Another article about Latinas converting to Islam, in Florida this time. From the TBO News, with thanks to Skeetstreet:
TAMPA - As a child, Amy Perez attended different Christian churches, praying at Catholic Masses and singing at Baptist revivals. But she never felt satisfied with the answers those faiths provided to her questions.At 12, Perez left Webb Middle School for the Universal Academy of Florida, a Muslim school in Tampa, because she did not like the cliques and social scene at Webb. And she wanted to learn more about Islam.
Perez read about the Muslim faith and asked her classmates questions.
After much research and contemplation, Perez took the Shahada, the declaration of faith to become Muslim.She was 14.
``I finally found peace,'' said Perez, 22, who is of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent. ``A peace that I had never known. Everything made sense to me. Every question I had, there was an answer for. It was truly remarkable.''
Perez's sentiments seem to resonate with U.S. Latinas, who are embracing Islam in increasing numbers. They join a faith dominated in the United States by blacks, who make up about half the estimated 6 million followers, according to a 1990 study by the American Muslim Council, the most recent available. Followers of South Asian and Arab descent constitute about 35 percent.
Numbers of Muslims are difficult to determine since faith is not included in the U.S. census, but there is abundant anecdotal evidence that more Hispanic women are adopting Islam....
Once again, still searching for a reporter with the guts to ask one of these converts what she thinks of Qur'an 4:34.
Isn't this almost exactly the same as the article published in the LA Times a few months back? Sorry I haven't time to research it, but this looks strikingly similar to that story. Worth researching.
Ask Amy Perez whether she is allowed to participate in sensual Latino dancing as a Muslim. When she marries, she'll come crawling back to her non-muslims roots, but it will be too late by then...
Jan
I've read this quote in three different articles about former Christian women converting to Islam: "The lack of intermediaries between God and the Muslim faithful appealed to her. 'I can have a direct relationship with God,'' she said."
It must be one of the Daw'ah talking points. As a Catholic, I find this statement baffling. There is simply nothing in Christianity that gets in the way of a very direct relationship with God, and I've had nothing but encouragement my whole life from my Church to have a direct relationship with God. In fact, my direct relationship with God is quite precious to me. What are these people talking about?
I think I'll send an e-mail to these writers and ask them to write an article about former Muslim women who have converted to Christianity.
Still another writer who fails to ask any questions and only reports on what these young women have to say about Islam without a single challenge to its tenets regarding a womens position in Islam. How much of ulama is really reflected by these women? What would their responces be to (Hadith 1:301) womens low credibility is do to her deficiency in intelligence, or a womans testimony is worth only half that of a man. (Hadith 1:28) The prophet said; I was shown hell-fire and the majority of its dwellers were women ungrateful to their husbands. Women are seen as a cause of evil. (Sura 78:33) In paradise a man may have many maiden for companions but no companions are promised for the few women who reach paradise.
This story uses wrong words to describe what happened.
This lady did not "convert" to become a Muslim.
She chose Islam from a zero state.
A Christian, assuming they KNOW Christ, will never renounce their faith, be they a Roman Catholic or some other denomination.
The American government should be, but apparently cannot bring itself to, be funding counter-Da'wa efforts everywhere, but especially among those groups that appear most vulnerable to appeals from Muslim propagandists, working busily away. Black churches should be given money to resist islamization; so should Hispanic churches, Catholic or Pentecostal, from the geopolitical point of view it does not matter. Why is it so hard to see where the points of vulnerability are, and how Muslims have identified them, and even now are working both to subvert -- for conversion to Islam, at this point, knowing what we all know about Islam (it was one thing to convert to Islam 20 years ago, or 10, or perhaps even 5) turns someone into an immediate enemy of the circumambient Infidel society, someone who now must be monitored instead of doing the monitoring.
Subversion from within will fail to be recognized as long as the simpleton's phrase about a "war on terror" continues to be employed, instead of "war against all the instruments of Jihad" which, of course, includes in the first place, the Call to Islam or Da'wa. This is recruiting for the Army of Islam; it does not permit apostasy, for apostasy is regarded as treason.
See the world through Muslim eyes. A zero-sum game. Two sides: the Believers, and the Infidels. Anything that strengthens the Believers -- it could be a Pakistani or Iranian bomb, it could be a few trillion dollars in OPEC oil revenues used to support mosques and madrasas worldwide, it could be new converts to Islam. The first question Bin Laden asked, on the first tape made after 9/11, was to ask how the attacks had affected the rates of conversion to Islam, and he was beaming when he was told that the rates of conversion to Islam in one European country, Holland, not only had not diminished, but actually gone way up. Whether this was true or not is irrelevant; what counts is the extreme interest that Bin Laden rightly took in the matter.
Perhaps those who made the mistake of marrying a Muslim and then discovered what Islam is all about, but have not been able to rescue their children from it, could help to testify about the real nature of Islam.
