Peace be upon you, and welcome. How are you? If you follow world news, you are probably troubled by the bad news from Muslim countries. Yet there are remarkable stories that, in my view, some do not want shown: people embracing Islam in Europe, America, and elsewhere. God willing, they cannot prevent people from becoming Muslim. Let us read this news and take joy in it.
Belgian newspaper Le Soir reported that more than 40,000 citizens had converted to Islam in recent years, the highest rate in Europe relative to the country’s population of 10 million.
This high conversion rate prompted Belgium’s far right to issue warnings about mixed marriages. The newspaper put the country’s Muslim population at more than 450,000.
One recent convert said he had not embraced Islam to marry a Muslim woman; he married about seven years after his conversion. What convinced him was that Islam placed no intermediary between a person and God, which was what he had been seeking.
He added: “When I said the testimony of faith, began praying, and married a Muslim woman, I felt that I had always been Muslim.”
He complained about a media campaign against Muslims that distorted many facts and contained numerous errors, particularly by focusing on marriage to a Muslim woman as the main reason for conversion.
The Belgian government, for its part, took converts seriously. It appointed Yassine Beyens, a doctor who had converted years earlier and was married to a Muslim woman, to chair the temporary council of Belgian Muslims. He later headed the higher council of the Executive of Muslims of Belgium.