Claire Stevens

My boy the radical Muslim

Ask yourself how you would feel if your child started spouting hate-filled bile against homosexuals, women, Jews — anyone, in fact, who wasn’t a Muslim man

Two years ago this week, my stepson came home wearing an Arabic black thawb. He walked into the sitting-room, smiled defiantly at me and at his father, and asked us how he looked. We were a little shocked, but being English of course we said he looked very nice.

Our boy had never shown any interest in religion before he found Islam at 16. We’re atheists, and we raised him to be tolerant of all faiths but wary of anyone selling easy answers. It all began after he left school. He was feeling slightly isolated, depressed and vulnerable after breaking up with his first girlfriend, so we were pleased when he began college and some new friends appeared. They were all young Muslim men. Around seven of them would pile into my stepson’s bedroom every evening and we would hear the shouts and yelps of teenage boys amusing themselves.

It all seemed so normal; it all was so normal. So much so that, when a prayer mat and textbooks on the Qur’an appeared on a shelf in his room, it came as something of a surprise. His father and I discussed his conversion between ourselves but, naively, we saw it as cosmetic change. This was, we reasoned, our boy’s version of going punk or vegan for a few months. We believed that this ‘conversion’ would be a harmless passing phase. We were wrong.

Over the next few months we saw the boy we knew become buried beneath a spiritual totalitarianism. The word Islam means submission. It allows you to love nothing else; to be a good Muslim, you must surrender yourself completely. Under the informal tutelage of his new friends, our boy eagerly took on the attitudes of his Muslim ‘brothers’ in place of his former personality.

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