And there is one more point to consider. Many immigrant parents are very concerned about the wellbeing of their children. They want them to succeed. They may not have given much thought, or indeed any thought, to Islam's unbroken record of failure -- political, economic, social, and intellectual -- over at least the past thousand years. The submission to authority, the Total Explanation of the Universe, the punishment of any attempt to exercise independent thought in the field of belief, all contributes to an environment that prevents free and skeptical inquiry. How many converts have thought about what Islam will do to their children's chances of success? How many have considered the ban on music, on most forms of art? These things may matter, when other appeals are in vain.
Instead of writing candyfloss pieces why can't any newspaper conduct a full and frank investigation into the price paid by Muslims who convert to other religions. It does not have to be a study of foreign countries....investigate the hell that Muslims in Britain and America face when leaving Islam, the death threats and persecution (sanctioned by Islamic law) about which Muslims are silent. Any article that does not present the counter-view is worthless, especially when it allows free reign to all the victimhood that comes off the explanations of how converts to Islam are treated by family members.
AT LEAST THEY DO NOT KILL OR THREATEN TO KILL THEM.
Muslims are given a free ride in these articles. If they accuse us of something they should be examined on this issue themselves. All these articles do is add to this whining self pitying complex of Muslims, the uniquely suffering, the uniquely persecuted.
How Muslims persecute apostates from Islam makes the sob stories of people like this seem miniscule. And yet I have only ever read one article on this issue in a mainstream paper. It is always good to be self critical but sometimes it becomes madness. We need to expose this aspect of Islam relentlessly, not feed the self pitying hypocrisies of 'new' Muslims. Any article about people converting to Islam without mentioning that Islam sentences to death those who leave its fold is worthless and meaningles and without context.
These women are strange. Stranger still is Yvonne Ridley.
http://www.w3ar.com/a.php?k=1910
Who whines about rude taxi drivers while on her way to a memorial for the terrorist arafat. Meanwhile, her sisters in religion located in Saudi can't even drive a car let alone try and get a cab in London at 11:30pm !!
lets see, she is half dominican and half PR. most dominicans are decended from former black slaves and a good many puerto ricans are too. maybe she discovered her roots and found out her ancestors were from somalia or mali or niger or, well you know. what is really heartbreaking is to see a caucasian blue eyed english or american woman condemn herself to islam. makes you wanna think what happened wrong in their lives.
Andece:
Dont' blame black genes for the reported FYT's decision. Most African-descended folks in the New World have roots along a once very pagan, now chock-ablock with at least nominal Christians, strip of land along the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea. Down in Brazil, there are lots with roots in the lower Congo region and Angola. The notion that Black America's original religion is Islam has to be one of the most remarkable scams ever perpetrated on any group of people.
My guess is that Islam in the West--at least the traditional Maghreb-to-Mindanao kind--tends to show a very polite face from cultures where elaborate codes of etiquette are the norm (and they get REALLY elaborate in insular southeast Asia). Hence, I'm not surprised that it takes a while for people to get the "bad news" about Islam. Its worst people at least have the discipline to behave themselves until such time as the Sheikh tells them it's time to murder a kafir.
Hugh:
Re subsidizing inner-city churches, while I'm all for supporting social setvices with public money (and yes, even a Bible story or a dose of seomone's traditional religion with it is acceptable--we're big folks who know what we're getting into); I'm not for supporting churches per se, even if I am a fanatic Bible-thumping fundie.
All government programs involve a certain amount of bureaucratic oversight, which means some faceless nobody who justifies his line in the budget by writing regulations for the people using the program. The potential for mischief and corruption is huge. Further, I can just see some idealistic character from a major secular university staffing one of the bureaucracies telling some effective preacher that he's no longer allowed to preach on some of the Bible's more terrifying warnings of hellfire and damnation--evben if such preaching has put drunks and addicts on a straight, narrow (and modestly productive without being a public charge) path they've been following for the past forty years.
It's better to let the ministries of those inner city churches remain in the hands of boards of deacons or elders who are intimately interested in the functioning and faith of the project. If you're a suburbanite who wants to help an inner-city black or Hispanic church, your own congregation may have, somewhere in its network, a contact for partnership and even some means of financial accountability. It might even be tax-deductible. Sopmetimes, two congregations in the wealthy and poorer parts of town can even form a working partnership.
I believe one of the West's great weaknesses at present is the widespread notion that anything that's worth anything is got from the public trough; and the key to success is the fat government contract (it infects rich as well as poor). Better yet, cut all the subsidizing of everything from multimillion-dollar agribusiness and insurance of rich folks' beach homes to immoral behavior (and above all, cut the National Endowment for the Arts--rich folks can still buy original works whenever they want; and the rest of us won't have to subsidize pots of piss and FYT's smeared with chocolate); and maybe we'll have a few more dollars of our own to give as we see fit.
We've got enough tax-funded nincompoopery going on (sensitivity training about the folks who want to blow you up and public school textbooks like _Across the Centuries_ among them) as is. My guess that with a little more cooperation and support of coreligionists from the wealthy parts of the land, the inner city churches will do a good job even without a government handout.
It is easy to control Moslim migration, but what are we to do with converts to Islam? You can't deport them as they are citizens of the country.