Based on her PhD study of Finnish converts to Islam, Linda Hyökki argues that understanding anti-Muslim and Muslim experiences between those converted from the majority community and those form minoritized Muslim communities, have both overlap and key differences that need to be recognised.

Finland’s Muslims are ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse, as in other European countries. Suppose one asks who Finnish Muslim converts are and their position within the wider Muslim community or Finnish citizenry. In that case, there are at least two alternative approaches. Firstly, one could provide a demographic description of the convert community and examine the gender balance between male and female converts, their social statuses, their age, and their religious background before they chose Islam as their spiritual path. But, in Finland, where citizens are not required to register their religious affiliation, it is impossible to define the convert community with statistics. The second way of going about the question of who Finnish converts are is to talk to the converts themselves and investigate the issue of their identities from the perspective of subjective experience with a qualitative research approach. By concentrating on the converts’ descriptions of who they are and exposing how converts strive to acknowledge their value in society on an equal footing with their non-Muslim peers, a qualitative approach aids against treating Muslim converts as insignificant statistics.

The decision to choose Islam as one’s religion seems to symbolize a step away from what modernism, liberalism and secularism entail. In this secular age conversion to Islam and belief in God is “(…) understood being one option among others” (Taylor, 2007, p. 3). Converts to Islam do not only have to struggle with being “religious” in a society in which religion hardly plays a role, but their choice of religion, Islam, is what causes more hate. When Samira became a Muslim[1], some of her friends had difficulty accepting the changes she incorporated into her life. While she was happy about how Islam gave her peace of mind and helped her to move away from a life of materialism, her friends found that her choice to become a Muslim was the cherry on top. As Samira recounted, she received questions such as: “But for this change, why must it be Islam specifically? Can you not come up with anything else?”

This question shows why Samira’s spiritual path was considered problematic because she chose Islam, not another religion. It is precisely in these kinds of instances that the alleged cultural incompatibility of Islam with Finnish society becomes manifest and helps us to draw a connection between the hostility towards religion per se and the lifestyle of the culture that this religion is perceived to represent. Following Irfan Ahmed’s (2013) concept of domophilia, Samira becomes the cultural other who threatens the imagined homogeneous Finnish cultural identity.

While the centuries-long presence of Islam on the European continent and its influence on the developments of Europe as a civilisation might go unnoticed due to the Orientalist framing of Islam as a foreign element (Berger, 2014, p. 30; Hedges, 2021, p. 130) the role of European converts to Islam in the formation of an Islamicate European heritage is even less talked about. Mass conversions in the Ottoman Balkans, Sicily, and Al-Andalus during the Middle Ages greatly affected the local populations becoming majority Muslim (Berger, 2014). Thus, Muslim converts are historically not seen as a new phenomenon in the European religious landscape, and even today, they are an essential part of making Islam known in Europe. Yet, choosing Islam seems today to represent an oxymoron of what modern Europe claims to represent in values and as an imagined homogeneous group of people in racial and cultural terms.

Questions of belonging and un-belonging mark the presence of Muslim converts in European societies. Despite the historical intersections of Islam and Europe’s civilisational developments, Islam is still largely considered an immigrant religion in Europe, incompatible with the latter. Amidst these debates, Muslim converts find themselves within a multifaceted debate regarding the question of how their identities as “German,” “Danes,” “Swedes,” “Americans,” “Finns,” “Irish,” and so on can intersect with their new religious identity (Carr & Haynes, 2015; Jensen, 2008; McGinty, 2006; Özyürek, 2015; Roald, 2004; van Nieuwkerk, 2004). I will shortly discuss the three main framings I encountered during my literature review, which are created by non-Muslims and the converts themselves when it comes to situating Muslim converts within the larger socio-political context of their societies.

1. Firstly, Islam and national cultural identity – or, for instance, belonging to the social category of Finns – are juxtaposed within the anti-Muslim racist discourse. This is what I call the cultural and racial divergence framing on Muslim converts, and it is externally produced. It deals with race, cultural practice, and values. Even the degree to which Muslim converts practise their religion plays a part in this process of othering. This framing also has gendered aspects, pertaining, for instance, to the ways in which Muslim women dress in public. In the extreme form of such racial othering, Muslim converts are considered “traitors” and outcasts, as was stated by the shooter of the Christchurch massacre in his manifesto:

“The only Muslim I truly hate is the convert, those from our people that turn their backs on their heritage, turn their backs on their cultures, turn their backs on their traditions, and become blood traitors to their race. These I hate.”

