Word: convert
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...journalists, freed early on Sunday, claimed their captors had treated them well but forced them to convert to Islam at gunpoint...
That sentiment rings true for growing numbers of Westerners, reared on other faiths or none at all, who are converting to Islam--despite the fact that relations between the Muslim world and the West have rarely seemed so strained. Although figures on conversions to Islam in Western countries are difficult to nail down, it's safe to say that Muslim converts in the U.S. and Europe number in the hundreds of thousands, and anecdotal evidence suggests the number is on the rise. The arrest of at least three English converts in the plot to blow up passenger jets over...
...being newcomers to the faith doesn't spare converts from the suspicions and pressures faced by Muslims in the West today. Ali Khan, the national director of the American Muslim Council in Chicago, says he once had to convince a recent convert's wife, who wasn't Muslim, that her husband wouldn't suddenly become a terrorist. "A lot of their families freak out at first," Khan says. He says another convert had to reassure his brother, who asked, "You're not going to kill me in my sleep, are you?" And yet there's little evidence that negative perceptions...
...name Don Stewart-Whyte is an unlikely fit with any racial-profiler's description of your typical Qaeda-inspired terror suspect. Yet, Stewart-Whyte, aka Abdul Waheed, who is believed to be either 19 or 21 and to have converted to Islam within the past year after what some neighbors describe as a troubled adolescence, has been reported by the British media as one of the 24 people arrested in connection with a plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners. Nor was he the only convert among the named suspects. Among those on a list of 19 suspects named...
...latest suspects, if they are proved guilty, will join a growing list of British extremist converts: Currently serving a life sentence for trying to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001 is "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, who is believed to have converted to Islam while in a young offenders' prison during the mid-1990s. And one of the July 7 London bombers, Jamaican-born Germaine Lindsay, reportedly changed his name to Jamal when he converted and was married to a white woman, also a convert, with whom he had a young...