Nov 11 2001 – Less than three weeks after terrorists struck New York City and Washington, Heather Ramaha stood among a group of women at the mosque in Manoa and recited the shahada in Arabic:
“Ash-hadu alla illaha illa Allah. Wa-ash-hadu anna Mohamadan rassulu Allah.”
She was testifying that “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah (one true God), and Mohammed is a prophet of God.”
By doing so, she became a convert to the Islamic faith, extending a recent national trend.
Some Muslim clerics across the country say they are seeing a fourfold increase in conversions since Sept. 11, when stories about Islam jumped from the back pages of the religion section to front pages worldwide.
Hakim Ouansafi, the president of the Muslim Association of Hawai’i, said that prior to Sept. 11, there had been an average of three converts per month.
In the two months since then, there have been 23.
And oddly enough for a religion that is often perceived as one that cloaks its women from head to foot, the newly converted Westerners tend to be female. Ouansafi said the national ratio of converts is 4-to-1, women to men. Here, he said, it’s closer to 2-to-1.
Most Mainland converts are African-Americans, who make up about a third of U.S. Muslims, some of whom found Allah while they were in jail or in recovery from drug or alcohol addiction.
On the West Coast, the men are mainly military, said Ouansafi, and most of the O’ahu converts are former Christians. One’s even a single cosmetics saleswoman.
More people are looking into his religion and liking what they see, he says, despite the relentless media coverage of Muslim terrorists.
“Know you find bad people in every religion, and that religion should not be judged by that extreme minority,” he said.
One thing Sept. 11 did was remind people that life is too short: “If I’m going to die, I want die a Muslim,” a convert told Ouansafi.
Cromwell Crawford, chairman of the religion department at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa, echoed that: The effect of Sept. 11 on the national psyche made all Americans aware of the transience of life.
He described the mood of the country as changing: Singles seek to bond; family members hang together more tightly; and, by extension, the nation’s people reach out to one another.
“People are turning to religion both in the institutional sense and in noninstitutional ways,” Crawford said, adding that the fallout also is benefiting other religions besides Islam.
Why overwhelmingly women?
“In the expression of this mood, women are moved more readily and more deeply than men,” he said. “Go to any church and you’ll find more women than men.”
He also finds the female students in his classes often show greater insight into ethical issues.
“Women are the more religious of the genders for various reasons,” Crawford said. “… Women give birth and so they are in touch with the life process, caretakers of the life cycle by virtue of their biology.”
Converting