woman’s freedom are framed as diametrically opposed. Bukhari sets up MMM with the following monologue: ‘You’re a young, British female. You can wear what you want, you can have a crazy night out…why are you choosing to leave all this fun and excitement?’ Alongside this narration, we see the image, typical of documentaries on this subject,
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of the white girl looking at her own reflection in the mirror as she puts on the
Likewise, in LCA, we see convert Miriam walking through a Genevan market square, as the narrator asks why ‘an older woman with blue eyes, an outre-Sarine 6 accent, and aware of the emancipation of women’, would cover her ‘long blonde’ hair. In LCA the preoccupation with women’s equality and embodied appearance intersects from the start with the concern with converts’ potential susceptibility to radicalisation and terrorism. While the documentary tells the biographical stories of women from various backgrounds embracing different types of Islamic practice, their stories are interlaced with images of the 2001 New York attacks and the 2004 Madrid bombings, footage of Daesh and Islamic State in Syria, and interviews with experts on radicalisation and terrorism. While the female converts’ biographies seem to have very little to do with radicalisation and terrorism (with Lydia, who will be discussed in the next section, as the sole exception), the radicalisation frame creates the overwhelming impression that (female) converts are potentially dangerous subjects. The essentialist portrayal of Islam as a ‘radical’ religion situates female converts as willingly inscribing themselves within a tradition that is not only culturally incompatible with, but also as a potential security issue to, the majority population (Fadil et al., 2019). Moreover, unlike the narrative of conversion that emphasises women’s vulnerability and passivity in the face of their oppression by Islam, the radicalisation frame ascribes to female converts an excessive, threatening agency. As such, female converts are caught within what the sociologist of education Tania Saeed calls ‘the spectrum of the vulnerable-fanatic’ (2016: 2), in which they are always perceived to be ‘at risk’ of radicalisation. Formerly non-Muslim women become presumably ‘too religious’ through conversion to Islam, and thereby ‘have to prove their innocence, lest they are thought to be extremists’ (Saeed, 2016: 66).
In MMM, we see a similar paradigm of the ‘too religious’ convert through the discursive framework of Bukhari’s sense of inadequacy in her religious practice as a ‘born Muslim’. While this documentary is unusual in showing a Muslim in dialogue with fellow Muslims, it is worth noting that Bukhari, while an ‘insider’ in terms of the Islamic discursive tradition, does not veil and appears (at least initially) critical of the ways in which these young women are ‘sacrificing’ the hallmarks of growing up as an ‘emancipated Western woman’ (drinking, going out, dating). 7 The Althusserian–Butlerian model of subject interpellation helps to make sense of Bukhari’s positioning as an interpellated subject who ‘relies on or points back to’ the dominant discourse (Bracke, 2011: 43), even as she seeks to help converts ‘respond’. Over the course of the documentary, however, Bukhari simultaneously seems to be interpellated by the Islamic discursive tradition (Bracke, 2011: 43) when she becomes concerned that the converts she meets are practising Islam more rigorously than her, and that she feels, as she puts it, ‘judged’ to be a ‘bad Muslim’. She defends herself by stating, ‘I’m British. Yes, I’m a Muslim, but we live in such a Western society.’ The use of the word ‘but’ here suggests a dichotomy between being a Muslim woman and living in Western society, and that Islam has to ‘adapt’ to this Western model of gender equality. Anthropologist Vanessa Vroon-Najem notes the prevalence of this tendency towards ‘polarized conceptualisations’ of Muslim and Western identities as constituting mutually exclusive ‘cultural repertoires’ (2014: 200–201).
