Here is Theodore Dalrymple on Lauren Booth's conversion to Islam
A Version of Conversion
by Theodore Dalrymple (November 2010)
Many years ago, as a student, I read a paper in a medical journal that described four cases of religious conversion under the influence of temporal lobe epilepsy. At the time the paper delighted me, for I was not merely non-religious but anti-religious. It encouraged me to think of religious belief or experience as pathological in origin, though of course this was itself a pretty elementary error of logic, unworthy of the rationalist that I fondly supposed that I was.
The psychological, sociological or other origins of a belief tell us nothing about its truth. The fact that I believe that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 mainly because my teacher would rap me over the knuckles with her ruler if I did not answer her question about it with sufficient celerity does not mean that the Battle of Hastings did not take place in 1066 – or, for that matter, that it did. The Marxist notion that being determines consciousness and not consciousness being might serve as a rough and ready empirical generalisation, but cannot possibly be an invariant epistemological principle. The origin of many of our beliefs about the world, but by no means all or even most of them, is no doubt to be explained by our particular circumstances. So while I doubt that there is anyone who never uses ad hominem arguments, I equally doubt whether there is anyone who uses only ad hominem arguments.
I mention this as a preliminary to an examination of one of the most peculiar recent cases of religious conversion, that of Lauren Booth, half-sister-in-law to Mr Anthony Blair, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, to Islam. I write half-sister-in-law because she is half-sister to Cherie, Mr Blair’s wife, and we live in a world in which the relationship of full sibling is becoming ever-rarer, like some insects or birds. The conversion of Lauren Booth, not surprisingly, made a few headlines.
In this case it is perfectly justified to resort to ad hominem remarks because Lauren Booth herself has advanced no other arguments or reasons than ad hominem ones for her own conversion.
She does not say, for example, that she became convinced that there was only one God and that Mohammed was his Prophet. On her own admission, she had read only a hundred pages of the Koran at the time of her conversion, so there was no possibility that she was persuaded by the sheer intellectual force of that document. To me, in any case, the Koran seems a terrible mish-mash (just as Carlyle described it); I fail to understand how anybody could be convinced by it intellectually. And only intellectual arguments call for replies that are not ad hominem.
Lauren Booth explained the reasons for her conversion to Islam in an article in The Guardian newspaper. There was no intellectual content to them whatsoever; the truth or otherwise of the doctrine did not exercise her mind at all, and was not even mentioned by her as a possible factor in her decision to convert. I accept that it is in the nature of conversion experiences that they should be more emotional than intellectual; but normally people are converted to what they believe to be a truth – thenceforth, for example, they know that their Redeemer liveth. For Lauren Booth truth (as either correspondence or coherence, or some combination of the two) seems to be no more important to than it was to her brother-in-law. She does not mention truth.
In so far as it is possible to extract reasons for her conversion from her women’s magazine prose, here are the reasons she gives for converting to Islam:
I began to wonder about the calmness exuded by so many of
the “sisters” and “brothers.”
Second: The bending, kneeling and submission of Muslim prayers resound with words of peace and contentment.
Third: Then came the pull: a sort of emotional ebb and flow that responds to the company of other Muslims with a heightened
feeling of openness and warmth.
Fourth: How hard and callous non-Muslim friends and colleagues began to seem. Why can’t we cry in public, hug one
another more, say “I love you” to a new friend, with facing suspicion or ridicule?
Finally: I felt what Muslims feel when they are in true prayer: a bolt of sweet harmony, a shudder of joy in which I was grateful for everything I have and secure in the certainty that I need nothing more to be utterly content.
These are the kind of utterances of people who claim that they are spiritual but not religious; they are a cross between Dale Carnegie and relaxation therapy, with just a hint of eastern spice, but not too much. In fact it is distinctly more Californian than Iranian: Islam-tinged psychobabble. It is religion for those who think that multiculturalism is a matter of eating at a different restaurant every night. There is not a word about the truth or otherwise of the religious tenets of Islam.
Lauren Booth ends her article with a lesson on the deeper cultural meaning of ‘Allahu akhbar!’
When Muslims on the BBC News are shown shouting
“Allahu Akhbar!” at some clear, Middle Eastern sky, we
Westerners have been trained to hear “We hate you in all
your British sitting rooms...” In fact, what we Muslims are
saying is “God is Great!”, and we’re taking comfort in our
grief after non-Muslim nations have attacked our villages.
It would be breaking a butterfly on a wheel to elucidate all the lies and evasions in this short passage, but I do think that it has some significance from the purely ad hominem point of view, and that is her use of the first person plural and its possessive pronoun: we are taking comfort in our grief after non-Muslim nations have attacked our villages.
