ESSAY
“We became Muslims”
Why Swedish women convert to Islam?
I n 2006, I defended my doctoral
thesis, We became Muslims: Conversion
narratives among Swedish Muslim
women, at Uppsala University. My research
was based on a series of interviews I
conducted with Swedish women who have
converted to Islam. Not many Westerners
have converted to Islam and those who
have taken the step trigger curiosity. Not
the least, converts who are attracted to
fundamentalist branches of Islam, tend to
be noticed by the media.
When the converts tell about their
devotion, they stress – in particular –
that Islam stands for true emancipation
of women, and that there is an advantage
to Muslim family life. The two sexes are
taken to be different but of equal worth,
equal but subject to a hierarchal order. The
importance of the wife’s submissiveness
in emphasised – or in some cases of wives’,
since many converts strongly argue in
favour of polygamy while some of them
live in this type of family constellation.
The converts also emphasise their
dream of a Muslim social order – a
fair society ruled by the diktats of the
Quran. With the influence and power
of institutional religion on the decline,
many Westerners have been attracted to a
religious worldview. It should be stressed,
though, that this is not a mass movement
and those being attracted usually do not
stay within their chosen religious group
for a long time.
The New Age movement holds a
large number of supporters because
of its mixture of popular psychology,
health thinking and religious techniques,
providing a worldview that works well for
the rootless urban middle class. But, even
for upper class women, religion may play
a role as a place of refuge, though their
choice of religious context may vary.
If women in the past could achieve
relative influence and freedom within
the monastery, today the Norwegian
By Madeleine Sultán Sjöqvist
princess Märta Louise enjoys the same
freedom within the New Age movement.
Upper class men, on the other hand,
seem not to be attracted to the holistic
prescriptions churned out by the New Age
movement. After Tony Blair’s conversion
to Catholicism, there has been a trend
among male politicians and cultural
workers to follow suit. They repeatedly
preach the benefits of traditional family
values and that stability in the society is
guaranteed by religion.
Together with New Age, the
conservative and fundamentalist branches
within traditional world religions are the
main religious agents in today’s society.
Neither the New Age nor the conservative
and fundamentalist movements have a
coherent agenda, though some of the
main ideas are more central than others.
Within the New Age movement, for
instance, the holy aspects of life take the
shape of forces and energies related
to the individual human being. Within
conservative and fundamentalist religious
According to the
interviewees, the two
sexes are and should be
different since they have
different roles, functions and
preferences. Women should
take care of children and
their homes, men should
primarily provide for the
family – the good wife’s
daily responsibility is
homemaking while her
husband holds the overall
responsibility of the family.
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groups, the idea of a patriarchal God plays
a central role – this God is not only the
bearer of traditional male attributes, he is
also transcendent, omnipotent, and often
surrounded by taboos.
At first sight, New Age may not
seem to have much in common with
fundamentalist and conservative
religions. But, they share the idea of
wholeness. Both are strongly critical of
the fragmented society, which creates
rootless and unhappy people – they
claim. The religious framework, on the
other hand, lays the path towards a
meaningful and happy life. In the case
of New Age, the importance to come into
contact with one’s inner self is emphasised.
Conservative and fundamentalist religion
stresses the importance of being obedient
to a male religious leadership, who can
interpret the religion in the right way.
Those who have converted to Islam
do not constitute a homogeneous group,
on the other hand, some of them point
to values that can be associated with
a fundamentalist idea tradition. From
a global perspective, some of these
fundamentalist movements have extra-
parliamentary agendas. For example:
Murder of doctors for carrying out
abortions, can be justified by a Christian
conviction, while the 9/11 terror
attacks can be justified with an Islamic
endorsement. In this context, it is
important to stress that the majority
within the religious movements do not
subscribe to the idea of using political
terror to make religious gains.
The converts I interviewed for my
research, do not support terror motivated
by religion. However, the values they
hold are based upon a religious logic
which involves a society governed by
religion: economy, politics, and law shall
be guided and corrected by the Quran.
There is also a strong scepticism towards
any critical interpretation of Quranic
March/April 2010 39

Many Western converts
– irrespective of religion
– long for wholeness.
Those I have interviewed,
strive for homogeneity as
they see heterogeneity,
complexity, and ambiguities
as threatening and
problematic.
text. The religious doctrine is taken to be
God-given, rather than originating from
a given historical and social context.
Furthermore, the family is taken to be the
basic unit of society, not the individual
person. From a philosophical perspective,
they argue, there is an absolute truth
presented by the God in the Quran.
T he specific form of Islamic family
life constructed by the converts is
based upon what they are critical
against and what they are longing for.
In Islam, they have found a context for
positive identification and a language
for critiquing the time in which we live.
The Muslim community is regarded to
be friendly and free of oppression of
women.
The Western world, on the other hand,
has failed to create happy individuals and
families. Women are forced to keep up
with everything: a career, motherhood,
taking care of the husband, homemaking.
Men are not allowed to be men – they are,
for political reasons, forced into female
activities: doing household chores and
taking care of children. The converts are
critical of how the Western society values
women’s and men’s activities. They
believe, equality is to be achieved when
women’s work at home is valued equally
with men’s job.
Among the interviewees, there is a
common understanding that the roles,
properties and preferences of women and
men are neither learned nor consequences
of gender segregating mechanisms of
a society. Instead, they emphasise that
the natural gender is being suppressed
by social conditions, which is different
from the constructivists who claim that
the natural gender is a product of social
40 March/April 2010
conditions. Suppressing the natural – as it
is done in the West – has many negative
consequences: stress related illness
among women, impotency among men,
and rootless children who are forced
to day-care-centres or have to shuttle
between their separated parents.