This process of negotiating ‘conflicting’ identities is a recurrent theme in both LCA and MMM. In LCA, convert Sophie describes an Islamophobic attack, in which a man threatened to remove her headscarf and ‘force her to eat it’. The narrator here seems to defend the aggressor, explaining that it was ‘
The converts’ responses: Complicating the narratives of in-betweenness and suspicion
In both MMM and LCA, converts offer some answers to the question of why they have converted to Islam and how they can be both ‘free’ and ‘Muslim’. When asked about her experience of Islam as a woman, Sofia responds that ‘All this stuff about women being oppressed…is complete codswallop.’ There is something endearing about Sofia’s use of the vernacular ‘codswallop’ here, which breaks through the usual moroseness of discourse on oppressive Islam. Similarly, in LCA, Miriam, described by the narrator as a ‘furiously independent’ woman, is asked if marrying a Muslim man has ‘helped her’ learn about Islam. Miriam seems taken aback by the question, and after clarifying it, bursts out laughing. She responds, still smiling, that she wants to ‘stop with the clichés’ and that her husband has not compelled her in any way in her religious practices. Miriam’s response to this question again breaks the mould of conversion to Islam as a serious matter of oppression and runs in contrast with the narrative of brainwashed female converts embracing Islam for their husbands. This narrative of marrying into Islam plays a relatively small role in both documentaries; while several women converted after marrying, most ascribe their ongoing commitment to Islam to factors such as liberation from Western norms or a new kind of intellectual freedom. Later in the documentary, Miriam voices a sense of ostracisation at work, where she sees people talking amongst themselves about terrorist attacks, and changing the subject when she arrives, instead of speaking to her directly and asking what she thinks. She explains that she finds this hurtful because it suggests that she is ‘
It is not only in terms of their marital statuses and experiences of dating that some of these converts invert normative stereotypes. In MMM, the narrator explains that, for convert Sofia, ‘partying didn’t have the same appeal…as to most girls in their twenties’. While the word ‘most’ here carries the implication that Sofia’s experience is ‘abnormal’, Sofia herself contrasts her conservatism with the ‘loose’ behaviour of ‘most’ British women who like to go out, get drunk and dress ‘provocatively’. Along similar lines, convert Lisa explains that she was a ‘wild thing’ before converting, and Islam has ‘definitely calmed [her] down’ and given her a new sense of purpose. In LCA, Miriam explains that her conversion to Islam has encouraged her to abandon Western ideals of beauty and youth, and focus instead on learning and reading ‘until her last breath’. This corresponds with Kent’s claim that the ‘modesty expectations of Islam’ may be experienced by converts as a mode of emancipation from the ‘alienating aesthetic norms’ imposed by Western fashion (Kent, 2014: 310). Likewise, McGinty suggests that Muslim identity might constitute for women ‘a space in which resistance against patriarchal ideas can take form’ (McGinty, 2007: 474). This reframing, in which Western culture is no longer the guardian of gender equality and freedom, resonates with a broader reconceptualisation of agency as something that can be expressed in a range of ways, beyond the Western model (Mahmood, 2005). In her discussion of women ‘turning to Islam’, Jouili takes a similar approach, arguing that women’s ‘conscious turn to Islam’ constitutes an act of agency (Jouili, 2011: 48).
Framings of women’s conversion as family troublemaking
Another central motif that emerges in the documentaries MMM and LCA is the ways in which converts’ families and friends respond to their conversion. This emphasis is near to absent in documentaries, reportages and articles concerning male converts, which tend to represent conversion to Islam as a political and/or intellectual act, perhaps reflecting the cultural norm that women govern the domestic sphere, while men act as the breadwinners in the public sphere (Scott, 2013).
In MMM, the effect of conversion on converts’ relationships with family members is framed as a ‘problem’. As we see convert Sofia’s mother, Jill, cleaning the kitchen, the narrator informs us that ‘one of the toughest hurdles converts have to face is the reaction of their families’. This statement exemplifies a model of tacit knowledge, in which conversion is assumed to pose problems for harmonious family relations. This assumption is immediately contested, however, when Bukhari asks Jill what she thinks about her daughter’s conversion to Islam, and Jill responds that she finds her daughter’s ‘conservatism’ as a Muslim convert much like ‘the old-fashioned Christian way’. Here, we can see Sofia’s mother making sense of Islam with reference to Christianity, a religion culturally embedded and accepted within the British secular context. From the way in which Jill speaks about her daughter’s conversion, her ongoing love, acceptance and support for Sofia become clear. Similarly, later in the documentary, Glaswegian convert Alana likens her ‘coming out’ as Muslim to ‘telling [my parents] I was gay or something’. She explains, laughing heartily, that her dad responded by saying that he ‘thought she already was a Muslim’ and that neither of her parents saw it as a ‘big deal’. Furthermore, when asked how her conversion to Islam has affected her family life, Lisa states, with a smile, that her mum calls her a ‘nun on the run’ and one of her neighbours describes her as a ‘ninja’. While, at face value, these comments might appear disparaging (Saeed, 2016: 71), Lisa characterises them as affectionate ‘banter’ that marks her continued inclusion in the community. There seems to be a disparity here between the way in which the narrator characterises converts’ ‘coming out’ about their conversions as a ‘hurdle’ that can create relational problems, and the experiences described by many of the converts featured in the documentary. Similarly, earlier in MMM, the narrator claims that ‘being accepted into Islam is nerve-wracking for converts’. This is juxtaposed with footage of convert Sofia being welcomed into the women’s prayer rooms, and receiving a gift of prayer clothes and a mat. Once again, there is a sense of dissonance here between the narrator’s words and visual representations of converts’ experiences.
