The story of a European female convert to Islam carrying out a suicide mission in Iraq came as a shock to a lot of people, despite the fact that it’s not the first European or the first convert, but just the first female. I was shocked, however, at how badly taught this woman obviously had been, something which isn’t lost on the regulars at Deenport. The crowd in which her husband moved obviously did not care much about maintaining ties with relations. (Dunner’s blog has more on this, a comment on Juan Cole’s entry.)

The Times here and the Guardian here have interviews with Muriel Degauque’s mother and some other acquaintances. Particularly objectionable is that the pair started dictating terms to Degauque’s parents about how they should behave when their daughter and her husband were visiting them:

“When we saw them they imposed their own rules,” her mother told La Derniere Heure newspaper. “We would be at home but my husband had to eat in the kitchen with Hissam while the women stayed in the sitting room. The last time we saw them we told them we had had enough of them trying to indoctrinate us.”

Who told them that men and women had to eat separately even when they are close family and therefore hijab rules do not apply? Even if this is the custom in some Arab countries (particularly when cousins and other in-laws are present), it is not necessary with close family and it is certainly not appropriate to demand this of one’s own parents. Worse, her mother accuses her of refusing to visit her in hospital. Did nobody tell her that visiting the sick is something for which a Muslim is rewarded?

A lot of converts face hostility from family and former friends, of course, and it sometimes happens that they reject us entirely. More common is not being able to participate in family events because they involve sitting round a table with people drinking alcohol, and because they take place in restaurants where the food is mostly haraam. There is a huge difference, however, between refusing to participate and demanding that one’s parents obey your rules in their house.

A poster at Deenport mentioned that on a recent visit to Morocco he saw “a significant number of men with scowling faces, long beards and shortened trousers”, a sight I remember seeing on a fair few occasions on visits to certain London mosques; Q-News once reported on an incident in which these extremists disrupted a wedding at Regent’s Park Mosque, calling the attendants kafirs and accusing them of drinking alcohol; on one occasion I saw two of them (not Moroccan) come to the brink of a fist fight in the prayer hall.

Of course, if al-Zarqawi’s gang had not managed to get this criminal to bring his impressionable wife to Iraq to carry out a pointless suicide bombing, they would have found someone closer to home. The attack would have happened anyway. While the way this cult poisons converts against their families in a way Islam certainly does not condone, much less require, is perhaps less heinous than its disregard for the limits on taking life, it still causes a lot of grief to the families affected. This woman’s mother lost her only other child in a motorcycle accident 18 years ago.

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• Young adult marriage visa ban: unjust, now unlawful
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• On Norway
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