According to the interviewees, the
two sexes are and should be different
since they have different roles, functions
and preferences. Women should take
care of children and their homes, men
should primarily provide for the family
– the good wife’s daily responsibility is
homemaking while her husband holds
the overall responsibility of the family.
Since women and men are supposed to
be in charge of different aspects of family
life, conflicts between married people
can be avoided. The difference between
the two sexes frees the Muslim marriage
from quarrels and conflicts.
According to this hierarchal logic,
women and men become whole and true,
only when they start subscribing to
the idea that men are superior to the
women. A woman becomes emancipated
only after she accepts her true femininity,
she becomes emancipated only after
she hands herself over to her husband.
Equality must be based upon difference.
Other ways of interpreting equality are
doomed to failure since they are the
products of social engineering that only
creates chaos and disorder in the society.
The lack of tolerance towards
ambiguity and complexity means that the
converts strive after a holistic thinking
on gender and family – homogeneity is
central to how they view the good society.
A mong conservative
fundamentalist groups, there
is a tendency to react against
specialisation of societal functions,
against pluralism, mass-culture, and
and
the global market. The longing for
homogeneity is expressed through the
endorsement of religion as a social order.
It is supposed to resolve political, legal,
moral, and existential issues.
In this context, the need for economic
and political justice is a recurrent rhetoric.
During the past year, some groups have
even started to discuss the terms of the
ecologically sustainable society. Religion
functions both as a means as well as an aim
in itself, for the implementation of this
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form of justice. Converts claim that the
Muslim community not only gives them a
context and a language, it also gives them
a tool for formulating a broader critique
of the secularised society.
The absence of a common moral in
the society, as well as the absence of an
absolute truth is deeply problematic
for the interviewees. The existence of
different interpretations of the religious
doctrines and the idea that truth may be a
social construction cause worries among
them. It is in Islam, in the Quran, one may
find the eternally valid, true and solid
answers.
The interviewees strive for wholeness
and harmony in all aspects of life, to
reach behind and replace the shallow and
mechanical relations between people
with a warm and endurable solidarity.
They wish to go beyond a reality that is
a social construction and reach a reality
that is real. They do not want a society
where the religious doctrines are subject
to interpretation. They wish to have a
society based upon rules, a harmonious
society based upon the idea of functional
division of labour. It is a social order that
is viewed as being free of competition,
antagonism, and power struggle. In
other words, harmony, homogeneity,
and equality may only be achieved when
individuals find their own place and role
in society.
Many Western converts – irrespective
of religion – long for wholeness. Those I
have interviewed, strive for homogeneity
as they see heterogeneity, complexity,
and ambiguities as threatening and
problematic. This longing for wholeness
is expressed on many different levels.
They wish to have stable heterosexual
gender roles and are confident with the
traditional, patriarchal family model.
They argue that the absolute truth can be
found in Islam, and they wish to live in a
theocratic society ruled by Islam.
Religion practised in a conservative
and/or fundamentalist form, may be
thought of as being part of the conditions
for the late modern lifestyle, and at the
same time, these religious movements
react heavily against pluralism and
secularisation. On one hand, these
adherents use traditional ideas about
gender, family, society, truth, and religion;
they are inspired by pictures coloured by
religion and an idealised society, within
Stockholm Mosque: Photo by Gabriel Ehrnst Grundin.
which they create an identity and space
for themselves, in a historical and social
context. However, their conditions are
not formulated by this idealised society,
but, by the conditions that characterise a
multicultural world.
During periods of economic decline
and cultural unrest, religious groups tend
to grow, followed by stagnation during
periods of stability and economic growth.
From a wider perspective, religion may be
interpreted as an unifying force against
the modern project. Religious groups that
manage to catch up and voice criticism
against from rationality and reflexivity
to capitalism and the global market,
have good prospect to see the number of
members grow. Religion offers a language
and worldview that presents a stable
ground for life, a demand for eternal
truth, an essentialistic gender order,
and, not the least, a political agenda that
promises a reduction of ambivalence and
complexity.
At first sight, it might seem as a
contradiction that religious identity
finds its legitimacy from belonging to
the right faith, rather than having the
right biological or cultural roots. But, the
conditions for the religious groups have
changed drastically under the influence
of the rise of modernity.
Religious groups today can not trust
their members to raise their children
into a religion-based worldview, and in
this way keep the number of members
intact. They have to recruit new members
in order to maintain their political
and cultural influence in secularised
societies.
It has turned out to be an accessible path,
for the conservative and fundamentalist
forms of religion, to offer values that
refer to safety and stability within the
patriarchal family model; claims of truth,
and to a large extent religiously guided
political social order. It might look like
paradox that the supporters are forced
to choose between believing on absolute
truth and an essentialistic view on the
sexes, but in a pluralistic world, where
the religiously coloured worldview is one
among several, it is of central importance
that the members are conveyed that they
have not chosen to choose.
Although the converts strongly
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emphasise the seriousness in their choice
of becoming a Muslim – they even say
that apostasy may be punished by death
– several of them have left their religious
commitment after a few years.
Some have found meaning in a
different religious context, others live
today a secular life.
Perhaps, the freedom and harmony
were not as large in the patriarchal family
model; the safety to know the existence
of an absolute truth so stable; and the
political life as simple, fair, and pleasant,
as they were promised by the religious
leaders. �
Madeleine Sultán Sjöqvist is a lecturer
of Sociology of Religion at Uppsala
University. Her research focuses on
fundamentalist religious traditions;
women in religious traditions; and
patriarchal religious control of female
sexuality and reproductive health. A
Swedish version of this article, will be
published in the next issue of Humanisten.
March/April 2010 41