The historical, social construction of Finnish society as White and the racial othering of Muslims as non-White serve as a reference point for understanding how Finnish Muslim converts’ Whiteness and Finnishness are disassociated from their religious identity. They can even be said to “lose their Finnishness” by becoming Muslims. Moreover, this question of belonging is reinforced by the idea that Muslim converts are radicalized and have a malicious agenda of committing violent attacks against non-Muslims. Such a claim is reinforced within the general securitisation discourse on Muslims. In Germany, the media has played a significant role in spreading a “threat image” referring to converts (Özyürek 2009), and in Finland, a book on jihadism alleged that born Muslims were worried about the radical stances of converts towards religion that pictured them as “brainwashed.” The question of conversion to Islam is framed as an issue of brainwashing and coercion, particularly in the case of female converts.

2. Secondly, as a solid contrast to the polarisation and fearmongering above is the idea of convergence between the local and Islamic cultures. Depending on how it is instrumentalized, it can have positive and negative ramifications when positioning Muslim converts as part of the Muslim community. In the case of the former, it can increase awareness of the fact that the religious diversity of Finns is a cultural asset for society at large. The converts are thus seen as able to “break through established social, cultural, and political boundaries” (Özyürek, 2015, p. 5) since these boundaries have existed there to keep the Muslims with migratory backgrounds alienated from the majority society. Samira talked to me about how she contributes to her working environment in the field of social work with Muslim clients in a very particular way that benefits her colleagues and the work they do at large. Her socio-cultural knowledge as an “insider” in the Muslim community differentiates her from her colleagues.

“How much experience do they get when they have me as a cultural translator? The kinds of observations the head of that department can make … and take them forward … from the point of view of civic action when they came through a Muslim.” (Samira)

Converts are thus framed as mediators or “bridges between the Muslim community and the majority society” (Duderija & Rane, 2019; Roald, 2004) who can operate beyond the claimed otherness of Islam. Converts I interviewed actively perform both identities, fusing religious norms with cultural practices and values. This fusion of identities shows that while they self-identify with the category of Finns, the converts draw from values and practices they consider part of their born culture that they find compatible with their faith’s values and norms (Hyökki, 2022). This understanding finds resonance in the idea that Islam is a religion that can be accommodated in all socio-cultural contexts. At the same time, the religious practice is adapted into the ‘urf, i.e., local customs, of each geographic area if it does not conflict with the Islamic principles of revealed knowledge and God’s command (Murad, 2020, pp. 208–209).

3. However, cultural convergence can also be instrumentalized to otherize Muslims with a migratory background. The framing, then, which I call “convert exceptionalism,” forms a very peculiar way of juxtaposing Muslim converts and Muslims with a migratory background to promote the detrimental binary of the “good” and “bad” Muslim. The binary is fundamentally created externally to differentiate Muslims according to the degree of their visible religiosity, ending in conclusions such as “non-practising: secularized, integrated/assimilated,” and “practising: fundamentalists” Muslims (Akgönül, 2011, p. 36). The political meanings of these labels find use in global discourses surrounding the “War on Terror” and are based mainly on assumptions of Islam as a threat to Western values and followingly stigmatize practising Muslims as carriers of that threat (Downing, 2019; Mamdani, 2005; Topolski, 2018). Within this binary, the convert exceptionalism is constructed two-fold, both by converts themselves and others, such as researchers.

On the one hand, Muslim converts are claimed to contribute to forming particular “European Islam(s).” As one of the Spanish converts interviewed by Rogozen-Soltar (2012, p. 619) expressed, these strivings serve to “make Islam accepted” within the global political era of hostility against Islam and Muslims. While Islam and Muslims are constantly marginalized and demonized, Muslim converts find themselves in a defensive position. In a way, this position translates to the need to distance themselves from the immigrant Muslims to claim their right to belong in their born cultural communities despite their new religious identity. Thus, this form of convert exceptionalism occurs when converts position themselves as able to carve out an Islam that is more “palatable.” The German converts, for instance, interviewed by Özyürek (2015, pp. 32–33) would try to express their difference from the Muslims with a migratory background by explaining that their way of interpreting and practising Islam would be closer to the European and German philosophical ideals of Enlightenment of rationalism and tolerance.