What we see here is the very characteristic modern thirst of people who have led privileged lives for the safe psychological haven of victim status (though I doubt that the thirst for real raw physical victimhood is not rather easily slaked). One of the attractions of Islam to someone like Lauren Booth is therefore quite likely to have been its tendency, which is no doubt cultural rather than doctrinal in origin, to self-pity.
Self-pity is one of the very few emotions that is sustainable for long periods, never lets you down, and is understandable by everyone: for surely no one so lacks compassion that he has not felt it at some time in his life. And self-pity oozes from the passage I have quoted like olive oil from fried aubergine.
In fact, there is another clue to Lauren Booth’s conversion a couple of paragraphs before the end:
In the past my attempts to give up alcohol have come to
nothing; since my conversion I can’t even imagine drinking
again.
In other words, Islam is for her a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous, but with a bit more drama. If she had simply gone to AA in some church hall, there would have been no blaze of publicity; and she has been something of a publicity-seeker throughout her life.
The shallowness and egotism of her decision is further illustrated by how she continues, explaining how and why, thanks to Islam, she will never drink again:
There is so much in Islam to learn and enjoy and admire; I’m overcome with the wonder of it.
One can almost imagine an advertising campaign based upon this: ISLAM, SO MUCH MORE TO ENJOY. TRY IT TODAY.
No doubt personal problems and a repudiation of conduct of the past play a large part in religious conversion, including that of St Augustine himself. And certainly there seems on Lauren Booth’s own account to have been conduct to repudiate, as well as the bad example of her family. Her father, a minor comic actor who once played a role in a successful television comedy series, has had four wives and a life of alcoholic dissipation. By all accounts he has been neglectful of and abusive to those around him. His bad behaviour has been well-publicised and is known to all those who find the doings of minor celebrities of interest. He recently told the press that he did not love, and had never loved, his daughter Lauren, information that, true or not, would best have been kept private rather than bruited abroad. The fact that he saw fit to divulge it to a newspaper with a circulation of millions suggests what kind of man he is.
Lauren Booth admits to having drunk excessively and a quick scan of internet entries about her shows her to have been a full participant in the militant (and extremely stupid) vulgarity that is now the main feature of contemporary British culture, in which restraint has been altogether replaced by the crudest possible frankness. It is well that she should turn her back on her own past. A single mother of two who drinks too much and behaves crudely in public is not much of an example. With advancing age, of course, suggestive comportment attracts less amusement than pity and disgust, even among the most vulgar and dissipated of onlookers.
But why Islam? It is not as if other religions, above all Christianity, have not offered people with chequered pasts the occasion and opportunity to reform and to eschew past indiscretions. And since we have seen that the question of religious truth does not even occur to her, it is to her psychology that we must look for an answer.
I suspect that something similar to the psychology that induces black prisoners to convert to Islam has operated on her, but with an extra twist in her case.
Black prisoners, like others, want eventually to give up their life of crime. It is clear from statistics that most criminals give up by, around or at the age of forty. Perhaps this has something to do with declining hormonal drive, or with maturing mentality. Be that as it may, many criminals seek or require an explanation of their own changed inclinations, and religious conversion is such an explanation. That is to say, religious conversion is as much an expression as a cause of a desire for change.
However, there is a lot of cultural pressure on people nowadays to appear not to conform to what were once the mores of society, especially among those who come from discontented or resentful sectors of society. Individuality, the most desired but elusive of attainments in mass society, seems to require the repudiation of what was once deemed respectability. It is not respectable to be respectable. And you would have to be very tone-deaf to the music of western society not to realise that conversion to Islam is a good way to alarm it, not to be respectable.
In the case of Lauren Booth, there was the additional incentive of publicity. If she had converted to evangelical Christianity, and even had started speaking in tongues, no one would have noticed. It would hardly have merited even a line in a local newspaper. But she had only to don a pink hijab (which, it must be admitted, is more becoming than anything else she has ever worn) for a flurry of publicity to follow. And, one suspects, she belongs to the ever-enlarging category of people to whom to be is to be seen; to be out of sight is not merely to be out of mind, but to cease to exist, even for oneself. She is certainly not the only member of her family to suffer from this most unfortunate and morally debilitating of conditions.
There is, of course, one further motive that might have impelled her. Her conversion was almost certain to give a momentary frisson of embarrassment to her half-in-laws, Mrs and Mrs Blair, whose kleptocratic sanctimony might very well have irritated her, principally because of its apparent and continuing success. She had few cards in her hand to play; her attempts at public vulgarity had failed to distinguish her in any way from the general run of vulgar public figures, or seriously to embarrass her half-in-laws. Conversion to Islam was a trump card, and she has now played it.
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