Has Jackson converted? (Do we care?)

The other day a British tabloid, the Sun, reported that Michael Jackson (you know, the guy that had a few hits in the 1970s and early 1980s but is now best known for his scandals, bizarre behaviour and plastic surgery) has converted to Islam. This might not surprise some people, given that his brother Jermaine really has done (and appeared at the recent Global Peace & Unity event in London), but as ever, people have picked up a dubious tabloid story and ran with it despite its tenuous sourcing.

As brother Siddiq Khan points out, on DeenPort:

This is a good example of how the media works at present. Yesterday, when this story was posted on Deenport, one one news source in Australia had picked up the story. At the moment on Google News, its about 905.
No has done a follow-up, no one. This, despite, the fact that the story has been falsely reported over the two decades; the story was derived from the tabloid Sun; that there is one source and he/she is anonymous; that there are at least four people mentioned by name in the story and should have been the focus point of any follow-up to the story. That's excluding Michael and Jermaine as well.
Yet, nothing has materialised. Most of the media just picked-up (copied and pasted) the story.

This is, of course, the latest in a long line of stories about famous people converting to Islam, most of which were just rumours which have proven to be false. Why on earth do we need to boast about famous converts as if they were any better proof of Islam than an ordinary person, such as a train driver or mechanic or civil servant, and as if any of these people were examples to live by?

And let's face it, this individual is one of the least exemplary of all of them. Whatever the truth of his behaviour with young boys, Michael Jackson is a flake. As far as his musical career is concerned, he is a has-been; the height of his fame was at a time no young person would remember (people coming of age now were barely born when Bad was released in 1987, let alone Thriller or Off the Wall). Since then, his music is generally regarded as having gone drastically downhill, better characterised by bombastic, preachy songs like Earth Song than by his high-quality pop, and he is better known for his public scandals than his music. Surely he would be an embarrassment to any community he joined, and that would include ours. Obviously, it is not our place to say who should become Muslim and who should not, but I do wonder why some Muslims are so keen for him to convert to Islam, and not someone else.