On the other hand, convert exceptionalism can also be produced by researchers and other commentators when looking into how converts converge their cultural and religious identities in their everyday lives. What concerns me is how researchers might choose to describe this ability with words that I would see as creating more binaries, such as “contributing to the development of Islam(s) in the West that is (are) indigenous rather than imported” (Duderija & Rane, 2019, p. 143). The words indigenous and imported are problematic for me here, as they put Muslims with a migratory background into a position of the spatial Other, from which they can never escape. It implies that they, unlike converts, cannot possess the skills to live Islam in a manner “suitable” to the local European contexts. This framing of Muslims with a migratory background as perpetual spatial and cultural others contributes to further issues I have observed to emerge from convert exceptionalism.

Lastly, in the attempt to distance themselves from Muslims of Arab, Turkish, etc. backgrounds, some Muslim converts claim that having no influence of family or tradition in Islamicate cultures, they can practise an Islam which is free of any cultural baggage. Striving for “pure Islam” is typical for the converts to Salafism (Inge 2017), who consider their way of practising Islam as following the Prophetic way and hence transcending any cultural practices that are mixed up with what is regarded as “religion.” However, converts who do not self-identify as Salafis claim to practice “authentic” Islam (Rogozen-Soltar, 2012; Vroon-Najem, 2019) and see themselves as even “better Muslims than immigrant Muslims” (Özyürek, 2015, p. 25). Such exceptionalism becomes problematic as it reproduces an Orientalist discourse wherein the Occident acts as “dominating, restructuring, and having authority” over the Orient (Said, 1979, p. 3). However, I would argue that these new spaces they create for Islam to exist in various European geographies are not about “freeing” Islam from its association with Arabs or any other “Muslim culture” but rather serve the Islamic concept of ‘urf as described above. There are not many “Islams” to be practised but a practice of one Islam depending on the local customs within the Islamic framework. Thus, within the critical paradigm of this thesis, I see it necessary to emphasise how researchers should critically investigate any exceptionalism and construction of binaries that serve in the larger context to categorize the types of Muslims into “good” and “bad” ones.

Muslim converts are a specific group whose experiences should be regarded from a particular perspective. Their lives are also affected by the hostile public and political debates surrounding Islam and Muslims in post-immigration societies. In their foreword of the newly published edited volume on Muslims in Finland, the book’s editors note that more and more Finnish Muslims have been born and raised in Finland, and there are thus fewer justifications to speak of Islam as the religion of immigrants (Pauha & Konttori, 2022, p. 5). However, such well-meaning acknowledgements do not compensate for the dire need for comprehensive studies on Finnish Muslim converts as part of the Muslim community in Finland. The normalization of Islam as part of Finland’s religious landscape must also be connected to studying Muslim converts. Larsson and Račius (2010) have pointed to the fallacy of the history of Muslims and Islam in Europe as only connected to post-second World War migratory trends and call for consideration of the history of Tatar Muslims in the Baltic. I concur that academic discussions frequently ignore that historical mass conversions to Islam have marked European history. Today, Europe consequently houses Islamic cultures not only in the Iberian Peninsula but also in the southeastern part of the continent (Karić, 2002). Still, I would emphasise considering the conversion experience as necessary in the broader understanding of Islam in Europe.

Based on the observations about the sociological positions of Muslim converts, it is essential to note that when examining the experience of Muslim converts in Finland, concepts of “Finnishness” and race must be viewed from a different angle than when examining the experience of born Muslims with a migrant background. Even though the experiences of converts, for instance, on discrimination in the labour market, can overlap with those of born Muslims, as Karhunen (2022) showed, facets of anti-Muslim racism are still different in the everyday lives of converts. This is because, after their conversions, they are often forced to negotiate their own and others’ ideas of Finnishness – an identity marker with which they have been born.

Linda Hyökki obtained her Ph.D. in Civilisation Studies from Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul in 2023. Her thesis, of which the following piece is part of, won the best PhD-thesis award of the year and focused on Finnish female Muslim converts’ experiences on racialisation and recognition. She works as a Senior Policy and Advocacy Advisor at the European Coalition of Cities Against Racism.  Apart from her commitment to local public policy, she also does freelance consulting in various national and transnational projects and publishes on the topics of anti-Muslim racism, racialisation, hate speech, gendered Islamophobia, anti-discrimination, and Muslim identity in Europe.

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[1] The name has been changed for anonymity. “Samira” was one of the women I interviewed for my PhD thesis on Finnish Muslim converts’ experiences on anti-Muslim racism, racialization, and recognition.