Whose Responsibility

Whose Responsibility It is the responsibility of Muslims to absorb converts into their society; but Muslim society fails in this responsibility. As a result, converts become like aliens among their new co-religionists. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a French Christian named Leuen Roche embraced Islam at the hand of the Emir of Algeria, Abdul Qadir AI Jazairi. The Emir took him into his confidence, and appointed him as his special adviser, sending him on various missions. On one journey to the Arabian Peninsula he performed the pilgrimage to Makkah. Leuen Roche married an Algerian Muslim woman. They lived together for seventeen years. Then French forces entered Algeria. Conflict ensued, and eventually Emir Abdul Qadir was defeated at the hands of the French commander Aldouc Dumal and publicly declared his renunciation of Islam and reconversion to Christianity. This was a terrible shock for Leuen Roche’s Algerian wife. She told him that Islam had now come between the two of them, and that she would not like a serpent like him to stay alive, for people to continually to put her to shame because of him. She took a knife and stabbed Leuen Roche to death. (AI-Thawafat-ul-Arabiya, Tripolis, December 1982) Most cases of apostasy of this nature are taken to mean that the person concerned had only accepted Islam hypocritically and, after completing his mission had turned away from the faith. This might be true in a few instances; but it is not correct to apply this theory to all cases of apostasy. The truth is that, in contemporary time, most people who accept Islam do so on their own, not because of any missionary efforts. Most converts to Islam do not undergo any deep intellectual revolution which makes them change their faith. Usually people who have not previously been strict or fanatical in religious matters accept Islam; they do so on the basis of some temporary and commonplace predilection.