Review of Conversion to Islam: A Study of Native British Converts

There is a small but growing body of work on the Islamic communities of North America and Europe. One thinks of edited collections such as Barbara Daly Metcalf's Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe (1996) or Yvonne Haddad and Jane Smith's Muslim Communities in North America (1994). However, none of these works deals with the role of converts to Islam in a substantive way. Jeffrey Lang has described his own experiences as an American convert to Islam (Struggling to Surrender: Some Impressions of an American Convert to Islam, 1994), and there do exist several other autobiographical accounts of conversion, most notably Steven Barboza's American Jihad: Islam After Malcolm X, 1994).