Admittedly, these examples might represent the exception rather than the rule: according to Ramahi and Suleiman, family members do not tend to be interested in the content of Islam or the converts’ reason for converting (Ramahi and Suleiman, 2017: 33). There is also some evidence of this in our two documentaries. In MMM, when Bukhari asks Jill how the rest of the family is ‘coping’ with Sofia’s conversion, Jill answers, as the camera cuts to Sofia’s father, that ‘they’re not very happy’. When Sofia’s father, Brian, is interviewed, he states that he associates Islam with a ‘different culture’ and reminds Sofia that ‘you know, she is Welsh’, echoing the idea of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Western’ as incongruent. He concedes that his daughter is ‘24 years of age, she’s got her own mind to make up’. However, he goes on to state that there is ‘no need’ for Sofia to ‘wear their clothes’ because ‘she’s got her own clothes’ and ‘pretty hair so there’s no need to hide it’. Brian’s wording ‘their clothes’ assigns a ‘them’ (a ‘cultural Other’) that is then distinguished from ‘us’ (Welsh). When Sofia herself is asked whether converting has limited her in any way, she admits that it has been constrictive in that ‘people think that I’m like a traitor’. This reflects the confinement of Islam within narrow boundaries of culturalised difference (Vroon-Najem, 2014). Rather than investigating this tension, Bukhari expresses pity for Brian, imagining that when he goes to the pub, people will make comments like, ‘how’s your daughter doing? She still got that thing on her head?’ Bukhari’s sympathy implicitly seems to give credibility to this chauvinistic stance to Sofia’s embodied practices of conversion.
Towards the end of LCA, the model of female domestic intersubjectivity is refashioned through an unexpected discursive turn. We are introduced to Isabelle, the mother of Lydia, a teenager who converted to Islam and very quickly became ‘radicalised’. While Lydia’s relationship with a Muslim man is framed as the trigger of her conversion and radicalisation, Lydia’s mother describes her daughter as a headstrong woman who, after converting, dropped out of school and did not get a job, her sole objective being to convert her mother to Islam. Ultimately, Isabelle’s status as mother was overtaken by her status as ‘
Conclusions
In this article, we have demonstrated the value of researching documentaries to better understand discourses about women’s conversion to Islam, which female converts have to negotiate on an everyday basis. More concretely, we have grappled with representations of conversion in
While some of the voices in MMM and LCA seem to cry out for a more nuanced approach, both documentaries, as well as many other documentaries across European contexts, repeatedly return to certain prevailing motifs concerning women’s conversion to Islam. Conversion is imagined as, at best, ‘anomalous’ and, at worst, ‘dangerous’. While MMM and LCA construct framings of conversion that rest on notions of women’s oppression and cultural incompatibility, the Swiss documentary underlines the ‘threat of terrorism’ more than the British one, perhaps reflecting the differences between the British multiculturalism model (Modood, 2019) and the Swiss model of an ethnic conception of citizenship (Gianni, 2016) combined with a French republican fear of communalism, political Islam and violence (Bowen, 2007). Having said this, since documentaries afford us the opportunity to hear from converts directly (if in edited sound bites), our analysis also illuminated the ways in which the narrator’s framing can be contested. Both documentaries seem torn between received Western narratives and the aim of ‘balanced reporting’. The resulting impression is one of paradox and tension, in which the voices of narrator, converts, family of converts and born Muslims diverge at various points. This is perhaps fitting if we are to understand conversion itself as a ‘dynamic and complicated concept’ (Klaver, 2011: 63), which can be experienced in limitless ways. However, since documentaries are cultural productions it is worth considering the repercussions of framings of female converts to Islam. To conclude, let it suffice to say that the portrayal of female conversion in the documentaries discussed echoes the prevailing view of Islam as oppressive, culturally ‘other’ and potentially dangerous, and constructs an understanding of female conversion as a source of family trouble. In her discussion of ‘turning towards Islam’, anthropologist Jeanette Jouili argues that because of Western understandings of Muslim women’s piety in terms of oppression or ‘false consciousness’, Muslim women have difficulty ‘being heard’ (Jouili, 2011: 62). In both MMM and LCA, even as we become conscious of the gendered and culturalised narratives that tend to be imposed on female converts to Islam, we can, if we pay attention, begin to hear converts speak for themselves.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
ORCID iD
